Proust, Murakami, and The Panama Canal

 For the Proust and podcast fans out there:

Proust Curious is a podcast miniseries about the experience of reading À la recherche du temps perdu in its entirety.

LitHub excerpted Murakami - The City and Its Uncertain Walls. It reads like his stuff - sounding simple and mysterious at the same time.

Murakami’s New Book Revisits an Early Masterpiece—and Improves It (Slate)

Most artists have a handful of ideas or themes they keep returning to—reworking, reconsidering, or just obsessing over a set of key preoccupations. But it’s a rare novelist who writes a story early on, then rewrites the same story in midcareer, and finally again in his late maturity. That’s what Haruki Murakami has done with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a retelling—or perhaps another telling is a better term—of a short piece of the same title that he wrote as a fledgling author, then later published as the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985. The story has changed profoundly over the years—at least between Hard-Boiled Wonderland and this latest incarnation, since the author has chosen not to republish the earliest version—in ways that reflect Murakami’s own growth as a writer. This novel is Murakami in winter, a season that, while outwardly sere and quiet, often harbors secret reserves of hope and joy.

Haruki Murakami Has Lost the Sauce (Vulture)

Haruki Murakami's The City And Its Uncertain Walls expands an early novella to diminishing returns (AV Club )

As in many of his novels, including the great ones, it all ends up teetering on the edge of incoherence. (The shorter third part, which feels like a tacked-on epilogue, doesn’t help matters). The truth is that the experience of reading a good Murakami novel is not altogether different from the experience of reading an underwhelming one like The City And Its Uncertain Walls: It’s a sort of frustration that mimics the inner motives of his protagonists, who are often fruitlessly searching for an answer or a more satisfying ending to some irresolvable plot. The difference is that, while Murakami’s best work rewards our frustrations and mystifications by revealing something about them, this exercise in self-recycling ends up feeling stagnant.

Ouch.

An example of what I keep writing about looking to others for new perspectives on America: Drawn Together, Held Apart: Cristina Henríquez’s “The Great Divide”, a review on Public Books by Dennis M. Hogan. The novel is about the creation of the Panama Canal (probably wholly forgotten by anyone younger than me as part of the United States).

The Great Divide succeeds as a novel about the ways that human connection is made both possible and impossible by the imperial system that arrived to govern the Canal Zone. Some characters come to Panama for the canal; for other characters, the canal comes to them. Their lives are changed: they confront the loss of a hometown even as they gain a new country; they expand their world geographically only to find their daily existence reduced to a struggle against the mud, rock, and muck of the Cordillera; they seek professional glory but find only personal misery. What is the great divide? It’s the canal that carves a gap across the continent, severing the land in two. It’s the separation of Panama from Colombia, a political act that granted sovereignty to Panamanians only to make it contingent on the whims of the US. It’s the gulf between the Atlantic and the Pacific sides of the country; between American and Caribbean Colón and Panamanian Panama City. It’s the color line that separates the workers of color and their girlfriends, wives, and children, who live in segregated facilities and receive their payment in silver, from the white and European employees who receive their wages in gold and enjoy better jobs, living conditions, options for recreation, and social prestige. It’s the political borders of the Canal Zone, dividing Panamanians outside the area of imperial interest from those who live within it, under the rule of a foreign government. It’s the gap between the promises of total transformation wrought by technological and political change and the realities of persistent unequal relations of power, wealth, influence, and access to food, medicine, a job, and a safe and secure home. Ultimately, The Great Divide confronts the way the social, political, and economic logics of imperialism cannot help but pull people together even as they must hold them inexorably apart.