Z-wor(l)d (Tibor Fisher: The Thought Gang)

Reading The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer is definitely the most extraordinary experience for those bored with Dr Gregory House: this lazy, self-conceited, fallen philosopher and aspiring bankrobber, Eddie Coffin, is one of the most inspiring characters in contemporary literature.
He, for example, made me collect all the Z-words from the book, in chronological order. Each only once. 

The zet has definitely got in me. I am under bad influence.

zing, Zetland street, Zodiac, zooming off, zealous, zetetic, zero, Zédé, zestfully, zarfs, zetting, zig, Zennor, zenith, Zonian, Zanzibari, Zak, zone, zacaton, zombied, zedded, zephaniah, zan-zum-mim, Zambezi, zany, zaibatsu'd, Zeitgeist, zettist, Zambia, zalambodont, zoo, zoning, zephaniahing, zonitid-like, za-zaing, zapped, much-zegotted, zarzuela, zuider zee, Zonaras, zet, zeb, zenonism, zzzzzzzs, zonked zonkey, zestily, zeds, zendo, zinky, zonales, Zinn, Zenon, Zeno, zymurgic, zinfandel, Zürich, Zsigmondy, zegaberus, Zouk, zob, zealously, zest, zyzzogetons, zorapeta, Zaire, Zedoary, zettable, zip open, get zet, zarp car, Zalecusian, Ziphüd, zet out, a zeb zob, Zytel, zedding, zip, zoonosis, to zap banks, a zeb zet, Zeta, zoa, zekily, zoroaster, (z), zzeezz, zaapoor, Zephryinus, Zoismus, A Z of sorrow, zouarze, Zamoyski, Zud, Zeirian, Zutistes, zut, zutisms, z boson, what the zet is going on?, zubiri, zebras, zedily, zebra spider (salticus scenicus), zeal, Zirndorf, Zwanziger, zob at each other, zwtschenwasser, zary, zeb combination, Zozo Voltaire, Zagros, zeiformes, Zygate-like, get the zest out, Zoser, (zz), zigzag, Zilch, zirconium, Zoffanys, zori, Zomba, Zipette, zaqqum, zth, Zama, Z.34150701, zadrugas, Zwickau, Zelenogradian, zocle, ziraleet, zymometer, Zola, zap, zapote, Zarko, Zante, zoetrope, zapateados, zostered, zucchetto, Zangi, Zimara, Zabarella, zamboning, Zungaria, zootomatically, zephyrs, zykloned, zarp, zuclopenthixol, zho, zilladar, Zubrowka, zigzaggily, zapoteran, zerrana, zumbador, Zubenelgenubi, zakat, Zildjan, Zeami, Ziggurat, zidovudine, zabuton, zender, zensho, zodatrous, zander, zoititical, zozo, Zenobia, Zabbay, Zabda, Zanteseschia, Zachia, Zerlina, Zeissia, zoologist, Zaporogue, Zeus, Zarathustra, Zacapoaxtla, Ziusudra, Zira, zeebrugge, zing, zape, Z, zythum, Za Dengel, zodiacal, Zapodida, Zwaardemaker, Zamzam, Zefat, Z-bar, zibet, Zimbalom, Zurvan, zampegna, zax, Zener, zareeba, Zachary, Zaretop, Zephaniah, Zelophehad, zinging, zaptich, Zile, Zimmer, Zacryptocerns, Zohar, Z1, Zajc, Zagreb, Zingg, zucchini, zorilla, Z-bend, Zutphen, Zin, Zypaens, Zersörer, zoophagy, zululand, zakurski, znuzily, Zeiller, Ziegler, Zumbo, zygomatics, Zimbabwe, Zalamoxis, Zuluf, zebra-wood, Zoe, zippy, zemi, Zainer, Zanis, Zarotis, zebra'd, zapping away, ziff, zaag, zoog, zopilotes, Z-plasried, zuihitsu, zel, ziletus, Zwolle, Zemaituka, ziginette, Zabaglione, Zug, ziti, Zechstein, Zitatenschatz, Zander, Zeppelin, zechtour, Z-transformation, Zettelmeyer, Zam, Zemes, Zenonian,  zinnia, zinziberaceous, zymurgy, ziczac, Z-twist, Zao Jun, Zaufahl, Zeis, Zuckerkandl, zillion, Z-charts, zmudzin, zaruk, zayin, zaino, zag, Zach, Zachariah, Zacharie, Zachau, Zademach, Zagnani, Zahm, Zahne, Zahringer, Zanchi, Zanker, Zanlich, Zantner, Zantzig, Zappecj, Zaringer, Zaug, Zech, Zehng, Zeissler, Zeitelmeier, Zeitz, Zucker

