Stranger on Earth

Hemingway photographed in Milan in 1918 Before I post the other two parts of the 3-part essay on Ernest Hemingway and A Moveable Feast , I thought I would share this intriguing article taken from bbc.co.uk. The newly released letters by Hemingway further prove that my reading of him as a “sensitive macho” is accurate. 30 March 2012 Ernest Hemingway letters reveal upset over cat Newly released letters by writer Ernest Hemingway have shed light on his distress over the death of his cat. The celebrated author was forced to put down Uncle Willie after he suffered two broken legs in a road accident. "Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years," Hemingway wrote to a friend in the 1950s. The set of 15 letters will be displayed to the public at the JF Kennedy Library in the US. Hemingway's correspondence over several years was with Gianfranco Ivancich, a younger Italian man with whom he struck up a friendship in Veni...

HEMINGWAY The ring of that surname alone is enough to conjure up in most people’s minds a host of unflattering descriptions: “male chauvinist pig” (a favourite amongst his feminist readers), “vacuous cad with a drinking problem,” “bullfight enthusiast stricken with machismo,” “Indiana Jones fancying himself a writer.” The man himself might have been all of these things, but what he was not was an unthinking, unfeeling man. This becomes apparent if one approaches his classic works A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises without the above-mentioned preconceptions; but if one really wants to know the man behind the brilliance of For Whom the Bell Tolls , one must get to him through his posthumously published memoir. A Moveable Feast – the 2009 Restored Edition allows the reader to do just that. Though it should be regarded as “fiction,” as dictated by Hemingway himself, it does invite the willing reader into the rambunctious world of the man, and along the way, he is treated...

When a totalitarian regime or a theocracy imposes its narrow rules on the written word, dramatic things can happen to a people’s history. This point is touched upon early on – in Book 1, Chapter 20 – by Tengo when he is introducing Orwell’s 1984 to a clueless Fuka-Eri. He tells her how in the novel the regime is constantly rewriting history, distorting it to the extent where no-one can remember the actual past. He tells her that “robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves,” and labels the act a “crime.” “Our memory,” he says, “is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves” (257). Simply put, individuals who live under a totalitarian regime will always have to suppress their true selves – if they do not want to suffer punishment. W...

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

Inspiration, as most artists already know, is that rare glimmer that shines at the most random of moments. It is elusiveness personified, utterly indifferent to your summoning and pleading. “Writer’s block,” that is what we modern-day writers call it when it refuses to obey our wishes, leaving us high and dry while the clock is ticking away deep into the night. Classic poets John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke show us what needs to be done if one is to be inspired. In Keats’ celebrated “Ode to Psyche,” we find the speaker singing the praise of Psyche because she is the “latest born and fairest vision far/Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!” Psyche’s beauty is so astonishing that even Eros, sent by Aphrodite out of sheer jealousy to punish her, injured himself with his love arrow and fell head over heels for her. However, Keats says Psyche, despite her earth-shattering beauty, is without her worshippers: “though temple thou hast none/Nor altar heap'd with flowers/Nor virgin-cho...

A short entry about orthodoxy before I post the second part of the analytical essay on Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 next week.  While reading a short story entitled “Augustine de Villeblanche or Love’s Strategy” by the Marquis de Sade (not exactly a historical figure you would go to for moral rectitude), I came across the following fascinating passages on why human beings feel the need to judge, condemn, and censor others who hold different beliefs and values from them: The most foolish thing of all … is to blush about the penchants that Nature has given us. And to make fun of anyone, simply because his or her tastes are unusual, is just as barbaric as railing against someone who was born lame, or blind in one eye. But trying to convince fools of these reasonable concepts is like trying to halt the stars in their courses. People seem to take a kind of prideful pleasure in mocking “defects” that they themselves do not possess, and they apparently derive such enjoyment – e...

Long before the 1000-page 1Q84 draws to a close with the saccharine reunion of its two main protagonists, Tengo and Aomame, Murakami broaches the subject of religious orthodoxy and its effects on Literature – respectively represented by Sakigake (a secretive religious organisation legally sanctioned by the Japanese government) and the ghost-written fantasy novella Air Chrysalis . Although the premise of this subject was never fully explored (perhaps it was never Murakami’s intention), due to the novel’s shift to Tengo and Aomame’s love story in Book 3, enough of it inhabits the unconventional world of 1Q84 to warrant an in-depth discussion. Sakigake is an exclusive religious community (not at all unlike Aum, the sect that launched the Tokyo gas attacks in 1995, which Murakami had extensively dealt with in the probing Underground ) that thrives on secrecy and the vague, mystical promise of salvation. We catch a glimpse of its interior through the descriptions of several charac...

Insanity is never too far away when the modern man discovers to his shock and horror that the forces of the universe are never on his side. He may attempt to reconcile himself to this harrowing fact, but with every botched attempt he loses a piece of his sanity, up until that point of absolute inevitability where things must fall apart because the centre cannot hold. The French Nobel Prize winner of 2008, J.M.G. Le Clézio, shows us exactly how insanity and the failure of communication go hand in hand in the impressionistic The Interrogation ( Les Procès-Verbal, 1963). Following in the footsteps of the other French giants, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Le Clézio created a resonant piece about a man, aptly named Adam, who has lost his sanity and attempts to re-interpret the world on his own terms. Adam's world view is fragmented and irrational (to everyone but him); it is one that is predominated by destruction and death, by godlessness. He envisions a world where people l...