Book Corner

I'm back! I return from my inexplicable hiatus with a report on some of the things I've been doing besides blogging -- as work has slowed down, I've finally been able to read again:

• First, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is best-known as a novelist (his most famous work is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but this isn't a novel -- mostly, it's a series of first-person accounts from survivors of Aum Shinrikyo's 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subways. I'm not entirely sure what lessons Murakami intended me to take home from this book, but two things stuck in my mind: first, the incredible pigheadedness of certain Japanese people -- interviewees were passengers on the affected trains, they left their stations surrounded by obviously seriously ill people (vomiting, collapse and unconciousness), they themselves were feeling serious impairment (weakness, loss of vision), but yet they still went to work and tried to work a normal day! Second, I was struck by how few people died, despite the fact that all of the institutions that were supposed to protect the common man -- the police, the hospitals, the railway system -- seemed totally unprepared for an attack of that nature; the "I can't believe this is happening/this can't happen here" response powerfully retarded people in charge from taking steps that could have recognized the threat and minimized the danger early on. In a better-prepared and professionally paranoid society like America's -- even before 9/11 -- I have to wonder if a similar poison-gas-on-the-subway threat would really have proved to be much of a danger at all.
• Continuing along the theme of happy, happy books, then there was The Battle of Hamburg: The Firestorm Raid, by Martin Middlebrook. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden were probably the two most brutal things that the Allies did during World War II. One night of incendiary bombing by the RAF in 1943 turned the Hamburg neighborhoods of Hamm, Hammerbrook, and Borgfelde into a living hell -- a combination of circumstances built on each other to create a giant firestorm with a temperature of almost 1500 degrees F at its core. Many innocents were trapped and killed -- either roasted alive in basement air-raid shelters, or sucked up into fiery whirlwinds as they tried to run to safety. If you've been to Hamburg and wondered why Hammerbrook is nothing but shiny new office buildings, this is why; there was no other choice than to build a brand-new section of the city over the unredeemable bones of the old.

  I'd always wondered exactly what happened to Hamburg during the war -- I knew about the firestorm, and many buildings in our neighborhood carried "Destroyed 194_ / Rebuilt 195_" plaques -- but it's not something that either side mentioned much, for obvious reasons. So, Middlebrook's book was useful for filling in a lot of the holes in my knowledge. Still, it's got an unmistakable fusty-old-military-historian tone for much of its length (I could easily imagine Alistair Cooke, or some similar Elderly Cultured British Person, reading passages out loud), with far too much concentration on the movements of various battle groups and how of things -- the 914th Lancaster Squadron, mostly composed of Canadians and Australians, suffered badly in comparision because their aviation fuel had a higher sulfur content than that of the 915th or the 532nd, blahblahblah -- at the expense of describing the effects that the battle in the air had on the people on the ground.

  Hans Erich Nossack's The End: Hamburg 1943 is sitting on my pile of to-be-read books for a Hamburger's perspective.

• After that, a brief palate-cleanser, a bonbon of a book: Good Grief, by Lolly Winston. This was our San Jose book club's selection for March. Woman loses husband to cancer, then almost loses everything else -- her mind, her job, her savings (as she sells their house and moves to Ashland, Oregon on a do-something-different whim). Naturally, by the end of the book, she's a supremely centered woman of power, running a highly successful small business that she founded herself, with a hunky-yet-exquisitely-considerate-and-sensitive actor boyfriend. And did I mention that she's virtually adopted her 13-year-old "Little Sister" and is taking care of her Alzheimers-stricken mother-in-law? You go, girlfriend! Way to empower yourself! I think that this may well be the very first chick-lit book I've ever read.


• Finally, there's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Mr. Norrell is a fussy, not-particularly-likeable old Yorkshireman who appears out of nowhere in the early 1800s, wanting to bring about a rebirth of English magic (which has disappeared entirely for the past few centuries or so). After he performs a resurrection and confounds the French with a flotilla of ghost ships, people in government start listening to him, and he becomes the toast of society. Shortly the dashing and much-more-personable Jonathan Strange appears and becomes Norrell's pupil; together, they bring English magic to even greater heights, with Strange travelling to Spain to help England deal France a crushing series of blows on the battlefield. Soon, however, there is conflict -- not only between the overcautious, go-slow Norrell and the gung-ho Strange, but also between the two magicians and other, more mysterious forces; Norrell and Strange, as powerful as they may appear, may just be pawns in the plan of an entity far more capable and frightening.

  I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell immensely; however, at 800+ pages (with footnotes!), written in a 'period' style, I can see why other readers might have found it tiresome.

  And while Clarke loads up Norrell with a host of unlikeable qualities, there's one of his fussy traits that I found endearing -- his extreme reluctance to loan out a single book to anyone (even Strange, his trusted pupil). What biblophile hasn't thought, upon loaning out a book to someone for the first time, can I trust this person? will I ever get this book back? and if I do, what shape will it be in?

Posted by Kevin at March 18, 2005 11:54 AM