Tibor Fischer

And that would be 310 Z-words in number.

At first I thought Fisher is just crazy with these Z-s. Then it was a good joke, then a bed joke, finally a mission to make note of all. Hope I haven't left any out.

As it turned out, Z-s are indeed a mission for  the author. On the last page he explains why the zet:

Z. The last letter of our alphabet, the seventh of the first alphabets, Hebrew and Phoenician, the sixth of the Greek. The Hebrew zayin from the Hieratic letter and linked to the Syriac zaino: weapons. Possibly descended from the Sumerian battle-axe sign, zag. When the Romans conquesred Greece they were forced to borrow the letter Z. It stands like a brand on the forehead of Roman culture, skivy, porter to the Greeks. Z, the letter chosen as teh most important symbol, the symbol for atomic number, the symbol for protons, the element of the elements, the things that give character to the universe. The one and many. Z, in the international code of signal flags, means "I am commencing to tow" or "Ready to be towed". Z, the medieval Roman numeral for 2000. I could go on.

zayin

On youtube two fan-made animations of would-be films are avilable for funs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK_VKLjMVNk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy7opqDLYeQ

I prefer the first one.

Kafka on the Shore by Hakuri Murakami

Just finished reading it. Still speechless. The end is a bit swishyswashy, though I don't think this word actually exists. What I mean is he could have done a WAY BETTER JOB on the last 30 pages after having written about 600 hundred without a flaw. Like, who IS his mother? Why does Johnny Walker do what he does? Where is he coming from? Why does he want to get to where he wants to get to? This is not a loose end, this is just some crappy end. The whole novel is a MARVEL, a, actually two BRILLIANT stories. One about Kafka, a teenage runaway, the other about a "slow" sixty-seventy-something guy called Nakata. And there is a lorry driver who really gets in the depth of everything, but, comes out of it as a newborn person.

Will write more about it soon if I have time. It would be good, as I feel that at last and at least I have something to write about.

Here is a review from the Observer.

A recurrent obsession in the books of Haruki Murakami is the idea of the labyrinth. His characters are always searching for something and mostly that thing is the emergency exit from his stories. His minotaurs come in all shapes and sizes. In A Wild Sheep Chase, it was a demonic would-be ruminant with world domination on his mind. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, there were the possessed healer Nutmeg Asakasa and her mute son, Cinnamon. Here there are monsters in the guise of Johnnie Walker, a malevolent, bottled-up spirit complete with tall hat and tails, and Colonel Sanders, who takes shape as a riddling pimp in a white suit selling sex and possibility in a side alley (with not a chicken wing in sight).

In several places in Kafka on the Shore, characters discuss the origin of the word labyrinth, dwelling on the notion that it has its roots in the ancient habit of laying out the disembowelled guts of an enemy on the sand to divine the course of the future. There are along the way several acts of disembowelment - Johnnie Walker, for example, has a taste for eviscerating stray cats - and mostly they lead to the conclusion that all of our mazes lie within us. It is, for Murakami, our fate to find a safe (and amusing) passage out of the life that fate has made for us.

Theseus-in-chief on this occasion is Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old in the Tokyo suburbs, who lives with his father, a brilliant and fearful sculptor. When he was four, Kafka Tamura's mother left home with his sister. He does not know why they went, or where, and the quest of the book, and one of its various whodunits, lies in his vague, compulsive attempts to find out. He leaves home, heads south and ends up working in a curious library in the provincial town of Takamatsu. He is haunted by the oedipal prophecy his psychotic dad gave to him when he was seven: that he would end up killing his father and sleeping with his mother and his sister.

