Saiunkoku book 14 potential spoilers.

Okay, looks like some Japanese people claim to have finished reading it. As always, take these spoilers with a grain of salt, as I can’t personally vouch for their veracity. So anyway, once more, SPOILERS AHOY!!! [EDIT: Note that I will be updating this post as I learn more]
[NONSPOILER EDIT: There will be a collection of the illustrator's pictures coming out, next year in March!]

 

Just finished…

Just finished A Canticle for Leibowitz, for the Bibliophages comm. Truly a powerful work. Shall have more to say when discussion week comes. I kind of feel like I should read another book, especially because this time there are so few participants.

Am also reading more Kindaichi Shounen Jikenbo (The Case Files of the Young Kindaichi), which is a mystery manga. I’ve read the first ten or so volumes in English, but the translations started to get really slow. Anyhow, it’s fairly simple to read in Japanese, except for the discussions of the mechanics of the case (to be honest, I like mysteries more for the psychology than for the puzzles. So I read for characterization and suspense, and sometimes I kind of uh… (don’t tell anyone) skim over the details, especially if a timetable is involved, or a cipher), where I sometimes have to look up vocab. Kindaichi is especially good if you like super angst and melodrama, because in every crime, it’s an elaborate plot conceived to take REVENGE for an even earlier crime by the now-victims. And so therefore the villains always have a semi-sympathetic sob story, and like most of the time, they commit suicide or die dramatically. Well, except for the recurring villain, who is an unrepentant psychopath. Anyhow, reading Kindaichi, although because of the nature of the plot (Kindaichi goes somewhere, and then there is KILLING, or Kindaichi is called in to investigate some mysterious case, or Kindaichi goes to a fun mystery event and then it suddenly turns into KILLING) is kind of repetitive, is pretty fun.

 

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a deeply metafictional work. [See first few pages here or the wikipedia entry here] At first, the narrator seems to be addressing “you” personally, as “you” begin to read the titular work, which seems to be some spy novel. However, the novel is less told, rather than the process of reading the novel is. In other words, throughout the this opening (and the many later openings of abortive, unfinished novels throughout the text), the narration is heavily reflective upon itself. (We hear such things as “the sentences suggest” etc) However, unfortunately for the Reader (who is not exactly us, especially given that I am personally female, and the Reader is male, although later there is a chapter where the second Reader, Ludmilla, is addressed), there is a problem with the book and the rest of the pages are blank, so the Reader goes back to the bookstore to find another book, where he is unfortunately interrupted again, and is unable to complete his reading. A strange tale, interrupted by various beginnings of books, ensues, in which Ludmilla (the ideal reader?), whom the Reader falls in love with, her ideologue sister Lotaria, the blocked writer Silas Flannery, who may or may not be collaborating with Ermes Marana, the spurned ex of Ludmilla, who attempts to make the enterprise of fiction reading a sham by orchestrating various conspiracies to create apocryphal, misattributed, or forged novels, weave in and out of the book. In any case, unlike many experimental novels, which are alienating, and much worse, unentertaining, this book succeeds at holding one’s attention through the interrupted narrative(s).

[Yes, this is the first extended work in which the author has used the second person present throughout the work. It works here because there's a clear justification, in addressing a reader, in a conversation between the construct of the Reader, to differentiate it from the narrated world of the books, which are generally narrated fairly conventionally. Too often I see people trying narrative tricks in works that are simply too conventional for such things to be grounded well. ]

Quotes which I liked:

 

Perfume

I can’t recall who recommended Perfume to me, but it was awhile ago. I ended up, for some reason, reading the Emperor of Scent instead (a non-fiction book about a scientist with a controversial theory of scent). But recently I came across Perfume in a library and picked it up. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind and translated from the German by John E. Woods (I figure with any book where the style is conspicuous, the translator also deserves mention), is the story of a genius perfumer and serial killer, set in 1700s pre-Revolutionary France, and the prose simultaneously flows free and displays both sumptuousness and precision. As I said before, this story is working without a net, as it is essentially a portrait of the sociopathic, inhuman protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille; normally a monster has a foil, but while there are other characters, Grenouille is the one whom we follow around, and whose consciousness is the most dissected. The story is not, really, precisely a realistic one, considering the extremes of the powers of scent Grenouille possess, but the setting is realistically conceived (having read much of this period of French history, I especially enjoyed the details), but takes on a highly… literary? quality, the sense of construction rather than a transparent style of simple description, through the sort of diction used in the text. What’s also notable are the descriptions of the alchemical processes of perfumery (which will probably be of interest to all you BPAL fans out there) and the perverse theories of human behavior implied in the tale.

 

The Third Artist, revisited

Perhaps the reason why I am so ambivalent about this conception of the Third Artist is that I don’t like the elevation of SF above other genres. As I said in my discussion with Limyaael, all genres need to change and revitalize, otherwise they risk irrelevancy. Mystery, Romance, and Fantasy are also, in their modern forms, relatively ‘new’ as publishing categories/genres. In fact, even though mystery is maligned as formulaic, it is perhaps one of the newest genres, depending on how you define it. Obviously crime has always existed, as well as the need to control it, but there is obviously a reason that the genre burst upon the scene and became massively popular. And it’s not as if mystery, either, has remained static: just as in the fantasy genre, there are imitators and innovaters. The problem of the Third Artist is endemnic to genre. Perhaps the commentators feel that it is especially relevant to science fiction, though, because hard, realist SF is the ‘ideal’ form of the genre, and such realism is supposed to be highly mimetic, perhaps even journalistic or pseudo-historical, not deliberately ‘fiction-like’ or intertextual, whereas one can say that fantasy is supposed to be inherently ‘intertextual’ if you count mythology and folklore (ancient or modern) as texts. And so with fantasy, it’s a more ambiguous matter to differentiate unoriginal, boring referentiality from transformative, original referentiality. However, I think this is more a quantitative than a qualitative difference.

 

Book reviews, goodreads

1. BTW, posted reviews of Kappa and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders to my blog.

2. Have also as a result of Tari’s post gotten a goodreads account.

The jpg is supposed to dynamically update. So far I have only those two books.

3. I was considering joining library thing, but although someone I know (Meril) is an early adopter on that service (people there seem somewhat odd. Several people asked her to review… the Tale of Genji? I just don’t understand why people would clamor for that to be reviewed, because it’s not as if there’s a lack of opinions on the work), I wanted to be able to store an unlimited number of books for free. If I can break two hundred, my decision will be rational. XD In any event, I don’t really need to be recommended new books by a search engine. I have lots of people who are willing to rec to me.