Brave New Worlds is an anthology of around 30 dystopian stories most written in the past decade, though, to be honest, my favorites were quite a bit older than that. This kind of book is a bit like sampling an appetizer platter; usually you find at least one thing you’d have more of. In this case, for me, it was Harlan Ellison, who’s been on my radar for quite a while and whose “Repent, Harlequin” said the TickTock man was one of the best stories – about the merciless rule to Time itself, about a world driven by extreme scheduling. It’s really the little, everyday things that end up being the most frightful.

While I really liked it overall, my biggest issue with the book was the fact that it seems to be grouped by themes – most obviously in the first half – and you end up reading several back to back variations on overpopulation, procreation control, sexual regulation or Big Brother – and it can get surprisingly mundane for speculative fiction.

For example, if we talk sexual freedom, I’d go with Geoff Ryman’s O, Happy Day, where the focus point is violence and its presumed source – heterosexual men. Thus, they must be eradicated, leading to a sort of holocaust where the only ones kept alive are the gays (and even them, only to bury the corpses). And, while we’re on this point, Neil Gaiman’s entry is a little comic strip – also with homosexuality at its core. He imagines a world without it as a response to some law passed in 1988 in UK and it was quite a disappointment for me – too obvious and clichéd.

Of those dealing with overpopulation my favorite was definitely JG Ballard’s Billenium. His premise reminded me instantly of two things: the living arrangements in Soviet Russia and the Hong Kong cages; while the throng of people slowly moving, blocking intersections for days, unable to choose their destination is claustrophobia at its finest. Dystopia can be quite real sometimes. Overpopulation, of course, opens up the issue of controlled reproduction and Paolo Balcigalupi’s Pop Squad brings a world where you can live forever, but at a price: you can never have kids. Those who have them anyway are criminals and the only punishment is death – for the children, not the parents – which is what our remorse-ridden hero does. And that’s the best part about the story, not the suspended New York and the tropical jungle growing underneath, but the itch of guilt, slowly tormenting the enforcer who begins to feel compassion and empathy for his victims, though not enough, not to the point where he would become a “criminal” himself.

I don’t really want to go into detail with every story; I’ll just add a couple more favorites: Joseph Paul Haines’s Ten with a flag & Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (both dealing with the circular complications of knowing and influencing the future); Alex Irvine’s Peter Skilling (almost a farce – where a man is brought back to life after 100 years only to be killed again in the same day for failing to comply with the new order); Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian (echoing the beginning of Fahrenheit 415); Robert Silverberg’s Caught in the organ draft (more of a meditation on how the old prey on the young than anything else) and Vylar Kaftan’s choose your own Civilization.

As to what I didn’t like…well, there was one story I didn’t finish because the style simply didn’t appeal to me (Jeremiah Tolbert’s Arties aren’t stupid) and I wasn’t exactly crazy about Caitlín Kiernan’s The Pearl Diver, Sarah Langan’s Independence Day and James Morrow’s Auspicious Eggs.

I found something unexpected in Siri Hustvedt. I started reading the book almost as a chore: I had bought it out of pure curiosity stemming from my love for Paul Auster and then it stared at me from the top of a pile for probably a year. The title is, quite frankly, off-putting and I expected something saccharine. What I got though was a powerful story of loss, failing and self-delusion. And I don’t know if it’s true or if it’s some kind of projection on my part, but I found her style and even some of her themes (starting with making New York a sort of character in its own right) eerily similar to those of Mr. Auster. (Even if that’s all in my head, I still plan to try at least another of her books.)

What I loved is divided in 3 parts, the first two of which both end in a death marking a new stage in our narrator’s life, an art professor at Columbia, the overly analytical Leo Hertzberger.

It all starts with the relationship between two men: the narrator and Bill Wechsler – a painter and visual artist who becomes his best friend – and it expands to include their families: Leo’s wife Erica and their son Matthew; Bill’s wives (first Lucille, then Violet) and his son from the first marriage, Mark. In fact, it all starts even earlier: with a painting of Violet done by Bill while he was still married to Lucille, a painting that, later on, came somehow to symbolize their relationship and, more importantly, Lucille’s influence cast unwittingly merely through her absence. Their professional lives and descriptions of their work (particularly Bill’s) take up much of the novel, but are perfectly entwined with their private lives and their continually shifting relationships. While it’s clear that, even as they sometimes drift apart, the core of what brought them together is still there, the mutations, the equilibrium shifts both between the main characters and between those levitating around them are what make novel so real and authentic – at least through the first half (but more on that later).

