Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World

I'm sorry. I know about five young coffee shop hipsters who think this book is wonderful. I hated this book. Or, more properly, I think I despised the translation.

I don't need this book explained to me. I understand magical realism and noir and new wave SF and cyberpunk. I get his source material from Chandler to Dick to Powers and guys like Jeter and Sterling (but not Stephenson and NOT Borges... and this guy reads like regurgitated weak tea in comparison to all of those authors.)

If there are cultural tropes not coming across here I'm blaming the translator. Many paragraphs are utter tripe.

This may not be a bad book, but the translation makes it so. For me.

- Barney Dannelke

As I understand it, Alfred Birnbaum's translations are less literal and more flowery than Jay Rubin's or Philip Gabriel's. I prefer Birnbaum's style, but many others don't.

I will respectfully disagree with your opinion--I think the book is fabulous. And for the record, I'm young, but I don't fall into the coffee shop hipster crowd.

For source material, let me throw in Jung and Kafka as well.

(Sorry to come into Awful Lit and be an apologist, but when you love a book, you love it...)

I hear you on the apologist front. And I appreciate your defense. I don't think there is anything "flowery" in this translation. In fact I think the prose is very flat. If you read the noir stylists (Chandler, Thompson, even Willeford) you will very often come across pages of rumination much more flowery than what I'm seeing here. And compared to prose like T.C. Boyle or Patrick Suskind this seemed to me to be quite one dimensional.

I think if someone had stressed Kafka more in selling it to me my "prose versus idea" bar would have been lower.

I only attacked this because beating on someone like Mary Higgins Clarke seems to me to be a bit of a mugs game.

But I very much appreciate your response. Especially the Kafka reference which kind of makes me re-align my internal settings.

- Barney Dannelke

#3: Thanks for the response--I do understand where you're coming from. Murakami's prose, especially in his earliest works, is direct, and yes, flat sometimes. Two big influences on the style of his early work were Vonnegut and Raymond Carver (I think his early works often lack the intensity of the latter, though). Murakami's one of my favorite authors, but he's probably the author in my library with the fewest passages underlined for the sake of sheer beauty. Your post made me think of this bit from an interview with Murakami:

"HM: The opinion that my books are not really Japanese seems to me to be very shallow. I certainly think of myself as being a Japanese writer. I write with a different style and maybe with different materials, but I write in Japanese and I'm writing for Japanese society and Japanese people. So I think people are wrong when they are always saying that my style is really mainly influenced by Western literature. As I just said, at first I wanted to be an international writer, but eventually I saw that I was nothing but a Japanese writer. But even in the beginning I wasn't only borrowing Western styles and rules. I wanted to change Japanese literature from the inside, not the outside. So I basically made up my own rules.

SG: Could you give us some examples of what you mean?

HM: Most literary purists in Japan love beautiful language and appreciate sensitivity rather than energy or power. This beauty is admired for its own sake, and so their styles use a lot of very stiff, formal metaphors that don't sound natural or spontaneous at all. These writing styles get more and more refined, to the point where they resemble a kind of bonsai. I don't like such traditional forms of writing; it may sound beautiful but it may not communicate. Besides, who knows what beauty is? So in my writing, I've tried to change that. I like to write more freely, so I use a lot of long and peculiar metaphors that seem fresh to me."
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/02_2_inter/interview_Murakami.html

The other thing I can mention regarding his prose is that he's really keen on jazz music. Rhythm is said to be an important element of his prose. I suspect it doesn't always translate well--it seems intermittent from book to book and passage to passage, for me.

At any rate...a longer ramble than necessary. I appreciate your counterresponse--gave me plenty to think about!