Week One of Sound of the Mountain

Week one of Sound of the Mountain has gone by, we are now in week two.

I've heard from a couple of folks who ordered the book on Amazon. I found my copy in a Half Price Books in Austin, and read it in one sitting one of the days I was ill from Allergies.

I really enjoyed the book, and plan on doing a second reading of it before we meet, to look more closely at things like use of allegory and symbolism. It is very clearly not a western novel.

One thing to look for is the use of flowers and trees as symbols of subjective activities throughout the book. I felt I saw a lot of that during my first read-through, and wanted to go back and see if there may be a deeper meaning there.  I remember once reading a story about Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, where a comment was made about the rapid regrowth of flowers and such.  I'll see if I can find a reference for that.  I don't have much experience with Japanese literature, but I'm thinking as a literary device, juxtaposing internal mental activities (thoughts, feelings, compulsions) with elements of nature serves as a means of making objective observations about inherently subjective processes.  In western literature I think we see more descriptions of subjective processes through bodily activities (blushing, trembling hands, the "fire in her eyes", that kind of thing).

I note another book club selected Sound of the Mountain in April as well, the Thursday Night Book Club, hosted by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Interestingly, they selected Vonnegut's Bluebeard for May.

This novel was written between 1949 and 1954, in the aftermath of World War II.  It was first translated to English in 1970.  Kawabata died, apparently at his own hand, in 1972.  He was the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1968.

Hopefully everyone else will enjoy the novel as much as I did.

Slaughterhouse Five Discussion

I've been bad.

I was supposed to post about our visit on Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five last weekend, and update the current selection. Ah well.

Hopefully everyone can forgive me!

 Those in attendance last Thursday include:

Dave & Mary
Jack and Shelia
Darryl and Barbara
Alice
Jeremy

 Most of us had finished the book. In general it seemed Slaughterhouse Five met with some approval and some disapproval, more or less on gender lines. The men seemed to like it, and the women seemed to prefer not to read such things again.

One of the big complaints expressed was the way it jumped around, in short episodes that were not linearly related in time. On the other hand, some of us found that to be an interesting artistic technique, especially given the alien's ability to see all of time, compared to the human ability to only see the moment.

One of the unresolved topics from our discussion was whether Billy, the main character, suffered delusions from a brain injury, and simply imagined the aliens and jumping around in time, or whether that was all "real".

We touched on the meaning of "so it goes" and the "po-tee-tweet". I think we agreed the repeated use of "so it goes" was intended to be annoying or at least attention-getting, perhaps to overcome a general desensitization to death on the part of Vonnegut's readers. po-tee-tweet we thought might indicate nature's general indifference to the activities of man, e.g. after the Dresden bombing, nature represented by the birds kept on, essentially unaffected, while men sought for purpose or meaning from the bombing.

We then selected our next work, "Sound of the Mountain" by Yasunari Kawabata.

I look forward to our next meeting!