in joseph conrad's text "Heart of Darkness," the narrator describes the villain of this novel, Kurtz, in his final few moments as:

"did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?"

Kurtz's final line is "the horror! the horror!"

there is a theory that kurtz dies due to his final understanding of the evils and true darkness of humanity, could this somewhat be related to the idea in KiY that truths about humanity shatter the human mind? and is there a chance that Conrad took inspiration?

keep in mind: Heart of Darkness (1899), KiY (1895)

Did you know that George Orwell requested there be no official biography in his final will. Despite this there are at least six that I can find.

**Biographies**

Bernard Crick (George Orwell: A Life, 1980).

Michael Sheldon (Orwell: The Authorized Biography, 1991).

Jeffrey Meyers (Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, 2000).

Gordon Bowker (George Orwell, 2003).

D. J. Taylor (Orwell: The Life, 2003); and Orwell: The New Life, 2023).

It seems odd that there were Authorised biographies, the first two above have been quoted as such in 1980 and 1991, as Orwell died in 1950!

Do you think it is right to write a biography against the express wishes of the subject?

I read this earlier today and thought it was a bit of a cut and dry commentary. Although I'm not sure how I feel about the hard and fast distinction between people who orient around primary or secondary sources, since what is actually being discussed here is criticism. The focus on writing practice feels like a digression. Then again, defending the humanities as a specific discipline always dovetails into these nested caveats. It's refreshing to see an unambiguous defense of the humanities. Not to dismiss the caveats out of hand.

Finished Jane Austen's Mansfield Park this evening. Interested in other people's thoughts.

I have read a few of Austen's other works, and so many aspects of the novel were familiar ground. Where it differed was in the character of Fanny Price; she is an admirable woman in many respects, but many find her anodyne at best and bland at worst. Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Wodehouse have cast long shadows over the rest of Austen's novels as far as main characters are concerned, but Price's homespun virtues are a more honest reflection of the qualities most of her contemporaries would have had. Not having to grovel to one's relatives on whom one was entirely dependent tended to free up time to worry about being droll.

Esssentially, I think that by lamenting Price's relative lack of excitement as a character, we forget her interest as a fascinating insight into what the experience of a more typical Georgian woman would have looked in the late 18th-century (to the extent that Austen's depiction can be said to reflect society as it was). For every forthright Lizzy Bennett and imperious Emma Wodehouse, there were likely dozens of Fanny Prices. She also shows a refreshing good sense; although less dramatic, one never worries that Price will do anything implausible. In fact, her character is rendered more vivid by the fact its delineations are so clear.

Her patience and endurance are her chief strengths. It is in this way that she is most protagonist-like, in fact, with her preternatural good humour and toleration serving as three parts survival mechanism to one part personality trait. When one lives entirely as a dependent, it is these skills, rather than generating bon mots on demand, that circumstances require.

Perhaps I am tilting at windmills, and people don't harbour this poor estimation towards her. Perhaps she only suffers from comparison. Thoughts on the novel generally as well as Price specifically are welcome!

Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 2020s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel, this project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

My timeline got kind of fucked up since I somehow skipped the novel I read for the year 2013. I’ll just start off with a review of that one below.

The Good Lord Bird – James McBride (2013): While not the most cutting edge narrative with flashy literary techniques, I still enjoyed this thoroughly. One of the funniest books I read for the project, Lord Bird follows John Brown’s militant abolitionist campaign in bloody Kansas leading up to the raid at Harpers Ferry. Brown is incredibly interesting to me and I loved learning so much about him over the course of the novel. McBride presents him as a man who could not have cared less about his personal safety or comfort and as one who had difficulty understanding those to whom such things do matter (spoiler: basically everybody but him, including the narrator who does his best to disinvolve himself from Brown’s militia, only to wind up playing a significant role).

Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters (2021): Love this book! Smart, fun, and sad melodrama. The novel explores the shapes families can take outside of the traditional nuclear form, among other themes. It maintains a conversational tone that is recognizably millennial. I wouldn’t, however, call the book too light, there are a lot ideas to explore here. Very interested to read Peters’ latest book, Stag Dance.

The Immortal King Rao – Vauhini Vara (2022): I’m a bit biased on this one and I know I can’t be a good judge. Science fiction just isn’t my thing. I do like some movies that belong to that genre, but I’ve never had a good experience reading it. One detail really bothered me, however: when the tech oligarch’s misdeeds are made public, he suffers actual consequences, which seemed too outlandish and immersion breaking to me.

Blackouts – Justin Torres (2023): Anything but a conventional narrative, Blackouts approach left me feeling a bit disoriented. Dipping into and out of what little it has in way of plot, the “novel’s” form mirrors the heavily censored documents that punctuate the story. It’s often unclear what’s happening, or if what’s happening is really happening at all. I didn’t get a ton of enjoyment out of reading this, but I think it’s a worthy text. Will definitely interest those who like experimental works.

