Dark & Long (Revised Edition)

Beyond just not having to be up; I’m actually up; no point in that now.

Cool dark of 6:00 in the morning. Make some instant coffee; inspired by reading some comics last night.  Catwoman wakes up her tough-guy P.I. by breaking into his apartment and making him coffee at 4 in the morning. Who would say no to that?

The collection I’m reading is some Ed Brubaker stuff, drawn by Cameron Stewart et al  from way back in 2002 when they just did the redesign on her costume. It’s weird, the costume is almost practical, with big heavy boots, cats eyes goggles hiding her eyes; with a slinky Emma Peel thing going on too. Less the ‘I’m a big sexy cat’ just jumping around the sky in skintight purple, more hey, I’m going to put on some leather and rob some houses. Maybe kick a dude in the face too.

Anyhow the new look fits the plot, which is pure noir crime all the way;  all about crooked cops and the drug trade lifted right from The Wire. And I mean that in a good way, there’s a bent cop named McNaulty (sic) for Pete’s sake. Anyhow,  Brubaker knows how to roll out a story; and feels less like a superheroine adventure than an actual crime story that happens to have Catwoman in it. Kinda like a Ms. Tree. Let’s hear it for tough dames!

Also reading: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bible! by Johnathan Goldstein. And it is fabulous. Back copy sayz poetic and poignant, and something about being funny. I knew he was funny. What I didn’t know was that he could write stories that would actually move me. This puts him in a whole other league of funnymen. Highly Highly Recommend this joint.

After Dark: An Appetizer

From the secret stash here at Balfour Books picked up After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The Japanese novelist read in translation, so it makes me wonder how it will work.  I’ve heard that he is an influence on David Mitchell’s stuff, so I was definitely intrigued, and we certainly  move enough of them on the fiction shelf here so there must be something going on.

And After Dark best of all looked, short, enough to get a read on whether this author’s worth pursuing. That’s part of the question I guess when choosing a book. When there’s so many writers going back even in the last hundred years, do keep moving through them sampling them all the diverse range, or do you find the ones that ping with you, that resonate and explore their depths.   Depends on the writer I guess, and I suppose the way you read. I read like a comic-book geek; a teenage sci-fi freak, scouring the aisles of your public libraries for every for every last one, a completist. At least that urge is within me, which is why now as an adult, a seeker of more mature tastes I try to seek out new writers new finds that expand my knowledge my own experience and comfort zones. Which brings me to Murakami.

After Dark plots the path of a group of characters drifting through Tokyo in the after hours, caught in the space between midnight and dusk, when the rest of the world sleeps. It’s about people who are operating during these times because one way or another, they’ve each fallen through the cracks. And somehow, in tracing their encounters and emanations a narrative emerges of what it means to live in this displaced time and person.

Time flows weird and strange in the book, and Murakami’s prose captures this well, with delicacy and insight. This same precision is applied to the characters who reveal their secrets to one another. I was impressed by how much he was able to really draw out of his fictional people, their problems, their realities seemed so nuanced, so real. The details of who they were and why, and how they went about their lives in the off hours, intrigued.  And by the end of the story I was really rooting for them and wanting them to be whole.   There was also this nice mythic subplot of a sleeping beauty/snow white caught in an eternal sleep, and sometimes the glass box of a television screen. That was handled quite well as well, a quiet counterpart to the dialogue driven encounters.  Not bad at all.

So yes to Murakami. Good to try new things. The book was short, like really short, big type, supiciously wide margins. But size isn’t everything. This was the perfect sushi snack to whet my appetite for more.