Kafka Tamura wants to escape from this fate but, in his dreams, of course, is drawn towards it. The fun and drama of Murakami's storytelling is that you are never quite certain where those dreams end and where reality begins. His singular skill as a novelist lies in creating hallucinatory landscapes in which everything has an internal logic and much has the cool erotic intensity of fantasy. He is a devout disciple of Chekhov's idea that 'if a pistol appears in a story, eventually it has to be fired'. He has talked often in interviews of allowing his stories to lead him where they want to go, from one sentence to the next. It is a risky, jazz-like strategy and it leads to dead ends as well as open roads.

Not surprisingly, Murakami is drawn as well to the idea of seismic dislocation, the kind of life events that make anything possible. His two non-fiction books dwelt on the victims of the Kobe earthquake and the terrorist gas attack on the Tokyo underground. In each case, Murakami interviewed victims with the kind of attention he might have reserved for interrogating characters he had invented. What was it exactly about their lives that had changed? he asked the stunned survivors. What new sense of narrative did they feel?

The dramatic act of fate in Kafka on the Shore falls on schoolchildren out with their teacher collecting mushrooms at the end of the Second World War. A plane passes over, or at least something very high up, and all 16 children fall to the floor unconscious like actors in 'some weird avant- garde play'. When they come round hours later, none can remember what happened. All but one of the children are unaffected by the incident, but that one, Nakata, has had all his memory, and his ability to remember, erased. The novel finds him in later life, the fool from the hill, in the same Tokyo suburb as Kafka Tamura, with an ability to speak to cats, and a skill for making unusual things fall from the sky. The weather of Murakami's novel is thereafter interrupted by squalls of mackerel and showers of leeches.

Somehow, the lives and dreams of Kafka Tamura and Nakata the rainmaker are linked. The clues seem to lie with Oshima, a cross-dressing librarian, who befriends Kafka Tamura, and the unsettling Miss Saeki, once Japan's Kate Bush, who is locked in the past of a murdered lover and has written a book about survivors of lightning strikes. Kafka Tamura believes Saeki might be his mother. He is visited by her 15-year-old self as he sleeps in her dead lover's room and, unsure if he is awake, has amazing sex with a ghost who he knows is asleep.

All of Murakami's writing is suffused with a sense of loss, as if his face were pressed against the glass of next, more perfect worlds. While he was writing this book, he was completing a new Japanese translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the evenings, and you might find traces of Holden Caulfield in the character of Kafka Tamura, in his mistrust of adult lies about life, in his tender consciousness.

One way out of his particular oedipal maze is through an impenetrable forest - complete with missing Japanese Second World War soldiers - to places where young lovers stay young forever, with all the wonder and fright of that prospect. It would not be Murakami, however, if there were not plenty of alternative exit strategies, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/02/fiction.harukimurakami

Never let me go, with a critical eye

here is a selection of reviews by Britain's most critical minds.

I am just really shoked by Never let me go, and though I haven't finished it yet (actually I cannot decide whether I want to be over it, and want to find out what's gonna happen to Kathy ASAP, or I don't want to know the proceedings, and I want to be outraged and shocked and deeply concerned about Kathy and Tommy and Ruth.)

(those of you who don't speak Hungarian need to put up with this, as my precious thoughts on the topic were written a few hours ago in this unfathomable finnougrish language.)

So here is what those clever white-haired guys wrote, some excerpts only, as I am not a sportspoil.

"So what is Never Let Me Go really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan.

By the final, grotesque revelation of what really lies ahead for Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, readers may find themselves full of an energy they don't understand and aren't quite sure how to deploy. Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters."

M John Harrison
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/bookerprize2005.bookerprize

there's a film, now in post production, based on the novel, directed by Mark Romanek, with Keira Knightley playing Ruth. Thought she would be Kathy - she always plays these nice and decent and sophisticated girls the viewer easily identifies with. Carey Mulligan plays Kathy. She was Kitty in Pride and Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright), yet another Keira Knightley film that I really like. And she is younger than me! fk! What a wasted damn life I am having!