wow
that is a fluke

I love auster
almost as much as Murakami
and then almost as much as Hemmingway

zen prose rocks

Did you know that Murakami translated Raymond Carver for a Japanese audience? The pacing and tone of Murakami's books owes much to Carver. He also translated Raymond Chandler...and that's where you get the detective tropes in his books.

i did hear that. Seemed likea good fit.

Auster translates a lot of English to French... or did before he got rich.... I'm not sure if the line is as straight as you suggest between influence and creation... I mean a lot of japanese fiction has the terse prose style (derived from Haiku.. Kawabata is a great example and hell he won the nobel prize) and everyone loves detective tropes (look at Auster for instance)... that said, it would make an interesting essay for a literary mag, or whatever.

Maybe you're right. I guess for me it's the modern setting. Carver sets his stories in American suburbs and lets the strangeness arise out of the mundane. This compared with
Murakami's obvious love for things American (I just started reading his new book which opens with a scene set in a Japanese Denny's), and how he develops a strange and mystical world out of something as mundane as cooking a pot of spaghetti. Carver never gets as flat-out weird as Murakami, but he does create what I see as a kind of shimmering next-world, one or two beats out of phase with the one we know, like a double exposure (remember those?).

remember? They're my bread and butter.

Murakami rocks hard

really its just him and Auster who are alive that I bother to read dilligently

I mean Carver was very important to me.... don't get me wrong....

fun talk

What about DeLillo? I think he had some recent clinkers (I actively disliked The Body Artist for example), but White Noise is a stunner. Looking forward to reading his new one. He sometimes gets a little abstract and intellectual as opposed to the emotional core of someone like Murakami...but even when he's bad he has some good nuggets to chew on.

yeah... i'm with you. Whit Noise rocks and everything else is good and all, but blah blah blah.

Give me Hemmingway, or give me bloody murder.

best comment ever.

Gary Snyder is the best voice in the world (after orson welles and a few poets.

I've heard the sentiment as: "be careful what you pretend to be as you will become that invention." (SIC)