Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "postmodern"
Midnight's Children
Listen: after sleeping for a scant and dreamless three hours...no, I must be precise...in June...yes, but a time is required...on June 18, then; the day Ram Manohar Loha called for Direct Action against the Portuguese in Goa...and the year?; well, the year is important too: 2014, there's no getting away from it: the season of ascending Ministers in India (Narendra Modi, a brand new mode of control as the first PM to be younger than his country's independence)...with all these names dates figures in mind, I reflect upon my conquest of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, at dawn, on a rooftop outside of Washington, D.C. No vendors called "Cold sandwiches; sandwiches cold!", and no distinct smells wafted up from the antiseptic depths of my more-than-suburb; I, Joseph Grammer, lank-of-shank writer, unprofessional professional hack, pickler of unsalted thoughts, had only the cold, gleaming screen of sun to comfort me in the moments when I turned the last page of this Booker-winning book and found the back cover's creamy blankness inviting me to meditate further upon Indira Ghandi's tumultuous reign; yes, or the frantically fresh creation of Bangladesh as a newfangled, war-torn nation; or, even before tumult and tumbling of country, before Prime-time ministrations of promise (which I shall attend to in depth if time permits--all these voices are jostling-hostling for space in my crowded pepperpot of a brain)...before all this, during independence a la carte (freedom being not-too-smoothly eschewed from the menu), prior to the Partition of India and Pakistan;--forgive me these fragments, by the way, for memory fails even now as events tenements ventings of emotion flood back to me with all the subtlety of a club--but yes: the primary triumph and crisis (all rolled into one, because we all contain multitudes) must be this: let me say it plainly, before the cracks of my sunburnt shell give way to the pressures of blue-June-hotness Obama (the old banyan tree, Mr. Piece-of-the-Moon) monument worst-traffic-you've-ever-managed-to-find metro-heckling-politic-populace...no, enough uncharitable prevaricating; I must lay it all on the table, as they say...plainly, then: doubletime quick: what I am talking about is the birth of India as a nation.
Fame and nascency, then, served as snake and ladder, depending on the auspice of the day. Saleem Sinai, main character extraordinaire, wielder of cucumber-nose and forehead-projections and All-India-Radioplay in his brain--connecting him to every child born between midnight and 1 am (with mythical powers descending in order of temporal distance from the zero stroke) on the day of Indian independence from the Anglo sahibs. Suffice it to say this excerpt is only that--a snippet from a many-headed history, and I am leaving out most of the good bits.
I will say this, though, at least (before the cracks open wider in my sun-tamed frame, which, despite specialists homeopaths psychologists, refuse to mend or even make themselves visible to others): there is a cold tussock of earth in Kashmir, and Old Delhi prophecies, and framed pictures of Nehru letters (I told you I would speak of this if time permitted); there is hiding in a washingchest and first love and bicycle-collisions and Shiva's deadly knees; there is betrayal, and weddings with ghetto magicians...but I am getting ahead of myself. Read the tome on your own time and make your own judgment: now: doubletime quick!
Fame and nascency, then, served as snake and ladder, depending on the auspice of the day. Saleem Sinai, main character extraordinaire, wielder of cucumber-nose and forehead-projections and All-India-Radioplay in his brain--connecting him to every child born between midnight and 1 am (with mythical powers descending in order of temporal distance from the zero stroke) on the day of Indian independence from the Anglo sahibs. Suffice it to say this excerpt is only that--a snippet from a many-headed history, and I am leaving out most of the good bits.
I will say this, though, at least (before the cracks open wider in my sun-tamed frame, which, despite specialists homeopaths psychologists, refuse to mend or even make themselves visible to others): there is a cold tussock of earth in Kashmir, and Old Delhi prophecies, and framed pictures of Nehru letters (I told you I would speak of this if time permitted); there is hiding in a washingchest and first love and bicycle-collisions and Shiva's deadly knees; there is betrayal, and weddings with ghetto magicians...but I am getting ahead of myself. Read the tome on your own time and make your own judgment: now: doubletime quick!
Murakami!
From the Paris Review interview:
Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.
The first draft is messy; I have to revise and revise.
If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?
My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world.
We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal.
When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.
It’s the driving power of my stories: missing and searching and finding. And disappointment, a kind of new awareness of the world.
As a translator myself, I know that to be enthusiastic is the main part of a good translation. If someone is a good translator but doesn’t like a book so much, that’s the end of the story.
The way people act, the way people talk, the way people react, the way people think, is very Japanese. No Japanese readers—almost no Japanese readers—complain that my stories are different from our life. I’m trying to write about the Japanese. I want to write about what we are, where we are going, why we are here. That’s my theme, I guess.
This might be considered my reply to the fact that “family” has played an overly significant role in traditional Japanese literature. I wanted to depict my main character as an independent, absolute individual. His status as an urban dweller has something to do with it too. He is a type of man who chooses freedom and solitude over intimacy and personal bonds.
I like to make people laugh every ten pages.
In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.
When you describe the details of small things, your focus gets closer and closer, and the opposite of Tolstoy happens—it gets more unrealistic. That’s what I want to do.
The closer it gets, the less real it gets. That’s my style.
Writing a book is just like playing music: first I play the theme, then I improvise, then there is a conclusion, of a kind.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you.
I don’t like Tokyo; it’s so flat, so wide, so vast. I don’t like it here.
Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.
The first draft is messy; I have to revise and revise.
If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?
My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world.
We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal.
When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.
It’s the driving power of my stories: missing and searching and finding. And disappointment, a kind of new awareness of the world.
As a translator myself, I know that to be enthusiastic is the main part of a good translation. If someone is a good translator but doesn’t like a book so much, that’s the end of the story.
The way people act, the way people talk, the way people react, the way people think, is very Japanese. No Japanese readers—almost no Japanese readers—complain that my stories are different from our life. I’m trying to write about the Japanese. I want to write about what we are, where we are going, why we are here. That’s my theme, I guess.
This might be considered my reply to the fact that “family” has played an overly significant role in traditional Japanese literature. I wanted to depict my main character as an independent, absolute individual. His status as an urban dweller has something to do with it too. He is a type of man who chooses freedom and solitude over intimacy and personal bonds.
I like to make people laugh every ten pages.
In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.
When you describe the details of small things, your focus gets closer and closer, and the opposite of Tolstoy happens—it gets more unrealistic. That’s what I want to do.
The closer it gets, the less real it gets. That’s my style.
Writing a book is just like playing music: first I play the theme, then I improvise, then there is a conclusion, of a kind.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you.
I don’t like Tokyo; it’s so flat, so wide, so vast. I don’t like it here.
