FANNING THE FLAMES, part 5; or, IT'S NOT OVER UNTIL IT'S OVER

now that tao lin and i are "friends," i have to be careful expressing my opinions on his writing, not so much for fear that i would compensate for presumptions on the effect of our relationship on the degree of my positivity, but because i'm afraid that readers would expect that sort of compensation and thereby not necessarily interpret my statements as sufficiently or genuinely negative. looking back, i judge my previous treatment of lin (in parts 2, 3 and 4) to have been admirably fair -- even when skeptical -- but all of those other posts were written before i met the man himself, on which evening he learned from our conversation that i'd studied japanese literature, which then prompted him to inquire after my favorite authors, a difficult inquiry in that i hadn't actually met any of them, but i answered that, as far as contemporary authors, i appreciated ryū murakami, to which he responded that he had been asked to write a long essay for "thought catalog" on almost transparent blue.

that essay was posted yesterday. it's long. and why? in his own words, lin wanted to, "'exploit' my natural interest and write the 'end-all' english essay," on the book. this murakami certainly hasn't been read enough thanks to the other one, who's been much more extensively translated and enjoys a wide popularity (which lin, seemingly a fan, acknowledges), but he has been critically discussed even more seldom, at least outside of academia, despite his being a seminal writer and critic in japan of a status at least equivalent to the other murakami's. so, despite lin's good intentions and obvious fondness for the book, i would hate for this newly opened dialogue to end here, and can't help but think it pompous for someone who's only read one of ryū murakami's books to call the end.

granted, i sympathized with most of lin's take on the tone of the book, which he described as being imbued with the "mysteriousness" with which its first person narrator experiences his world. the narrator's delivery is always calm and intensely observant, even amidst an orgy or another character's drug induced frenzy in a tomato field in the rain, a blank stare rather than a directed vision. in contrast to other less abstract works, lin saw "almost transparent blue...more like 'this is something that happened from the perspective of one character, who viewed their own thoughts and feelings also as "things that happened," and so did not attempt to interpret them for himself or an imaginary other.'" lin also effectively describes the layeredness of the tone, which evokes the simultaneity of the narrator's physical and emotional experience, both inwardly and outwardly directed.

however, as much as his discussion of tone seems to hint at it (he writes of the narrator: "i am willing to include things the character might not have noticed, in the moment, with their full attention, but i will not include things the character was completely unaware of or didn’t think or feel or know at the time"), lin doesn't break through to what i think is possibly the most compelling element of almost transparent blue: the near complete dissociation of the first person narrator from the first person character. i don't have the book in front of me and haven't read it for years -- which probably disqualifies me from writing any sort of criticism -- but i'm almost absolutely certain that at one point, in a train on the way to a rock concert, i think, the narrator lapses and mentions himself in the third person. many of murakami's books are driven by manipulation of perspective (sometimes solely, as in the case of the quasi-sequel to almost transparent blue in which settings change based on the application of imagination to the end of some line of sight originating in the immediate action), and the calming effect of the almost overstatedly detailed (but not absurd or bathetic) descriptions of the narrator in almost transparent blue amidst the tumult of his character's surroundings are representative of murakami's keen attention that element of his writing.

and crap. i'm almost at 700 words, the length of the paraphrase and commentary piece that lin originally planned for his review of almost transparent blue. i'll take myself to task in deference to lin's effort and impose a word limit on myself. shying away? absolutely not. i didn't even have time to talk about the black bird! tao! you should have brought that bit out of your "miscellaneous notes" and expounded. i think it was important.

762. damn. ironically, i won't even finish under 800 if i try to explain that i very much sympathize with lin's difficulty in getting his essay to "lead somewhere." like him, "i felt, throughout, that i could write much more...ten times as much...and still feel like i was misrepresenting, simplifying, or blocking out certain aspects of the book." but then where's the "end-all"? of course, that term was in quotation marks in lin's essay as well, which probably means he meant it less certainly, perhaps even as a challenge to elicit contrary opinions. or maybe he just really wanted his essay to go viral, in which case i'm abetting him regardless of any criticism. should it bother me, though, that most of the response will be praise? just because he's written some books?

i've had at least five copies of that book over the years and at one time had one of them almost always on me. i'm going directly from the keyboard to powell's to get that second edition from the japanese section. but should i let pride stop me from encouraging the spread of something that will probably encourage a decently large group of people (and young, taste making people) to read a work of literature in translation? and one of my favorites at that? that's going to be how it sounds, because i only gave myself 700 words. or lin did, anyway, and that's 1000.