I read this after the internet demanded that I do so. It was good, but as I posted a long time ago when I read Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes, I felt I missed out on a lot because a: I'm not a Japanese man and b: my hazy recollection of the 1980s skewered the narrative. I wouldn't say it was good, because it was meandering and time flowed strangely in the book and I was expecting a story without all the insane occult/mystical shit that happened when he was in the well. Hang on, it was good, but I can't say why. I read it all and didn't think it was a chore, but I did think that it would have been better had Mr. Murakami pared his shit down and didn't go so far afield in the writing. I don't know, I felt like Hemingway reading Stein, but no one's read that book and no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about.
This is the most recent book by Tao Lin and it is awesomely funny and depressing at the same time. He goes all out in showing how awful and boring and lonely and wonderful and shitty the lives of young adults are. I hate myself when I read him, but I also get him too. I want to rip out the internet's eyes and masturbate with them when I read him. I feel him infecting my brain with his deadpan delivery and shitty lives of his characters. I have the feeling that Tao is showing us his life in all its disgusting ennui and that this showing forces us to take our own shittiness into account. He shows us why using the internet is stupid, blogs are worthless, the self is a stupid and trite construct that crashes blindly on the breakwater of technology but only because these things are just as pointless as all the other shit that we have to do to grind through another day. Going to the store after your eight hour job is equivalent to spending hours on chat with a fat self mutilator that sometimes gives you head. If you don't want to constantly kill yourself, you're not paying hard enough attention.
The internet also raved about Siddhartha, but I didn't. It was well written and informative, but only if you're a total noob to ideas laid out by the Buddha. I did however like the idea of a protagonist who eschews everything in order to find shit out for himself, even though Siddhartha seemed like kind of a douche. Like I could have saved him a lot of time and searching just by punching him and telling him he's not special and nothing matters.
This was pretty awesome at excoriating of the soullessness of bureaucracy and the stupidity and also the humanity of the barely cognizant workers upon whom this nation is built. It's funny as fuck too. I've heard tell that Bukowski is considered this rampant misogynist, but that wasn't my impression. Also, suck on it.
Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.
The word terrible looks funny in a block like that. Next up, I should have finished James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Updike's rabbit, run, and Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and maybe some other awful that gets sandwiched in there.
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