Stranger on Earth

It took a few days for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to sink in. Seldom have I been so bewildered and enchanted by a film and not instantly grasped why it should have such an effect on me. I have seen several other Oscar-nominated films since, but the ingredients that make up The Master – the rolling blue waves, the obscene sand sculpture, the anguish in the eyes of Freddie Quell (an otherworldly Joaquin Phoenix), the madcap motorbike race through the desert, the probing psychological sessions with the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Amy Adams’ cryptic, mildly sinister character – have not lost their hypnotic effect one tiny bit. The film’s length and halting pace help. You are immersed in the tormented world of a war veteran who has long learnt to numb his pain with alcohol and drifts in and out of reality. When Quell comes under the tutelage of the Master, we are both relieved and worried for him. He may be out of the storm, but what tempest has he got himself ...

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuos.html   In the climax of the novel when Sachiko drowned Mariko’s kittens in a river, Etsuko tried to comfort the child on the riverbank. Mariko was reluctant to move to America with her mother and “Frank” (whom the reader never met). During her attempt to console Mariko, she utters the following puzzling words: “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173, italics mine). This may not sound out of the ordinary at first, but she goes on when Mariko looks at her “questioningly”: “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will” (173). Her language here indicates she has assumed Sachiko’s role, speaking and acting as the child’s mother. In the following chapter, Etsuko “confesses” to Niki that perhaps Keiko’s suicide by hanging was her fault: “But you see, Niki, I knew all...

Make no mistake about Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of uniquely restrained works such as The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . His Japanese background suggests we should see him in the same light as the other Japanese literary colossus: Haruki Murakami. But Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the UK when he was only five, is oceans away from Murakami. He does not deal with time warps, ghostly apparitions or talking cats. His fictional world is (on the surface) realistically rendered, populated by characters with emotions and motives that largely resemble our own. Ishiguro’s award-winning debut A Pale View of Hills (1982) introduces to us an author whose chief concern is the inner landscape – that twilight region of the human mind where shadows threaten to erase reality. The novel’s protagonist Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman residing in England, is having to cope with the aftermath of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide. Her English-born second daughter, Niki, is ...

Perhaps the biggest surprise to the 21 st century reader of Twilight of the Idols , assuming he has not read its predecessors, is its aggressive attack on ideas he holds dear and never thinks of challenging. Nietzsche never had an appreciation for liberal politics. This is expressed in clear and therefore philosophically atypical language in Section 38 “My Conception of Freedom.” Of liberal institutions, Nietzsche opines that they “cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions” (103). The reason why Nietzsche distrusts liberalism is consistent with his philosophy: liberal ideas “undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (103). Since liberalism preaches equality, harmony, and attempts to erase dissonance, it is seen by Nietzsche, who...