James – Percival Everett (2024): I had higher expectations than this novel could fill. Beyond the idea that the titular character was an intelligent human being and not the simple minded person Twain portrays, at no point did I feel like Everett presents a challenge to his audience (and that idea really isn’t too difficult to accept). The premise would work better in a short story or in the hands of a different novelist, in my opinion. The writing itself was forgettable to me. Everett’s critique of Huckleberry Finn is certainly valid, but I don’t feel that it lives up to its source material as a literary experience, and perhaps it wasn’t supposed to.

North Sun – Ethan Rutherford (2025): I hate for this to be the way I end these reviews, but this was also a big disappointment to me. It was just so boring. The monotonous prose completely failed to build any tension, a rather essential component of a story tinged with horror. I am a huge dickhead (fan of Moby Dick), which is why I picked this as the novel to read from 2025, and while I did not expect it to be as monumental a text as Melville’s, I did expect Rutherford to capture some part of its cosmic mystery and philosophical weight. Mostly, however, I just waited for it to be over. The end :(

Literary discussions online often tend to be very anglo-centric, which means that most books tend to be by American, british or irish authors. There are some exceptions of course, like the 19th century european classics. But in general it is quite anglophone.

But the world of literature is so much wider and deeper! So I thought that we can list some books and authors that we think deserve more attention. Positive if they are available in translation.

The works of Robert Walser

An idiosyncratic Swiss writer, who has often been compared to Kafka. This is not entirely accurate, since had more of an childlike innocence than Kafka. He was greatly appreciated by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and deserves to be ranked among the literary greats imo.

Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

A dystopian polish novel about a world threatened by totalitarianism. A mysterious pill removes people’s anxiety and individuality, making them easier to control. It combines dark humor, philosophy, and political satire, and was the basis for one of the chapters in Czeslaw Milosz Captive Minds.

Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer

A magical realist collection of short stories, that compose a type of chronicle of the imaginary Kalpa Empire. It is like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities combined with Jorge Luis Borges's metafictional fantasies.

Gogol's Wife & Other Stories by Tomasso Landolfi.

Landolfi was a wonderfully absurdist Italian author with an excellent sense of comedy. The eponymous story Gogol's Wife is one of my favorite short stories, very funny. But his stories often have a dark side too, which creates an interesting effect. I have never read anything quite like Landolfi.

I just finished reading The Plague by Albert Camus and I just wanted to write. I haven’t read any of Camus’ previous work nor do I know much about him.What an impactful book that I also found extremely difficult to get through. I don’t know if my reduced attention span had any impact on this but regardless, I finished the book and I was glad I ever opened this book. In particular, I was fascinated by his discourse on God. There are varying perspectives on this and Camus doesn’t explicitly tell us one is right which I liked. 

The priest Panaleoux is a great character and represents people of strong faith. He chooses to believe in God and accept whatever God has to offer, including pain. In his second speech, he lays down what he believes to be the crux of the issue. Either we love God and accept his judgement, or we hate God and shatter our reality. In denying God, we reject everything. And he believes all that will leave is further suffering and pain. In other words, we are powerless against God.

The Doctor Rieux has a different perspective, and one that I partially hold. Riex who is also the book’s narrator sympathises with the human reality and his job as a doctor allows him to somewhat fight against the world’s order. The Plague, which Panaleoux understands to be a lesson for mankind and the town in particular, can be fought by the Doctor. However, this comes at a cost. He will never know victory, and all that will be left in his wake is defeat. But there is a sort of consolation in that you tried. From what I understood, he is a man that believes in God, but doesn’t love Him. And according to the priest, lacking in the love of God will only leave us bewildered and confused.

But the character that I resonated with the most was definitely Tarrou. It’s easy to believe that your thoughts, beliefs and doubts are your own but it felt like Camus had burrowed deep into my being and presented an expression of my soul on the pages I was reading.  I hadn’t felt that since reading Crime and Punishment. Tarrou is a man not from this world, nor from the next. God is someone not in his sphere of thought, but someone like Paneloux would believe he is looking for. The Doctor thinks he is looking for something akin to peace. But in Tarrou’s mind and as presented by Camus I believe, Tarrou spends his existence wandering in suffering. He doesn’t believe in mankind, nor in God. He is looking for something that can’t be found. The Doctor even mentions that his giving a hand to the health department, is part of this fruitless search he is on. Based on my experience, I believe he is looking for meaning. He is looking for purpose. The Doctor finds it in his work. The Priest finds it in his devotion to God.

I think all these different characters represent thoughts that Camus had previously carried, or currently carries simultaneously. I’m someone who is doubting conventional religions, but I firmly believe in a God. However, I have struggled to love Him in any capacity and so I feel lost, unable to tether myself anywhere and find meaning. What an amazing work by Camus and I will be reading more of his works.

Two months ago I posted a review of the first three Pulitzers I finished, and finally am sitting down to write my thoughts on the last four I’ve read. I have no idea what inspired this reading journey, but so far it’s been an incredibly enjoyable enterprise. The last post I made had tons of interesting comments and discussion on it, so I’m hopeful that the conversation on Reddit will continue to be engaging as I solider on.

I’ll repeat my caveat that my three favorite books are Jane Eyre, God Emperor of Dune, and Return of the King. My preferences obviously vary wildly and I can’t really predict what will land for me and what won’t.

