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Loading... Almost Transparent Blueby Ryū Murakami
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  mich_yms | Aug 30, 2009 |  'You're always trying so hard to see something, just like you're taking notes, like some scholar doing research, right? Or just like a little kid. You really are a little kid, when you're a kid you try to see everything, don't you? Babies look right into the eyes of people they don't know and cry or laugh, but now you just try and look right into people's eyes, you'll go nuts before you know it. Just try it, try looking right into the eyes of people walking past, you'll start feeling funny pretty soon, you shouldn't look at things like a baby.' One of the few quotes I could find that didn't deal with vomit, semen, spit, bleeding orifices, throbbing protuberances, sweat... One word sums up this book... yucky Did I like it? oh yeah If you've never taken drugs or lived a depraved life read this book and you'll feel like you've taken drugs and lived a depraved life. I'm still tripping... There is no plot. Things just happen. Many, many things happen. Some things best left unsaid here. Think Kawabata... now imagine his complete opposite. This was Ryu's first book. It was awarded the Akutagawa Prize. Not for the moral majority or minority or anyone with morals at all. '... a charred body is one thing you don't ever want to see, you know, it's really bad.' (  )1  Banoo | May 3, 2009 | Mishima-esque nihilism, utilizing ugliness instead of beauty, swirled with pseudo-Bataillean transgression. The language and imagery of this book is equivalent to a clogged garbage disposal in a filthy sink, and Murakami somehow makes it almost beautiful. Plotless, meandering, and at times so disturbing that it is difficult to go on reading. Definitely of interest to readers of contemporary Japanese Literature. Quite similar thematically to a more recent work by Hitomi Kanehara, entitled Snakes and Earrings. (  ) poetontheone | Sep 6, 2008 | There is beauty and grace in much of the language here, but beyond that, it didn't draw me in. My best description is that this is like a mix of Waiting for Godot and Jesus' Son. It has little (or no) plot, and wanders with characters that, however vivid and crude, don't have much depth or connection to readers. In subject, I have to compare this to Jesus' Son, but there's a fatal difference: in Johnson's narrative, however focused on drugs it may be, you have a thoughtful and interesting narrator pulling the "novel" together into a story that amounts to something quite a bit more meaningful than just random drug experiences and philosophical comments. Murakami's novel is missing the philosophy and the interesting narrator. As a result, this seems like something of an exercise in crude wanderings of violence, sex, and drug use. Perhaps it's an interesting experiment in much the way that Becket's Waiting for Godot succeeds, but it didn't work for this reader. I wanted more, though I enjoyed the grace and rhythm of the language at many points. (  ) whitewavedarling | Jun 16, 2008 | you want me to review this? what could i say about it - it's without plot, goes nowhere, one does not feel any empathy toward the characters, nothing in the book matters.. there's a lot of great description..but, to be honest, if i want to have the impression of being on drugs or alcohol or both via reading then i'll just go out and get drunk and live it instead...and be a lot safer than the characters in this book. this book is like a comfy chair for drug addiction. one major plus is that, even though the characters are extreme, edgy, and hardcore, one does not get the impression of sensationalism that one would expect of something like this. in other words, it's very well-written and literary. it's just too bad that i don't care. (  ) coolsnak3 | Apr 1, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0870113054, Hardcover)A youth of college age, his older mistress, friends--random friends, they might be called--living near an American military base and experimenting with drugs both hard and soft.In rapidly sketched scenes gliding from the everyday real to the hallucinatory, the author has used what he himself calls his "narrative zoom lens." The novel is all but plotless, but the imagery is tellingly vivid, "the literary equivalent of genre painting," according to one critic. The participants seem caught in their hard-rock scene, sadly unfree, having neither the will nor the energy to break away. And over all there seems to hang the heavy shadow of self-destructiveness, not only in terms of their present situation but with regard to what the future holds for them--and the question is inescapable, for human society as well? In this mirror reflecting the present, personal relations deteriorate, violence of the moment erupts, and communication inches slowly towards nullity. One asks, eventually, if the hallucinations, whatever their source, are so very far from the vague misgivings and hopeful imaginings of the man in the street. The author coolly and unsentimentally distills from this morass a feeling of something pure and unsullied. His technique, with its lack of taboos, of moral condemnation, and of the superfluous, comes very close to the insouciance of cinema verite, in which there is also a touch of surrealism. Representing a sharp and conscious turning away from the introspective trend of postwar Japanese literature, this work polarized critics and public alike and soon attracted international attention, a sign of winds of change, if not specifically of things to come. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
But as if that wasn’t enough, even the prose was violent. Just reading the book itself, I felt like I was being pushed and shoved in all directions. Sometimes I felt suffocated, and there were moments when I felt like my whole body was slammed against a wall.
There are still so many aspects of this book that I do not understand. But rare is a book that repels and intrigues me at the same time. (