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Originally Posted by Farren
China Miéville's incredible Perdido Street Station demonstrated that it is possible to write fantasy that is entirely a work of imagination rather than stringing together bits and pieces of stuff that's as common as muck and equally as boring.
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Well, eh, kinda yes and kinda no. Mieville used very obscure referencing in his stuff- garudas, grindylow, Lovecraftian monsters etc etc. which a lot of people wouldn't know, and so it would
seem more original (a little like JKR using her knowledge of Old-English and such when picking character names). Which is original and good in itself. But a lot of the stuff in his works are very original re-workings on the subjects he nicked. I completely fell in love with his Grindylow and The Weaver in PSS and the Scar, even though they were things I knew about/had read about a lot before. This was mostly because of his masterful description that gave me shivvers and tinglings all over my body.
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I think Murakami usually avoids falling into the pointless-descriptive-passages-masquerading-as-existentialism trap because his long detail laden digressions more often than not serve to create a mood that's necessary to the experience of his novels. For example, he devotes an inordinate amount of time in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle to describing the protagonist lying about in the sun with {can't remember her name} in excruciating detail, but it doesn't cross the line into fake angsty bullshit for me, simply because I think he does a good job evoking the experience of long hot pointless afternoons, of which I have wasted quite a few myself. I will admit, however, that I get sick and tired of Murakami's habit of detailing the particulars of the preparation and consumption of every meal his characters eat. Dude, I really don't need to know how many slices he's cutting his cucumbers into.
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See, this is what I mean by a fine line: I know both of these things you mention here are influences from the cultural structures he grew up in. The description or depiction of environments to create moods is a common characteristic of Japanese media, and so I can easily justify that. The food thing is also Japanese, but a more modern issue. Back in the old days, food was either ceremonial or unspoken of. You ate, but you didn't
talk about it, because it was part of the "defiling" of the body under Shinto beliefs. Post War food became a symbol of class, and so was equally unspoken of in case you offended someone. Then in the 80's all this changed. The "Guumei" (Gourmet) culture took off and suddenly food was good. This is where you get shows like Iron Chef from and such. A lot of modern Japanese literature does it because of this, because they don't have a literary history that has ever had any focus on food, they want to make up for lost time.
And yes, I do like Baudolino too.
One of the literary tropes I have a real love/hate relationship with is lists. Lists of things, places, objects, people etc. At the same time as I know lists are important and they can be interesting sometimes to read, other times they're just too fucking long and make my brain go *snore*, even if they are important. Borges stuff sometimes gets like this.
As for long paragraphs, I say, if they're done well, they can be excellent. As with long sentences. Let me give you one of my favourites:
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'By God brother it's like the eighties in here.'
'Sure it's a grey and airless wasteland of banality suffused with the impossibility of imagination or trye creativity and anyone trying to grow in this'll have a time getting out with a living heart and soul and those who claim to be the way-out-and-wacky ones are as drab as the rest thus lowering the threshold of individuality to somewhere below the knee and in an atmosphere like that is it a wonder the bastards who voted for death took a decade and a half to realise the fucking obvious and who were all the cunts who thought it was a fine old time and now won't even admit they were there and for those of us with the wit to see in all its horror what we were living through it was like being awake during bloody surgery and no wonder we were offing ourselves left right and centre and now it's all retrospective and no one's responsible and what a surprise and we're all wise now well let me tell you Sonny Jim apart from a but of music the only difference now is there's fuck-all money to be had anywhere and the song's all caring-and-sharing because after all people like to pretend they're in control of their withered lives and that they're poor and ineffectual by their own free will but I can feel the sterility of those times around the edges of my vision brother and it never goes away.'
'Exactly. Is that Eddie I hear?'
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Oh, how I do adore Steve Aylett. The first weird-fictionist I ever read. *dances*
Re: Pet Book Peeves
I made it last night in Photoshop. 
Linear Mode