Matt’s death (at the end of part 1) is not really a surprise -  you feel it lurking, even unconsciously; and when it does happen you realize you always knew it would. All Leo’s stories of him are suffused with the golden tinge of nostalgia: the child that maybe was truly exceptional or maybe only in the eyes of the aggrieved parent – and the few minutes, translated in a couple of pages after the fateful phone call that would shatter Leo & Erica’s world are a nearly perfect mix of disbelief, shock and grief. The subsequent fraying of the parents’ relationship reminded me a bit of Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, possibly because they all deal with loss and its toll.

The third part, with Mark’s downward spiral and the realization that, more than a drug addict, he really is a clinical psychopath, felt a little forced to me, like its entire existence was driven solely by the need to have another conflict. The New York art scene and Teddy Giles stand out glaringly because their colors are too harsh, too bright and contrast too much with the more muted tones of all that came before. Also, the thriller-like quality of the third part (the missing kid, the suspicions, the endless assumptions and finally the journey to recover him) simply doesn’t match – like a puzzle where you’re trying to fit in a too-large piece. But, I suppose, it all helps bring the book to a clear, clean ending – too clean, come to think of it.

Other random thoughts: Ms. Hustvedt makes, I think, oblique references to a couple of 90s works that sparked controversy (The Killers could very well be Natural Born Killers and Psycholand sounds a lot like American Psycho) to clarify Mark’s tastes and Teddy’s influence on him, but they’re all too on the nose and their sensationalist tone only lessen the overall effect; also, my favorite bit of all the characters’ work was definitely Violet’s thesis on hysteria and her case studies (actually, instead of the whole Mark subplot, I would much rather have read more about this ).

A bunch of reviews: Guardian, NY Times, The Observer.

But then, you’re so suddenly thrown in the world of the year 92 AV – with its post-apocalyptic unrecognizability and a whole cast of new characters that you feel a bit off-balance. I mean sure, you expect everything to come together, but it feels like a cheat to have read 300 pages about people you’ll not be hearing about again. We’re introduced to a Colony of survivors, men and women constantly living under the harsh glare of lights to keep the virals at bay. And then, of course, something happens that disrupts their daily lives: Amy, the little girl, appears amongst them and a plucky band of misfits (I’ve always wanted to use this phrase ) will go with her, trying to find what the world is really made of and, perhaps, they key to their salvation. If it sounds sort of cliché, it’s because it is (in some places at least) but you’re so engrossed in the action and the suspense of what will happen next that there’s not much time to analyze; it’s just a matter of sitting back and enjoying the ride – and I for one did, quite a bit.

The readings at the conference in 1003 AV from The Book of Sara and The Book of Auntie got me thinking in an odd way that whatever historical relics we discover and study once belonged to real people, to people who carried on their daily lives, just like, in all probability, some things we use today will, in 1000 years, be relics to someone else. It all depends on your point of reference really and it’s a bit sad, a bit disconcerting to think of your own life as someone else’s object of study. Anyway, enough with this silliness The ending is a sort of cliffhanger, paving the way for volume 2, which is, I think, supposed to come out some time in 2012 – and I’m definitely looking forward to it. And if you want to read more about this one, it’s say the Washington Post review is as good a place as any to start.

]]> http://meerchant.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-passage/feed/ 0 ameer justin_cronin_the_passage http://meerchant.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/a-bunch-of-2011-movies/ http://meerchant.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/a-bunch-of-2011-movies/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:28:17 +0000 ameer http://meerchant.wordpress.com/?p=1768 ]]> My plan for the Xmas break back home: watch 2011 movies. Except for a few summer flicks, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that came out this year because most movies, quite frankly, sound like crap – and the ones that don’t, aren’t available yet. But anyways, here we go:

Contagion is basically Steven Soderbergh and a whole cast of who’s who (which you can check out on imbd). The title says it all – a virus spreads like wildfire, people drop dead like flies and no one really knows what to make of it (goes pretty well with the books I’ve been reading lately, too). The disadvantage of such an impressive cast is how distracting it gets – everyone’s done something better (or more famous) and, inherently, there comes the moment when Walter White is having a chat with Keith Mars and my interest in the virus – poof. Gone.  All in all, it’s fairly boring given the subject matter.

