Book Review In the Miso Soup - Ryu Murakami The back cover says it reads like the script notes for American Psycho - the Holiday Abroad, which is an odd and promising thing to say about a novel. I read the novel American Psycho in high school, and more-or-less hated it. But the movie is great, so if this novel is like the script of the movie, I might actually like it.
Aside from actually being good, the main difference between American Psycho the novel and in the Miso Soup is the fact that the POV character is not the psycho, he’s an everyman. Psychos are people who lack empathy, but mere lacks are only interesting when framed by presences. Almost every wall in the world does not contain Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St. Lawrence, but this adds no particular richness to them. It’s only the blank wall in the Oratory of San Lorenzo that gains any poignancy from its absence.
In the same way, American Psycho is a book of mostly nothing. And yes, I know, a book of nothing for a society of nothing, but you could have saved on ink while making the same point. And if American Psycho was good, that would be more impressive than if in the Miso soup was good, in the same sense that playing a halfway decent guitar solo with only one hand would be very impressive. But there’s also the point that Ellis chose to do the thing more likely to make the worse product, so maybe the unimpressive taste this evidences cancels out the relatively impressive skill in the execution.
It’s a gory book. Which is unpleasant. I went to a Buddhist retreat in the middle of reading this, just before the scene in the pub at the end of part 2. One of the nuns talked to us about exercising mindfulness as a gate to decide what to take in to our body and mind. This was an unwholesome thing to take into my mind. I wonder if there was any reason to do that. That scene put me off my food.
Bar graph with 10 page intervals or no, really stupid data analysis of where they left dog ears. They were reading it for ideas I guess.
Frank reminds me of the judge from blood Meridian. I think they are both boring and I don’t understand them. I don’t know if that’s honest.
Like weil says, force or violence makes things out of people, so it’s not very interesting. Descriptions of overwhelming violence are ultimately descriptions of how the violence feels about the scenery.