2007-06-21 - 5:17 p.m.
ATTN: Rana Dasgupta - Please be my pen pal
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Tokyo Cancelled is one of the best books that I've read in a really long time. I don't know what to read next. Tokyo Cancelled was one of those books that are so good that, afterwards, reading is kind of ruined for a while because everything seems lackluster and stale by comparison.
Reading this book felt like I was reading a magical treat, planned and created specifically to delight myself. This book made my neck feel funny, like I'd taken T3s. Odder still, versions of sections of this book currently exist in a big empty oatmeal box in my closet, which is where I'll be keeping things that I've written until Shuhei and I get a computer. Tokyo Cancelled is, I've convinced myself, the book that I would have written - or at least started in earnest - by now if a certain kind and handsome man hadn't come along and bumped my need to learn Japanese up to urgent from that of merely sophistry.
I loved this book.
And, I'll admit it, even though I don't care to, Tokyo Cancelled is better than anything that I could hope to put together myself. Ever.
I've never been so jealous of a total stranger before in my life.
The story, and the stories within the story (damn you Rana, and damn my weakness for frame tales) aside, all of which were excellent, this book, as a book, exemplifies how I think a book ought to be.
Rana and his publisher included at the end of the book an interview and a (very) brief essay by Rana himself explaining exactly what he had hoped to accomplish by writing this book, and why he wrote it as he did. As a rule, I enjoy and appreciate it when writers do, write, and say things that discourage academic wankers from further academic wanking, and I therefore enjoyed and appreciated these inclusions immensely.
The essay articulated Rana's thoughts on the nature and/or invention of reality, which pleased me greatly. I like reading what imaginative yet reasonable (by which I may mean reasonable yet imaginative) people want to say about realities.
After the essay Rana compiled a list of things that had impressed and influenced him as he was writing the book. I thought that that was awesome.
I loved this book.
I'm so jealous that I didn't (and couldn't) write it first.
I'm even jealous of his name. A brief biography section taught me that Rana grew up in England and now lives in Delhi. Nationality-wise, I don't which Rana is, or considers himself to be... I can't wait until I can start making IDs declaring myself to be an official member of Team Numasawa and becoming more confusing in that way myself.
In his picture, Rana doesn't look as though he's trying to appear happy, nor creepy, nor eccentric. He simply isn't trying at all and, as a result, winds up looking an interesting combination of all three. Meanwhile, the picture itself cut off half his forehead while including an unnecessary proportion of his t-shirt, which kind of pushed my impression of him a little further towards the eccentric end of things. And this, I've decided, is how I'd like to see authors look. Banana Yoshimoto also offers some good examples of what I'm trying to desribe, while Carrie Bradshaw and Wei Hui (despite the fact that the former is ficticious) demonstrate perfectly what sort of pictures to put in your book if you don't want to be taken seriously by people like myself. Ever.
In conclusion, Rana Dasgupta possesses amazing gifts of imagination and good taste. Tokyo Cancelled was so good that I want to cry. And I wish that Rana was my pen pal.
And, in other news of books, Shuhei is currently reading Charlotte's Web, which prompts me to use a couple words that I haven't in a while... Swoon, swoon.
And in other news of things that make me want to cry, the birds who have taken to performing their absurdly squawky mating ritual in the field directly outside our apartment beginning at the crack of dawn everyday this week are going to feel the wrath of my rockpile* pretty soon if they don't calm down.
*Rockpile being, literally, the rocks that I piled up while clearing space for my garden, and not a fancy wrestling move. Although, at this point of sleepiness and frustration, I'm not ruling that out either.