Carnage. A few years back I watched the Tony Awards, saw a scene from Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage and envied those who had the chance to see the play live. So, ever since I heard this movie was getting made, I’ve been quite excited to see it, and I’m happy to report it turned out pretty decent: watching four seemingly reasonable adults gradually expose all their hidden anguishes and turn into the very children they’re debating is so theatrical, so ridiculously over-the-top that it actually ends up being entertaining. For once, the trailer is a pretty accurate gauge, so check it out – and the best thing about it all might be Christoph Waltz’s deadpan delivery.

Drive – the movie that launched ridiculous lawsuits, one of the three that made this Ryan Gosling’s year and Bryan Cranston’s second appearance on this list (Walter White is now briefly sharing a table with Clay Morrow ). It’s an atmospheric, 80s infused, slow-moving tale, with a stuntman moonlighting as a getaway driver, a robbery gone wrong and a little romance thrown in the mix. It may sound trite, but it’s definitely worth watching; actually, my only issue was this song: it doesn’t blend in with the rest of the soundtrack and it draws you away from what’s happening onscreen, in a moment when you really should be paying attention.

Hanna. Rogue agent’s kid, raised and trained by her dad somewhere in the Arctic, Hanna basically pulls a tiny switch and has a whole governmental agency on her trail. There’s a lot of running, shooting and last-minute escaping (actually, the whole scene where she first gets away is like a music video: all flickering lights and rapid-cut close-ups). Hanna is one bad-ass kid, but she’s yet to learn the ways of the world and her real story – that’s almost all there is to it. As a side note, I’m surprised Joe Wright didn’t find a spot for Keira Knightley here, since he seems to like her so – she’s been in two of his films lately and they’re filming now Anna Karenina – another prospect that doesn’t exactly sound appealing

Melancholia (and the Infinite Sadness? Can’t help it, my mind just instantly went there) I’m not a fan of Lars von Trier’s stuff – it’s too forced for my taste, too…deliberately artsy. And, while this is still true of Melancholia, I did find myself enjoying it. Part end-of-the world drama, part wedding absurd comedy but with an entirely beautiful cinematography – it really should be enjoyed in the theatre. Throughout the course of the movie, Justine becomes more and more remote, distancing herself from everyone, including her new husband, who seems to have no clue (and no interest) in what’s going on with her, while Claire, so cold and detached in the beginning, is overrun by anxiety, by the corroding fear that the universe will end – and, just like her sister, she’s no one to share this with. Von Trier’s world is evil and alone – as Justine says; and it’s all about going through the motions – so maybe that’s exactly why it needs to end.

Moneyball I’ll preface this by saying I know nothing about baseball; it involves hitting a ball with a bat – and that’s about it if you ask me I also don’t care for inspirational sports movies – so, if it hadn’t been for Aaron Sorkin’s involvement (and the generally positive reviews) I wouldn’t even have tried it. But now that I did…I honestly have absolutely no opinion. It’s not bad, but it just left me completely indifferent. Half the time I was thinking about other stuff anyway so, really, if you’re not into baseball (or into Brad Pitt ) – don’t bother with this one.

Source Code After the seriousness (or the serious boringness, depends how you look at it) of Moneyball – a bit of action and sci-fi was just the ticket. Jake Gyllenhaal travels back and forth to the last 8 minutes in some guy’s life in order to prevent a train from exploding and Michelle Monaghan just sits there being all pretty There’s a not-all-that-twisty twist thrown in there for good measure, but I won’t spoil it, since there aren’t all that many reasons to watch it anyways

The Adjustment Bureau More sci-fi action, this time based on a Philip K Dick story – with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as the obligatory, yet charming couple. It all begins with a lost Senate race (Matt Damon-the politician is much more convincing than Matt Damon-the dad in Contagion), while on the sidelines and seemingly unrelated, there’s John Slattery’s band of creepy men – and they all come together rather abruptly. From then on, he’ll obviously start chasing the girl – and the truth. It may sound ridiculous, but it works and I do like the notebook with the action lines and the inflection points – it’s cool (even if a little cold) to imagine your life like that Bonus – Jon Stewart!

