Holiday Reading....

Despite all the diving, I managed to read a couple of good books on holiday. The first, Grotesque by the excellent Natsuo Kirino is billed as a
crime novel, which in my opinion is complete crap (in the same way that War and Peace is an action novel). It starts with the narrator's younger sister, a prostitute being killed, followed a year later by a classmate, who had a highly respectable day job. The book flits between the narrator's opinions, diaries of both murdered women and court testimony of the accused murderer. The author manages to go into the lives of these people, hinting at their motivations and at the same time keep the story going. It works especially well as you slowly become aware of the bias of each story, especially the narrator's.

I also loved her earlier book 'Out'. Definitely an author I'm going to keep following.


My other Japanese author was Hitomi Kanehara. I read both Snakes and Earrings, her first, highly acclaimed (in Japan) novel. Similar to Ryu Murakami, it is a dive into counter culture of Japan. In this case piercing, body modification and tattooing. Unlike Murakami, the book could easily be set in London or New York. This and here second book Autofiction both deal with obsession (to the point of madness). I liked both books especially Autofiction, which steps back through a writer's life explaining, through events, how she came to be a very very clingy paranoid girlfriend. Both books I'm glad I read.