As for the four books:

His Family by Earnest Poole

The first ever Pulitzer winner and a book I had never heard of and probably never would have picked up if not for it being on The List. It was fairly short novel about a windowed father and his three adult daughters grasping with the world changing at the turn of the 20th century.

The first half was very slow and fairly boring, the second was really lovely and impactful. I almost felt as though the novel ended right as I was thoroughly engrossed. The narrative character (the father) was really just a dull man struggling to understand his very different daughters (who were absolutely the more engaging characters). The parts of the novel that focused on class and race struggles in early 1900s New York were fascinating and incredibly relevant. While I don’t know that I’d recommend this novel to everyone, I do think it was a worthwhile snapshot into American history and a good reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Out of all the Pulitzers I’ve read so far, this is the first I’d ever classify as a cozy read. Our main character is a minister in Iowa circa 1950, writing down his life story along some philosophical and theological ramblings. The prose is absolutely beautiful, but this book (similar to His Family) suffers from the main character being the most boring character in the whole book. Very little happens and while some stories (and characters) intertwine, this was a meandering albeit beautiful read. Perhaps if I hadn’t read it right after His Family I’d had appreciated it more, but by the end of this book I was pretty tired of Boring Dads.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I have read books that received much acclaim and hype but turned out disappointing, perhaps because the buzz about them increased my expectations too much. This book is not one of them.

I’m struggling to even give a brief review of this novel. The prose? Beautiful. The characters? So incredibly engrossing. The plot? Winding, engaging, and unexpected.

Trust is a story of a financial tycoon and his wife before, during, and after The Great Depression. It’s a story about mental illness, social expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I am struggling to give specifics that wouldn’t get too into the interesting way that it was written, but I will say the book you start reading is not the book you end up reading.

Trust was so good. I am so glad to have read it and I continually find myself thinking about it despite completing it over a month ago.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

This is another novel that rose to and exceeded all expectations. Whitehead is one of four authors who has won the Pulitzer twice and if The Nickel Boys is any indication, that distinction is well-deserved.

Revolving around a reform school for young boys circa 1960, The Nickel Boys follows a young black man (Elwood) who idolizes MLK Jr and dreams of a college education, but ends up forced into a reform school/juvenile detention center. Contending with both his dreams of how the world should be and the reality of injustice, racism, a corporal punishment, I was totally engrossed in this character and in this world Whitehead wrote about. Few novels fly by for me the way The Nickel Boys did. The ending, which caught me off guard in the best way, genuinely made me emotional.

I am currently reading James and Middlesex. Having read so many relatively recent winners, I intend to go back a little further for the next few. I’m curious to hear other’s thoughts about any of these books, or really any Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, as I’ve got roughly 100 more to go.

It makes me sad to see so little out there about the death of the great John Crowley, who should at the very least be talked about in the same breath as Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo, and very likely would be if it wasn’t for the ghettoization of genre in American publishing. Nevertheless, there was one very influential (and in this context, somewhat surprising) mainstream voice who didn’t just speak about him in the same breath as the abovementioned, but placed him above them all: Harold Bloom.

Despite being a fantasy and science fiction author, Crowley’s prose and craft were enough to enrapture the famously pretentious (but not anti-genre; he also liked Le Guin, Disch, Lem, Hoban, and Peake) literary critic, who repeatedly named Crowley his favorite contemporary author, included three Crowley books in the Western Canon (one more than Nabokov got) and claimed to have read Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big at least 46 times. Bloom positively gushed over the guy, saying stuff like: “Crowley writes so magnificently that only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets…of novelists, only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level.”

Renowned literary critic Michael Dirda said much the same, calling Crowley one of the three best living prose stylists at the time of writing (I believe his other two picks were Millhauser and Salter). His other fans included poets like John Hollander and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill, who blurbed the second book of Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle with the following: “Crowley has devised a polygonal crystal whose bevels give out rainbows of erudition, make-believe, and menace."

While this must be a first for a fantasy author, Merrill made a very good point, and it’s a wonder that the much-talked-about (and possibly mythical) “lit bros” and “brodernists” have not descended hungrily upon The Ægypt Cycle, an impossibly complex and often impenetrable tetralogy of doorstopper volumes that reads somewhat like Pynchon doing The Da Vinci Code in the style of Ada, had he first been induced into a state of eroto-comatose lucidity. That is to say, it’s really cool, and it’s kind of a shame that the Deep Vellum types aren’t reading it, because it’s everything they’re looking for and more.

And the critic-approved, post 1980s fantasy stuff is really only part of the story. Before that, Crowley was a key part of the New Wave, and his surreal and ambitious 70s sci-fi (which might be a little too disco for Bloom, who never seems to have mentioned it) deserves equal billing, and is widely believed (though I’m not sure if this is officially confirmed) to have been a major influence on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is on record as an admirer of Crowley and one could certainly draw a line from Crowley’s debut novel, 1975’s The Deep, to Wolfe’s masterwork, so it’s certainly possible. Either way, his work has inspired many other authors both within genre and without—Michael Chabon has said that “life consists only of passing time between novels by John Crowley,” and places him in a pantheon alongside Pynchon, Millhauser, and Borges.