The Tree of Life This movie had first spent years in development and then a few years more waiting to be released, so it was kind of hard not to come at it with … expectations. But I was talking to a friend about it and the only description I could come up with was that it’s a very look-a- me- I’m-so -special type of movie – which may not be is not the best choice of words, but I believe it gets across the message. It’s pretentious and full of itself; it’s nice to look at (very nice to look at); it’s got some great performances – but there’s no…substance. And I don’t want to claim that any of the movies above are filled with whatever profound revelations – but at least they all seemed more self-aware. Tree of life looks like it wants to be deep so badly that it highlights the facts that it’s just gimmicky. Basically, it tells the story of a family losing a son sometime in the 50s: the mother’s disbelieving grief and appeals to a higher power, entwined with the story of the remaining brother, now grown, but reliving those moments, unsure of his place in the world. And then there’s the whole birth of the universe sequence, which feels like you’re watching a slideshow – visually exciting, but ultimately forgettable. The critics mostly loved it though – just read the quotes on RT.

The Sunset Limited. Written by Cormac McCarthy and based on a play by Cormac McCarthy; directed by Tommy Lee Jones and starring Tommy Lee Jones (and Samuel L. Jackson) – it’s a three-men job, this one. A televised play really, it’s two old men (a suicidal professor and an ex-con – stand-ins for the educated-yet-burdened Ivy League type and the light-hearted, from-your-gut wisdom of the common folk) having A Conversation about everything ranging from religion and faith (or lack thereof), to their respective life experiences to, of course, suicide. It seems too literary, too verbose to give the illusion of authenticity in the beginning – but by the end I was so entranced by the ebb and flow, by the rhythm that it hardly mattered. (And how can anyone not love Tommy Lee Jones?)

The Ides of March Election drama with a strong cast (George Clooney directing and Ryan Gosling’s third movie this year, too) focused not on the candidate, but on those behind the scenes. It’s no West Wing , but I enjoyed it: it’s well-written (the speeches especially touch on the rhetoric-du-jour, with the actual elections coming up) and well-acted, there’s a couple of surprising moments – it’s all very…competent, for lack of a better word, but it’s not something to get too excited about.

La piel que habito – it’s about a crazy plastic surgeon obsessed with skin after he tragically loses his wife and daughter and his mysterious guinea pig. It’s Almodovar, so…that says it all.

My favorites – after this needlessly long post? Drive and The Sunset Limited.

Blackadder: Ah, Melchett! Greetings! I trust Christmas brings you its traditional mix of good food and violent stomach cramp.

Melchett: And compliments of the season to you, Blackadder. May the Yuletide log slip from your fire and burn your house down.

Unconnected to any of her more famous cycles (Hainish, Earthsea), The Lathe of Heaven has the most fascinating premise: what if dreams could literally change the world?

George Orr finds himself dealing with this very conundrum and its moral and ethical implications and, seeking to rid himself of these world-altering dreams, he uses more than his allotted share of barbiturates, which will, ultimately, land him in VTT (Voluntary Therapy Treatment) in the seemingly capable hands of Dr. Haber. The initially reluctant psychiatrist finds that Orr is, indeed, not psychotic; that his dreams can truly change reality, shift it to another continuum, leaving no memories of the previous timeline to anyone else but the dreamer and, now, the man who suggested the dream and who was right there when the change occurred – his shrink.

This leaves Ms. LeGuin the freedom to explore not one, but several alternative realities and, also, the great gap between intent and actual consequence. Ultimately Haber is a power-hungry individual but with fairly good intentions (at least in a sort of utilitarian way – the best for the most, not much room for empathy); in his way he wants, as the cliché goes, to make the world a better place with, of course, the arrogance of one who believes he knows what he’s doing while playing God. Orr turns out to be an imperfect instrument not only because of his moral misgivings and reluctance towards the therapist, but also because his subconscious, where all the transformations happen, changes Haber’s instructions sometimes beyond recognition.  Thus, Haber’s desire for peace on Earth brings an alien threat from the Moon (against which all warring nations can rally together) and his suggestion to eliminate racial prejudice, discrimination and inequality leads to a single race of bland, grey humans.

The various alternatives of the world Orr takes us through reflect the coming to pass of various 70s fears that are still issues today – global warming, overpopulation, scarcity of resources etc. In a way, Haber and Orr switch roles throughout the book: while in the beginning Haber is in control and trying to model Orr to his wishes, by the end, his desire for the ultimate power trip – to have his own effective dreams – changes him into an out of control ‘monster’, with only Orr capable to literally step into the nightmare and put an end to it.

