Susan Hated Literature

Your Vocabulary Score: A-

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

via: Wyvernfriend

A-, I’m a little disappointed. But never mind, I’m sure I’ll get over the shock.

I don’t know if any of you have seen the trailer for The Holiday^[1] ? The film itself looks quite crap, Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swap houses around Christmas and find romance in their foreign homes. Blah, whatever. The point I want to moan and complain about is the violence.

Not the fact that it occurs. Cause violence on screen is a good thing. Really, it is. I know that if you haven’t seen the trailer you may now be imagining blood and guts and gore, but don’t. This film is rom-com, there aint going to be no bloodbaths. At least I don’t think there will, it’d be a very unexpected ending if there were. No the violence is one scene of Diaz’s character punching her boyfriend^[2] because he has revealed that he slept with someone else.

Now, imagine the roles are reversed and boyfriend punches Diaz for sleeping with someone else. Still a funny amusing scene is it? Course not, because men hitting women *fx: Faith as Buffy* is wrong. And naughty. But somehow it has become perfectly acceptable to have women beating up men.

Sexist pigs.

And if I was going to be all serious I’d point out that domestic/spousal abuse happens to both men and women and really isn’t a funny thing. Or I might mention the fact that this sort of scene is, in no way, something that shows men and women as being equal. Instead it points out that women are so weak and unequal that having them use violence is funny.

But I’m not going to go there cause that would require thought, logic and maybe even an argument of some sort. And lets face it, you don’t come here for sensible posts like that, do you?

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Author: Haruki Murakami, trans from the Japanese: Philip Gabriel
ISBN: 0099494094
DDC: 895.635
See also: LibraryThing ; Mental mayhem ; Mindspill

“So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his characteristic sluggish voice. The kind of voice you have when you’ve just woken up and your mouth still fells heavy and dull. But he’s just pretending. He’s totally awake. As always.

There are two main narrators to this book, one a 15 year old runaway who has taken on the name Kafka, and the other an old man, Nakata, who never recovered from some strange childhood accident, but can talk with cats. I have to say that while both storylines were gripping and intriguing, I never knew what was going on. Or had an idea what would happen next. By the end of the novel I was as in the dark as at the beginning.

I still enjoyed it though.

It isn’t a fast paced book, the characters weren’t particularly gripping, but there is more than enough to keep you entertained and wanting to read on, even if you are scratching your head and wondering about fish falling from the sky, or if Kafka fulfilled his father’s dark prophecy. There is death, and sex, myths, and cats, libraries, and truckers. Of course there is also a lot of unanswered questions at the end, and many, many loose ends. But in a way that doesn’t matter, the open-ended nature of this book isn’t something that bothered me in the slightest.

I’m sure I missed half of what was going on here, what with references to Oedipus and Japanese legends, aliens and creating a magic flute from the souls of murdered cats… But what the hell, it was a wierd and enjoyable book, one that I may have to read again to try and understand a little more.

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