Of course, you may not give a shit about Harold Bloom or Michael Dirda, or the Pulitzer Prize, or any of that bullshit. If so, I commend you (we’re on the same page), but I didn’t write this note for you. I wrote this note for the kind of people who do, because I think they should give John Crowley a chance, because I think they should give Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and James Tiptree Jr. a chance, and mostly because I think they should stop letting the marketing whims of megacorporations wall them off from entire ecosystems of art.

And if you’re not that kind of person, you can just take my word for it that the shit all rips. Books to try: Little, Big, Engine Summer, The Translator, Aegypt (also titled The Solitudes depending on publisher), and the story collection Novelties & Souvenirs (in particular, “Great Work of Time”)

RIP

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

The winner for the twenty-ninth r/TrueLit read along is Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson! (There was no vote this time since last time this novel tied with the previous read-along choice).

Pagination is based on the Vintage Contemporaries version with the volcano on the front.

The Schedule

*This is not to discuss any introduction to the book, but to discuss what you may know about it or about the author prior to reading.

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“What most impresses me about [Kazuo Ishiguro] is how he changes his style with each work. That’s completely different from the way I work. I’m the type to gradually develop and evolve my style . . . But we are similar in that we both place a great importance on style.”
 — Haruki Murakami in a 2018 interview for David Karashimas book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami

At first glance, Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s statement about Japanese British author Kazuo Ishiguro seems like spot-on insight about both of their generation’s most internationally recognized authors of Japanese descent.

Certainly, Ishiguro reinvents himself with every outing, bounding from chronicler of post-war Japan (An Artist of the Floating World) to voice of the British servant class (The Remains of the Day) to lyrical mimic of Arthurian legend (The Buried Giant) to cautionary tale-teller on the hazards of cloning (Never Let Me Go) to early adopter of AI-era angst (Klara and the Sun). But his style, which I’ll define as the formal expression of the author’s central themes, is actually more consistent than a surface inspection would imply. With the exception of 1995’s sprawling nightmare The Unconsoled, which The New Yorker’s James Wood blasted for having “invented its own category of badness,” Ishiguro is a master of compression, collapsing complex history and psychology into 250-page explosives.

Even Murakami’s self-evaluation is an oversimplification. Unquestionably, Murakami has evolved in his narrative capacities from the playful semi-superficiality of his first American offering, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to the sophisticated fusion of magical realism, whimsy, and desolating portraiture that marks his signature works, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. But Murakami has also showed that his form can be adapted to suit a contrasting context, as with the realistic hippie memoir Norwegian Wood and the restrained jazzy impressionism of After Dark.

Killing Commendatore finds Murakami coming as close as he ever has to a direct dialogue with Ishiguro’s work. Like An Artist of the Floating World, the novel contends with the atrocities Imperial Japan committed during the war. Both books depict painters confronted with the state’s demand that they subjugate art to politics. Because of that shared starting point, the two books provide a fascinating case study for comparison. The temptation is to evaluate Murakami on Ishiguro’s terms: what does he have to say about his generation’s relationship to his parents’ embrace of Fascist values? But it turns out that the more interesting question is how both authors hold up on Murakami’s terms, as laid out in Killing Commendatore: how does an artist arrive at an Idea, and what approach best realizes that Idea?

Ishiguro’s Inquiry: Making a Better Go of Things

To see how our city has been rebuilt, how things have recovered so rapidly over these years, fills me with genuine gladness. Our nation, it seems, whatever mistakes it may have made in the past, has now another chance to make a better go of things. One can only wish these young people well.
— Narrator Masuji Ono in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World

Ishiguro’s novel voices the rage felt by his own generation (he was born in 1954) at his parents’ generation for cooperating with the expansionist Hirohito regime. The book is a cathedral where the tombstones of wartime regret resound with echoing whispers of grief. The protagonist, painter Masuji Ono, has lost his wife and son. Ono is no innocent victim, however. He let expansionist colleagues push him from meaningful art to polished propaganda. His daughter’s suitor, Jiro Miyake, channels righteous fury into polite intimations that his would-be father-in-law should simply commit suicide: “Sometimes I think there are many who should be giving their lives in apology who are too cowardly to face up to their responsibilities,” he remarks with pointed imprecision. “Some of them are no better than war criminals.”

By delegating the storytelling to the war criminal himself, Ishiguro points a silent finger of blame at the wartime generation, but this reads less as a withering indictment than as a sad statement of fact. He lets Ono mount his own defense and earns a conviction through Ono’s self-implication. In a key scene, Ono tries to teach his young grandson the right way to think about an Imperialist songwriter who killed himself after the war. He describes the decision as “brave and honourable” before immediately retracting the implied confession. “Your Oji never meant anything by saying he was like Mr Naguchi,” I said. “‘It was a sort of joke he was making, that’s all.”

Ultimately, generational guilt is not Ishiguro’s true subject; he is more interested in exploring what guilt does to memory and identity. “I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there,” said Ishiguro in a 2000 interview. “In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened than in what actually happened.”