This was, by far, my favorite book by Ms LeGuin, and I’m glad I didn’t start off with it – any follow-up would probably have been rather disappointing.

The Year of the Flood was, in one word, disappointing – and I figured this might be the case from the first 20 pages. Why I stuck though the whole 500 of them…is really anybody’s guess. I suppose it’s something to do with misplaced feelings of guilt; but on the bright side – it’s an easy read, takes no more than a couple of mornings to go right through it.

That being said – what bugged me the most was the fact that it retroactively spoiled Oryx & Crake. It completes that universe, telling the story of the apocalyptic pandemic from the point of view of two other characters – but while, in theory, this added perspective should be enriching, it eventually turns out that in practice (or in Ms Atwood’s particular case) it diminishes the effect of the first book, making Jimmy and his plight a bit ridiculous. To go from assuming you are the last (or one of the last) remaining human beings on Earth (not counting the human-like creatures created by your best friend) to discovering that, not only you’re not the last, but there’s a survivors’ colony right in the neighborhood – it’s a bit of a wake-up call. Not to mention the overabundance of ‘coincidences’: how is it that every time a character seems lost he/she accidentally meets someone familiar, someone willing to lend a hand? It happened to Ren, it happened to Toby, to Shackie & Croze and, by the end, it looks like it happened to Adam One as well. Not to mention that Jimmy practically rescues two of his former girlfriends in one fell swoop and, by the end, everyone’s back together, one big happy group (or as happy as a group can be, under the circumstances). Just writing about it gets me all worked up again.

And I’m usually not this vehement in my posts, but I felt cheated. I can get over the fact that the pseudo-religion of God’s Gardeners and all the ‘green’ (almost) propaganda didn’t appeal to me – this is more of a personal preference – but with everything else, it felt like Ms. Atwood was having a little joke at the expense of whoever bothered to read the book.

Phew.

Now that I’ve gotten this off my chest I can probably add that the book follows the themes from Oryx & Crake – the supremacy of genetic engineering, the overuse of the Earth’s resources, the new plastic reality from the compounds vs. the life in the impoverished pleeblands; and we meet familiar faces, too: Amanda & Ren (best friends, both known in Oryx & Crake as Jimmy’s girlfriends at various times in his life), the MaddAdam group (whose history was actually interesting), Glenn (Crake), etc. The characters here are more rounded, their drama is more real, more immediate, the bonds between them are forged through more than mere proximity (which was really the only thing that brought Jimmy & Crake together) – and this is, by far, the strongest aspect of the book.

Both Jeanette Winterson for NYTimes and Ursula K. LeGuin for The Guardian seemed to really have enjoyed it though – and most likely they know better

A long long time ago (to be more precise, in this particular case, long = 3 years) I wrote a very excited post about how I’d kept up the blogging for a whole year. Now I can say I’ve kept it up for 4 – but the excitement has gone down by something like 75%. I think it’s a kind of fatigue – I don’t have the same drive to write and, for the past few months, I’ve somehow slipped on my reading too (42 books for the year – since Shelfari is nice enough to count for me). I’m bored and tired – and I think this could be the headline for the whole 2011, since I started it in the same delightful mood. I probably just need a change of scenery and the drive to actually go and make one happen. Maybe by November 2012. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, happy birthday to me – or rather, to Blog.

These things, they sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency.

 There were several moments during Oryx & Crake which had a déjà-vu vibe – but this isn’t to say that the book felt like a compilation. I guess the more you turn towards a genre, the more it feels like familiar territory or, in the case of these post-apocalyptic dramas, unsettlingly familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.  Ms. Atwood takes us backwards: from the immediate immersion in a seemingly deserted world (deserted but for Snowman and the Crakers) she retraces steps to the catastrophe that made this world possible through Snowman’s flashbacks and alcohol induced hallucinations. But even the pre-apocalypse world isn’t necessarily recognizable; it’s a world split into compounds and pleeblands (the haves and have-nots – so far nothing new) a world where gene splicing is commonplace and almost everything is artificial, including animals. For example, we have the pigoons which are basically human organ farms in the shape of pigs; unlike Kazuo Ishiguro’s future in Never let me go, where the organ farms were actually human clones – and yet still hinting towards that (with the option for cloning and the illegal baby orchards).  We have wolvogs, rakunks, snats and, of course, the Crakers – the ultimate creation.

