Stranger on Earth

The psychological and intellectual preoccupations of the modern man have never been more confounding since the arrival of Kierkegaardian Existentialism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, there is the global village which brings all of us together but ensures that our differences keep us apart; there is the Internet that has transformed the world into a giant family, making us believe in the idealism of “six degrees of separation,” and yet we can feel desolate among 7 billion people and hunger for intimacy; there is the freedom of being an individual, of making your decisions based on your wants and needs, but you cannot seem to work out what it is you want or need. Modern living is mined with these frustrating challenges. The purpose of this piece is to look briefly at four landmark literary works – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , Franz Kafka’s The Trial , J.M.G. Le Clézio’s The Interrogation , Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood  – and convince the reader tha...

The 84 th Academy Awards ceremony saw the triumph of two motion pictures, The Artist  and Midnight in Paris , which have the power to transport the viewer to a (seemingly) innocent, less distracting time. Both films celebrate the golden twenties, reminding us that there was in fact a time period when men and women of a certain class were meticulously dressed, and speech was a carefully cultivated art form. The modern audience connects with this, as is evident from the accolades both films have been receiving. It may very well be possible that inside every one of us (above the age of thirty or thirty-five), there beats a heart that secretly longs for the irretrievable past which turns a little rosier with every passing year. Nostalgia keeps our imagination alive and makes present-day reality bearable. The Artist is an unabashed homage to the short-lived silent movie era, whose luminaries included names such as Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster ...

It may be superfluous to stipulate that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut This Side of Paradise (1920) is still remarkably relevant to our times, but a valid idea bears repeating, and those who have enjoyed and witnessed Fitzgerald’s literary finesse in this challenging first work would most certainly not mind being reminded of exactly why this novel, published almost a century ago now, still reflects our youths today. This Side of Paradise (a phrase derived from Rupert Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti”) concerns Amory Blaine, a Princetonian convinced of his own intellectual brilliance (“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory…” [19]), but never quite finding his niche, stumbling from one love affair to another, perennially wondering what life has in store for an exceptional mind like his. During the course of the novel, he removes himself from the highly regulated world of his mother’s, seeks knowledge in literary classics, makes fair-weather ...

Kafka Tamura’s odyssey is not complete until he has been to that one place he has been cautioned not to underestimate: the thick forest around the cabin. While in there, he encounters two World War II soldiers who have, since the war, kept themselves hidden from the world because of their pacifist beliefs. They show him the way to a village of sorts, and it is here that Kafka is reunited with the fifteen-year-old Miss Saeki. Kafka describes being with her is “to feel a pain, like a frozen knife in [his] chest,” but the irony is that he is “thankful for it” (456). Kafka has entered the forest to search for confirmation, and he has found it in the shape of the fifteen-year-old Miss Saeki, who promises she will be here if he needs her. She is eternally fifteen in this realm, and will be waiting for him whenever he needs her – a fact that has a profound impact on him. Before the forest episode resumes in Chapter 47, an interlude simply entitled “The Boy Named Crow” appears o...

Revisiting a book or a film is rarely seen as a virtue; in fact, the act has a ring of nerdiness to it. You must be thoroughly bored with yourself, or without a date, if re-watching The English Patient for the tenth time is your idea of spending a Friday evening. What is usually left unmentioned is that for some, re-watching a film or re-reading a book may amount to re-imagining a long-forgotten love affair. You recall that first blush. You re-submerge in the freshness of the thrill. You know beforehand where the plot leads and yet are surprised by its original turns. There is satisfaction to be had in familiarity. What is more important than familiarity is something that is a lot more personal. The act of revisiting a film or a book may also allow you to discover surprises that you, perhaps due to immaturity or some other limitation of the mind, had overlooked the first few times. To use the “love affair” analogy, you are in fact looking at an old flame from a different perspect...

While residing in the library, Kafka sees the “ghost” of a young Miss Saeki in his room one night, and falls madly in love with her. His descriptions of the phenomenon are full of hyperbolic contradictions: Her features are gorgeous, but it’s not only that. She’s so perfect I know she can’t be real. She’s like a person who stepped right out of a dream. The purity of her beauty gives me a feeling close to sadness – a very natural feeling, though one that only something extraordinary could induce (235). After witnessing the ghostly manifestation, Kafka says his head is “too full of that enigmatic girl,” and that “a strange, terrific force unlike anything [he’s] ever experienced is sprouting in [his] heart, taking root there, growing” (236). This is a clear sign that the image of Miss Saeki has already found a way into his young heart. A remarkable coincidence in the form of a popular song sung by Miss Saeki entitled Kafka on the Shore and a painting of a young man by the sea, ...

Once every few years, a motion picture would come along and show us the ugly truth of being human.  For 2011-2012, it is undoubtedly the challenging, NC-17-rated Shame by director Steve McQueen, a  psychological drama about sexual addiction that pulls no punches. The subject matter, needless to say, is unpalatable to the ordinary moviegoer; but if you are one constantly in search of thought-provoking materials and are unfazed by uncompromising directors such as David Lynch and Lars von Trier, then you will do well to give yourself over to Shame . Stigmatised from the start and labelled by the press as the “sex addiction movie,” Shame must overcome its unsavoury image before it can even begin to convince its audience that it contains within its sordidness a message so universal any man living in an urban jungle in the 21 st century could relate to. The good news is the film is elegant and captivating right from the opening shot (we get to see a naked Brandon – a ...

This is a comparative piece I wrote way back in 2008, when I had just arrived in Kuala Lumpur and seen Fincher's film. At the time I was also teaching Cummings, and it had instantly struck me that the film and the poem had a lot in common. Though I discovered later that the poem could have a different interpretation from the one I have given below, the comparison still stands. The full poem can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403 Tentative answer: More than half a century separates the publication of "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (1940) and the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), starring the incomparable Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The former is a maddeningly unorthodox poem that makes linguistic purists wince; the latter is a wildly imaginative portrait of a man whose life defies linearity. Neither the poem nor the film appeals to those who have been conditioned to think that life comes in easily ...

With Kafka on the Shore ( 海辺のカフカ , 2003), Murakami delivers what is arguably his most crowd-pleasing work. It has all the ingredients that make up a great thriller; it has a sympathetic teenage anti-hero who is at odds with the world; it has an engrossing parallel plot that never loses steam; it proffers more than enough head-scratching, eyebrow-raising mysteries any Murakami fan could wish for. To top it all off, it is also a deeply philosophical work that tackles complex subjects such as identity and Fate. The novel’s intriguing title naturally calls to mind the Czech writer Franz Kafka, author of The Trial and the short story Metamorphosis , immortal symbol of twentieth-century Existentialist angst. When the novel opens, it is instantly clear to the reader that Kafka, a boy who has just turned fifteen, is a troubled soul. He has an internal voice called “the boy named Crow” (“Kafka,” incidentally, means “crow” in Czech) that he converses with, and he quickly comes to the ...