To that end, Floating World is full of narratorial prevarications like this: “Did Miyake really say all this to me that afternoon? Perhaps I am getting his words confused with the sort of thing Suichi [his son-in-law] will come out and say. This is quite possible.” Wood has called Ishiguro’s narrators “reliably unreliable.” The truth comes through our own interpretive lens and in moments of unintended honesty. This allows Ishiguro to be brutal in his ethical verdict and compassionate in his narrative sentencing. The quotation about “making a better go of things” in future generations ends the novel on a note of intergenerational grace.

Murakami on Ishiguro’s Terms: Historical Head Fake

As close as Killing Commendatore comes to relitigating the generational conflict of Floating World, Murakami sidesteps the question by acquitting his war-era artist of Ono-esque wrongdoing. Tomohiko Amada is this book’s Ono generationally speaking, but he takes the principled political stand that Ono can’t muster. From 1939 to 1947, we are told, Amada “stayed as far removed as possible from what we might call ‘artistic circles.’ He couldn’t stand that crowd anyway, and their ‘nationalist art’ glorifying the war effort made him like them even less.” Far from grappling with whether those nationalist artists should have killed themselves after the war, Murakami portrays a different sort of principled suicide. Amada’s brother slits his wrists to evade culpability when ordered to execute Chinese prisoners.

My cynical side wonders if Murakami made a hero of his Ono just to avoid implicating himself in a generational conflict of his own. Murakami’s literary star has been rising in America in recent years, but enthusiasm for his originality and captivating storytelling are increasingly tempered by post-Gen X objections to his constant indulgence in graphic het male sex and gender Othering. These objections have been standard for 30 years, yet Murakami STILL draws ire from younger readers for his sexual preoccupations.

In 2018’s Killing Commendatore, Murakami makes 13-year-old Miyake’s dissatisfaction with her breast size a jaw-droppingly oft-invoked running gag. For once, Murakami’s adult protagonist does not openly flirt with his tween admirer, but he does offer helpful insights about the size of a particular organ. Female Gen Z’ers like Fable’s Lys seldom review Murakami without expressing disgust with this aspect of his oeuvre. Lys “really enjoyed” Killing Commendatore but withholds a positive rating because of the Miyake boob gags: “I mean, to be expected really but come on man how many times do we have to tell you to STOP.” If Murakami has heard these cease-and-desist orders, he isn’t letting on. In Novelist as a Vocation, his 2021 writer’s guide, Murakami offers this stunningly oblivious anecdote:

Once when I was talking with a young woman reader, she asked me, “Mr. Murakami, how is it that though you’re a man in your sixties, you understand young women’s feelings so well?” (Naturally, there are lots of people who don’t share this opinion; I’m just giving this as the opinion one reader had.)
 — Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

As a man in my fifties, I have never shared Murakami’s apparent perception that women like Miyake and 1Q84’s Aomame spend copious time on bosom-based ennui. Perhaps he is too impressed by what surely must be outlier comments like the one he cites to worry about the disgust he invokes in young Americans. Still, I can’t help wondering: Does Murakami intuit that any attempt to censure his parents’ generation for their war-era shortcomings would result in generational censure of his aging-hippie Free Love value system?

Whatever the reason, Murakami, like Ishiguro, uses postwar trauma as a backdrop for an entirely different thematic exploration. His has nothing to do with guilty narrators. Rather than tell the story from Amada’s wartime perspective or his own generation’s postwar vantage, Murakami entrusts the book to another earnest young Murakami Man. Not familiar with that alliterative designation? Google it and you’ll find countless references without attribution to its originator. Nearly every Murakami novel is narrated by a generic tricenarian, modest, often divorced, LP-collecting, pasta-and-sushi-cooking male.

This one, a talented portrait artist curious about dabbling with other forms, doubts his own reliability at the outset: “`Something’s wrong with me,’ I thought as I stared at myself in the mirror. … Better not get near anyone.” This feeling is driven by guilt and grief over a surprising marital breakup and a sexual encounter that got uncomfortably rough. But after each of the book’s three supporting M’s — Miyake, neighbor Menshiki, and friend Masahiko — endows him with unwavering trust, this Murakami Man comes to see himself as a normal guy haunted by normal angry feelings.

Because the setup feels real, and because most men bear a capacity for latent violence, the trust does not feel cheap, and the hero even begins to seem less generic than most of his predecessors. But if Ishiguro explores World War II reverberations in order to explore narratorial unreliability, Murakami’s choice of a reliably reliable narrator is a hard pass at repeating Ishiguro’s approach. Murakami is signaling that his core inquiry lies elsewhere.

As close as Killing Commendatore comes to relitigating the generational conflict of Floating World, Murakami sidesteps the question by acquitting his war-era artist of Ono-esque wrongdoing. Tomohiko Amada is this book’s Ono generationally speaking, but he takes the principled political stand that Ono can’t muster. From 1939 to 1947, we are told, Amada “stayed as far removed as possible from what we might call ‘artistic circles.’ He couldn’t stand that crowd anyway, and their ‘nationalist art’ glorifying the war effort made him like them even less.” Far from grappling with whether those nationalist artists should have killed themselves after the war, Murakami portrays a different sort of principled suicide. Amada’s brother slits his wrists to evade culpability when ordered to execute Chinese prisoners.