While Jimmy ‘Snowman’ is our narrator, his life has circled around Crake, his best (and only) friend since childhood and Oryx – a young woman whom they both first see as a child on a porn site and with whom they both end up falling in love – quite predictably. But their little love triangle ends with 8 simple words – 8 words which wouldn’t really say much but which, in the context, seemed to acquire a new strength, a new meaning: ” ‘I’m counting on you’ he said, and then he slit her throat. Jimmy shot him.” It verges towards the melodramatic, but to me it felt like a lot was said with so little; same as with the repeated catchphrase from Alex the Parrot (a video Jimmy saw in his childhood) – I’m going away now – which reads a little bit like the sad whine of an inevitable doom.

Jimmy’s passion for archaic expressions is in contrast with the sudden loss of meaning, of context, for much of his contemporary vocabulary – This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space  – a similar experience to that of Paul Auster’s In the country of last things.

I think I managed to be more incoherent than usual – but you can always find the main points of the plot on Wikipedia, where it also says that Joyce Carol Oates sees Dr. Frankenstein in Crake, an easy enough parallel. Except that the Crakers, his creations, are a sort of evolution towards involution, if you will, a return to a more primitive mind, to instinctual living. They lack various neural impulses that would drive them to seek independent living, to create, to build, to grow, to become jealous or violent – they are humanoid, but devoid of anything that actually makes a human. They somehow worship Crake simply because they are told that he had created them and they regard Snowman as a sort of prophet, their own version of Moses (who even saves them from the plague unleashed by their creator, which has rendered the human race as we know it extinct) in this twisted interpretation of the creation myth. Their fragility and their docility reminds me actually more of HG Wells’s Eloi.

The novel also reads like a bit of a cautionary tale against man playing at God, against taking science too far and against even the much maligned desensitization of our age – and on these points it’s sometimes too obvious, too on the nose. But for me, the details of both the pre & post-apocalypse world and Ms. Atwood’s vivid and precise style more than make up for it.

  Sin City My timid foray in the world of comic books (or graphic novels) continues with Sin City (so far, only volume 1). If you want to go through the plot, check wikipedia or the movie (of which I actually have no clear memories except the vague impression that I liked it in spite of Mickey Rourke) – all I can say is that I had fun with it. I liked the sketchy art and the noir vibe – and I’ll be getting the whole series.

   Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead I haven’t read a play since highschool, if I’m being honest, I don’t really think I even know how to read a play. But I really wanted to give Tom Stoppard a try – and I found myself enjoying his humor quite a bit. Sure, you get so much more out of this is you know more than the basic plot of Hamlet – but even for the uninitiated there are some delightful moments of absurdity and linguistic ambiguity.

  The Gourmet Club There are 6 stories – and when I read the first story – I hated it. It kinda made me feel…icky, for lack of a better word – like I really needed to take a scalding hot shower. I might be overreacting here – after all, it just wasn’t my cup of tea; but it did make me consider abandoning the whole book. Then a week passed, and I got to read the second story, then the third…and halfway through the fifth I realized I’m enjoying myself a great deal. The general themes don’t stray too far from those in the first story – it’s all about obsession and its power of submission, with the occasional perversion dropped in to spice things up – but since none of the other 5 stories involved kids, I felt a lot more comfortable with them. The Two Acolytes reminded me a bit of Narcisuss and Goldmund – with the young disciple leaving a Buddhist temple to understand what the outside world really is like, while The Gourmet Club gave me this nagging déjà-vu feeling that I still can’t escape, since I’m pretty sure I’ve read something similar, but I can’t figure out what or by whom (yeah, that’s exactly how far I can rely on my memory ). The story is about a group of friends in search of the ultimate culinary sensation, leading to an all consuming obsession to find that one dish that will satisfy them. In  Mr. Bluemound, Mr. Tanizaki dips into obsession again – this time though it’s of a sexual nature, when the title character discloses that his fascination with an actress (or rather – her body parts) has led him to create blowup dolls in her image. All throughout these stories there is a lyrically eerie atmosphere that just draws you in – and I think that’s what I liked best about the book.