Opus (Satoshi Kon)
Despite my love of all things Japanese (well, apart from the bad
things), I've never been much of a manga reader. While I have dabbled here and
there, I have not got through many in my time. I am, however, a fan of all
things by the late Satoshi Kon. A fan of his anime, I decided to give one of
his manga a try.
'Opus' is an incomplete serial he worked on in the mid-Nineties,
recently re-released in a near-complete form. Perhaps somewhat appropriately,
it centres around a mangaka struggling to complete his manga serial
'Resonance'.
Pressured, suffering from writer's-block and unable to put pen to
paper, the lines between fiction and reality are lost, as he becomes literally
consumed by his own work. Once inside, he is considered 'God' by his characters
and he has to deal with the consequences of his creation. He is questioned as
to the lack of detail in backgrounds leaving an incomplete world and as to why
he writes his characters' deaths.
Maybe this isn't anything too original, with the creator becoming an
unsuspecting god, but you do get a sense of a semi-autobiographical nature from
the work, written largely before his rise as a director. This is another strong
addition to his body of work, setting a theme that would be throughout his
feature films.
Days to read: 12
Days per book: 14.7
Colors of the Mountain (Da Chen)
While I was doing my Master's dissertation at University - which partly
featured a cultural look at China - I read Xin Ran's 'The Good Women of China'.
Oh, I wish I hadn't. While others may like it, my English cynicism had me
reading a book I found horribly over-sentimental, to the point where I found it
difficult to read. The whole thing was far too 'tragic lives' for my liking. So,
when my wife bought me Da Chen's memoirs for Christmas, maybe I was a little
sceptical.
Now a celebrated flautist in the US of States, the first of Da Chen's
memoirs focus on his school years in his home town of Yellow Stone in southern
China, telling of his family's struggles as former landowners in Communist
China and the daily abuse it brought them. Knowing the importance of family
ties in Chinese culture and this being very much a family-driven affair, it can
at times become a little too sentimental as he reminisces about the first
fifteen-or-so years of his life. His family's past a constant burden for them,
I feared this too would become a tale of a life tragic.
Luckily, however, Chen's status led him to befriend a group of street
rascals, allowing for enough tales of boyhood hijinks to bring in some comedy
and tales of doing those things teenage boys do to stop it becoming a little
too heavy of the emotional superlatives.
This is a little of a bumpy ride, switching between boyhood pranks and
family sentimentality, that can at times be good; at others be less so. But
all-in-all this gives a good account of some of the difficulties that life in
the second half of the Twentieth Century in China posed for people of certain
backgrounds.
Days to read: 15
Days per book: 14.7
Easily Distracted: My Autobiography (Steve Coogan)
If there's one thing that prompts immediate hatred inside my loins,
it's naming your autobiography 'My Autobiography'. Public figures that have
done this include Alex Ferguson and Rio Ferdinand; you know, that type. Here
now comes another such memoir from a another man associated with Manchester;
another man who thinks he's IT.
Maybe I'm being harsh (not on Rio Ferdinand) on Mr Steve Coogan here,
however, for this is a man whom naming his autobiography 'MY Autobiography' might be something of a statement. This isn't
Alan Partridge's autobiography - he's already co-written that - it's his, and
you can see mild attempts to keep Partridge on the sidelines throughout, though
always there.
Attempting to unearth the 'real' Steve Coogan is something that's been
attempted before, and it's a bit cliché to write about how one of the country's
most famous character actors struggles to find himself. Of course segments feel
like they could have come from the mind of a Norwich-based radio DJ, but it is
a part he's played for over two decades now, and so is part of him; this is
perhaps why the book starts at the end, focusing on more recent works, such as
'Philomena' and his part in the hacking scandal.
The book then moves into his childhood - a major focus of the book -
gradually building to drama college and early breaks into comedy and
performing, occasionally veering here and there along the way.
He's a man that probably hasn't done things through the typical routes,
perhaps to the annoyance of some around him, seeking both success and critical
acclaim hand-in-hand. This isn't the best autobiography - not the deepest or
most revealing - and so doesn't leave you feeling a better understanding of the
man of certain mystery, though that's perhaps the role he chooses to play most
when in the public eye.
Days to read: 14
Days per book: 14.7
A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James)
This book is a bit of an epic. A nomination for the Man Booker Prize
brought this to my consciousness; and its winning of said award prompted me to
mention it enough to my wife while I saw someone reading it on a flight to
Budapest to force her to buy it for me as a Christmas present. You soon
discover you are one of the crowd reading this.
Telling the story of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley at his
Kingston home in 1976, this book morphs into something so much more, with 'the
Singer' more a symbol than an actual character throughout. The attack is placed
in the context of gang violence, political turmoil - with the CIA's attempts to
fend off Communism - and change in Jamaica from the Seventies to the Nineties,
following the fates of the men that carried out the attempt on Marley's life.
This book is massively ambitious and clearly one that took a lot of
research to build: It has many layers, many voices and, as a result, many
pages. The continual changing of the narrator keeps it from dragging too much,
however, and it finishes a rewarding work, if maybe a little inconsistent along
the way.
But, being a book loosely themed around Bob Marley and its recent
successes will mean that this is a book that is clearly 'cool' to be seen
reading, as the daily readers on London's Northern Line confirmed each day.
Days to read: 37
Days per book: 14.8
Sounds of the River (Da Chen)
'Sounds of the River' is the second half of Da Chen's grandfather's
verse, and the memoir of the second phase of his life, having left Yellow Stone
to start University in Beijing, studying English language.
This is a slightly different time in a big city, with the Cultural
Revolution now over and a more modern outlook on the world surrounding the
young man. Thoughts now turn to fashions, foreign cigarettes and translating
for NBA stars.
Again, the book is a little bumpy, switching between moments of humour,
but then being far, far, far too joyful in his descriptions of everyone that
crosses his path. Towards the end though things get all a little too much for
me as his dreams of reaching America grow nearer. While you can appreciate his
appreciation of his family, it perhaps is given too much emphasis on the book's
conclusion, bringing a slightly disappointing end to the memoirs as a whole.
Days to read: 20
Days per book: 14.9
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