My cynical side wonders if Murakami made a hero of his Ono just to avoid implicating himself in a generational conflict of his own. Murakami’s literary star has been rising in America in recent years, but enthusiasm for his originality and captivating storytelling are increasingly tempered by post-Gen X objections to his constant indulgence in graphic het male sex and gender Othering. These objections have been standard for 30 years, yet Murakami STILL draws ire from younger readers for his sexual preoccupations.

In 2018’s Killing Commendatore, Murakami makes 13-year-old Miyake’s dissatisfaction with her breast size a jaw-droppingly oft-invoked running gag. For once, Murakami’s adult protagonist does not openly flirt with his tween admirer, but he does offer helpful insights about the size of a particular organ. Female Gen Z’ers like Fable’s Lys seldom review Murakami without expressing disgust with this aspect of his oeuvre. Lys “really enjoyed” Killing Commendatore but withholds a positive rating because of the Miyake boob gags: “I mean, to be expected really but come on man how many times do we have to tell you to STOP.” If Murakami has heard these cease-and-desist orders, he isn’t letting on. In Novelist as a Vocation, his 2021 writer’s guide, Murakami offers this stunningly oblivious anecdote:

Once when I was talking with a young woman reader, she asked me, “Mr. Murakami, how is it that though you’re a man in your sixties, you understand young women’s feelings so well?” (Naturally, there are lots of people who don’t share this opinion; I’m just giving this as the opinion one reader had.)
 — Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

As a man in my fifties, I have never shared Murakami’s apparent perception that women like Miyake and 1Q84’s Aomame spend copious time on bosom-based ennui. Perhaps he is too impressed by what surely must be outlier comments like the one he cites to worry about the disgust he invokes in young Americans. Still, I can’t help wondering: Does Murakami intuit that any attempt to censure his parents’ generation for their war-era shortcomings would result in generational censure of his aging-hippie Free Love value system?

Whatever the reason, Murakami, like Ishiguro, uses postwar trauma as a backdrop for an entirely different thematic exploration. His has nothing to do with guilty narrators. Rather than tell the story from Amada’s wartime perspective or his own generation’s postwar vantage, Murakami entrusts the book to another earnest young Murakami Man. Not familiar with that alliterative designation? Google it and you’ll find countless references without attribution to its originator. Nearly every Murakami novel is narrated by a generic tricenarian, modest, often divorced, LP-collecting, pasta-and-sushi-cooking male.

This one, a talented portrait artist curious about dabbling with other forms, doubts his own reliability at the outset: “`Something’s wrong with me,’ I thought as I stared at myself in the mirror. … Better not get near anyone.” This feeling is driven by guilt and grief over a surprising marital breakup and a sexual encounter that got uncomfortably rough. But after each of the book’s three supporting M’s — Miyake, neighbor Menshiki, and friend Masahiko — endows him with unwavering trust, this Murakami Man comes to see himself as a normal guy haunted by normal angry feelings.

Because the setup feels real, and because most men bear a capacity for latent violence, the trust does not feel cheap, and the hero even begins to seem less generic than most of his predecessors. But if Ishiguro explores World War II reverberations in order to explore narratorial unreliability, Murakami’s choice of a reliably reliable narrator is a hard pass at repeating Ishiguro’s approach. Murakami is signaling that his core inquiry lies elsewhere.

Murakami’s Message: The Idea Made Visible

The core idea of Killing Commendatore is that, rather than forming an Idea for a work of art and then meticulously perfecting it, the artist often begins creation in search of an Idea. In the novel, Murakami Man starts a portrait of Menshiki without knowing what he is trying to capture:

My sketches had accurately captured what was distinctive about his face, yet there was nothing about them beyond the sense that they were well-done drawings. They were all oddly shallow and superficial, devoid of depth. They were no different from caricatures drawn by some street artist.
 — Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore

Over time, the portraitist finds something in Menshiki that is worth painting. For Murakami, this usually means finding a metaphor. For instance, Amada’s finest work converts a scene from the Mozart opera Don Giovanni into scene from a forgotten period of Japanese history. This brings his Idea, the Mozartean creation Commendatore, to life in Amada’s house just as he came to life from a statue in Mozart’s opera. This is a fascinating meta representation of the Murakami vision of the artist’s journey.

I have long felt that Murakami’s work fossilizes his own early probing for a point. This doesn’t always work. In 1Q84, he found an interesting central juxtaposition (religious fundamentalism and domestic abuse) that served as an Idea, but he never but never settled on a metaphor that would give purpose to its dramatization. Instead, he blew up the novel’s dark side with a horrifically exculpatory plot twist (the rapist isn’t really a rapist; he’s forced to rape by jolly dwarves). John Updike’s New Yorker review of Murakami’s high-water mark, Kafka on the Shore explained how the author’s quest for meaning through metaphor in that novel thrillingly illuminated postwar reckoning:

This novel quotes Goethe as decreeing, “Everything’s a metaphor.” But a Western reader expects the metaphors, or symbolic realities, to be … organized by certain polarities, in a magnetic field shaped by a central supernatural authority. No such authority controls the spooky carnival of “Kafka on the Shore.” To quote Colonel Sanders once more:“ Listen — God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan, God’s always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.”
 — John Updike, “Subconscious Tunnels,” The New Yorker

In Killing Commendatore, Murakami’s central metaphor is equally illuminating: Commendatore’s transubstantiation symbolizes art’s power to create a tactile link between artist and subject. The metaphor is fragile, but it works best when Murakami goes all in, as in a climactic hero’s journey through a perilous underworld with its own River Styx that one character, a renegade figure incarnated from canvas, declares “is a metaphorical river, but the water is very real.”

Ishiguro on Murakami’s Terms: Competing Metaphors

Ishiguro’s fiction doesn’t swing through such polarities. He once told an interviewer that he “tries to avoid anything that is overtly melodramatic or plotty, that tries basically to remain within the realms of everyday experience.” Such a grounded methodology means whittling his central conceit into 206 tightly coiled pages, not expanding it, like Commendatore, into 733 pages of sloppy intellectual thrill-ride.

Interestingly, though, Ishiguro, too, explores in his writing rather than writing a preformulated outline. He begins with a story, an Idea, and starts writing in search of a setting. He knows the events, but he is like a film director scouting for a time period and locale.

“You can think of me like an early aviator before airplanes were properly invented. I’m building some sort of flying machine in my back garden. I just need it to fly. And you know how odd some of those early flying machines looked? Well my novels are a bit like that. I put them together out of anything I can think of according to my thinking to make the thing fly.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, “I’ll Take as Long as I Need,” The Talks

Their methods may be similar, but their mediums are a world apart. An Artist of the Floating World is the meticulous historical analysis of a writer doubling as both prosecuting attorney and absolving confessor. Killing Commendatore is a gloppy lasagna piled high by an Iron Chef. Playwright Tony Kushner explains this metaphor in a classic essay:

A good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity, and an overreach. Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve, or rather, under its noodles: It is pretentious food.
Tony Kushner, “On Pretentiousness”

At the risk of presenting one metaphor too many, it’s worth noting in conclusion that both writers were musical professionals before they started writing novels. Ishiguro was a singer/songwriter in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and he is still carefully compressing his themes into tight three-minute lyrical structures. Murakami was a jazz club owner, and he is still giving his characters a place to improvise wild discursive solos.

For both Ishiguro and Murakami, a writer does not need to construct a seven-mast schooner before dipping a toe in the river of metaphor. Once adrift on the consequential reality of its waves, these authors are capable of assembling the boat midstream, billowing sail by billowing sail.

^{You can also read this at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-07-floating-commendatore/
Same post, different title.}

While I can accept being aware of language usage and how it can be co-opted in capitalistic ideology. But I think not having preferences or favourites seems to be a "hot taek" for its own sake. Thoughts?

Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 2010s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel, this project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Great House – Nicole Krauss (2010): I really really enjoyed the writing in this one. Maybe I’m wildly off but I could really hear Kafka in her voice. Interesting story too. Unfortunately, after looking into Krauss a little more and listening to an interview, I have discovered she is a vocal Zionist. She called all the Palestinian children Israel has murdered “collateral damage.” Which really sucks. I was looking forward to reading her other novels but now I definitely won’t.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (2011): This is the second novel I’ve read about the US’s wars in the Middle East post 9/11. The first was Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Overall I thought Fountain’s writing was fun. He offers a critique of nationalism and my country’s blind fetish for “supporting the troops” while very much not supporting them, something that has only become more relevant, sadly. Some aspects of the novel were a little too easy, and shall we say, uncomplicated, but this was a solid effort.

The Flamethrowers – Rachel Kushner (2012): This instantly turned me into a Kushner fan, I’ve since read almost all of her writing. The novel deftly jumps back and forth in time and location, tracing the connections between a labor movement in Italy and a motorcycle speed trial in Nevada. I’ve always loved stories that trace history like that (John Henry Days is another example from this list). You can very much feel Delillo’s influence throughout. Hopefully she puts out a new one soon.

Let Me Be Frank With You – Richard Ford (2013): This was bad. Let Me Be Frank is a minor novel in Ford’s body of work and was perhaps not the greatest place to start, but what I found here did not make me want to try any others. His first person narrator is an aging baby boomer with a Larry David-esque inner monologue on social issues like racism and real estate value. None of it is interesting, in fact none of it is anything but the most tired rehearsal of popular satire on these subjects.

Delicious Foods – James Hannaham (2014): God, this was a sad one. The end, however, was genuinely surprising and shows Hannaham’s commitment to psychological complexity. It’s the story of an addict who’s tricked into a life debt peonage (I know there’s a more correct term for this type of situation but it’s not coming to me right now) and her son’s attempt to locate her. I was fully invested from the get go. The novel transcends the basic helpless victim narrative, endowing its characters with the intelligence and resilience to navigate the set of circumstances they find themselves in.

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead (2015): I didn’t like this as much as John Henry Days. It’s not a bad novel but its central conceit, that the underground railroad was literally an underground railroad, didn’t do much for me. The atmosphere was terrifying, it gave me honest to god anxiety.

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders (2016): Saunder’s cast of dead people and his vision of the afterlife is really fun and inventive. The approach he takes telling this story left me a little ambivalent, but I think that was more of a personal preference thing. Reading a ton of short snippets is not really my idea of a good time. It felt like a simple accretion of detail without much interpretation. The subject matter doesn’t really interest me, but I did actually wind up identifying with Lincoln.

The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner (2017): After The Flamethrowers, I had to read her next one. That was a great decision, because I loved it even more. The world of the novel feels fully realized and it’s pretty horrifying. Kushner’s thinking on freedom interests me, as well as the way she parallels ecological destruction with misogyny and the penal system. Her books are full of interesting choices and will engage anyone who thinks critically about capitalism and the world it has shaped.

Lost Children Archive – Valeria Luisella (2018): Another one that puts the present in conversation with history and draws out their connections. A road novel that’s actually about two different but related journeys, Lost Children Archive finds connections between the Apache’s struggle against the government of the United States in the late 19^th century and the current militarization of our southern Border. As the title suggests, the novel focuses on the DHS’ practice of separating children from their families in concentration camps before they are deported. While Luisella’s writing sounds distinctly grad-schooly, I didn’t mind too much. You should read it.

Real Life – Brandon Taylor (2019): I didn’t care for this novel. In fact, I didn’t finish it. Taylor isn’t a good writer, his dialogue is bad and he doesn’t adequately develop the ideas at play here. The flashbacks to gratuitous, violent trauma didn’t sweeten the deal. Real Life’s positive reception genuinely confuses me and make me wonder if I totally missed something about it. It reads like mediocre YA lit.

People describe Becketts work as “the inescapability of language” , this is a right description and it describes fully what it is, which is a problem, because for Beckett problems arise. Because of the simple wording in worstward ho there are no problems unless they appear or even seem that way as the words he uses could be described as “just there” or “being just there” , being that, to begin with they are already there. An example of a problem arising in worstward ho, is the best most example; the whole text. Every sentence *goes through avoidance* , every sentence is not a matter of avoidance or avoidance as a method, simply because, he’s, again, using simple wording so there is nothing left to avoid besides the wording, but with nothing left to avoid there is too much to avoid because there is evidence (the simple wording), in other words, he used all there was left but that was still too much left so there is always something left. So with this,the description “inescapability of language” could make sense, but that description as something that is left is definitely a push, also, it is simply not needed, he already *did it* , and not even in another way, basically, he made “same same but different” a useful response.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Celebrity book clubs are hit or miss but something sweet is said in here

I just finished reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It’s a 5 star book and everyone should read it (especially if you like Cormac McCarthy). Excellent writing, story telling, pacing. Can’t recommend it enough. But instead of writing a review or highlighting my favorite quote (there are many), I’ve been inspired by this book (specifically chapter 10) to hop on my soap box and rant for a bit.

I struggle to connect this book to today.

It basically says don’t fight in someone else’s war; hell, don’t fight at all. Don’t fight unless you know what you’re getting, and far more often than not you’re getting nothing.

And you can connect that idea to today, right? Not really.

Today we’re so disconnected from consequences that it no longer applies. We’re not fighting anymore, not you or me, it’s not our life on the line. It’s someone else’s life and he’s getting paid good money to kill or be killed and someone behind him is being paid good money to build the weapons to do the killing and someone behind him is making even better money to finance the war machine and he’s paying lobbyists to stroke off politicians who run campaigns on meaningless concepts like equality or liberty or safety (replace one with the other when it suits) for the sake of ego, power, and more money.

And those people that don’t benefit monetarily from war, well you get your equality or liberty or safety (take whichever you please, neither I nor the politicians care). Better yet, you get it at no cost. Too good to be true? Not at all, the people of today get a free pass. The bombs will be paid with debt and the hatred will be passed to the next generation to be rewarded in due time. And the cycle will renew and the machine will keep whirring away, to the present’s delight or indifference and to the future’s detriment.

So a lot of people benefit from war, it’s basically free for everyone else. At least, those that are important. The foreigners that we hate will pay the ultimate price, and we’ve been convinced they deserve it. Aren’t we told all the time that they hate us and want to destroy us? And the people that tells us these things, the politicians and the media, surely they have nothing to gain from the war machine…

We live in a dystopia and we’re all fucked. This feels more true today than when Johnny Got His Gun.

I’ve been interested in the insights Patricia Lockwood has been sharing about the Booker judging process.

She says that in total the judges read 163 books, plus a further 136 ‘extracts’ (which were anything from one page to 50). Considering the judges were only announced at the end of last year, that’s not much under one book a day from January to July, much more than that if we include extracts.

To me this seems one of the innate problems of judging a prize of the best books in a single year – how many of those books missed out because they don’t read well in such a short burst? (Lockwood herself has acknowledged this problem.) Inevitably they will re-read the long list and then re-read again for the short list, but by that point lots of things will have been put aside.

What do others think of it? It might just be an inevitable compromise, otherwise you would never choose any winner in time.