skygiants

I've been pondering the question of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle since I finished it almost two weeks ago, and I still can't decide whether I actually liked it or not. The plot is pretty simple: a guy quits his job and takes some time off to think about his place in the universe. His cat goes missing. Then his wife goes missing. Various strange women appear and make bizarre statements at him, and occasionally and mysteriously give him large sums of money, so he decides to go sit at the bottom of a well every day so that he will have the psychic power to break into an imaginary hotel and destroy his evil politician brother-in-law. Also, he gets a magic bruise on his face that heals people. The main character takes this all pretty much in stride, since he hasn't really got anything better to do with his life.

. . . it doesn't actually make all that much more sense in the book. The thing is, I think I might like the way the whole Utterly Ordinary Everyman/Utterly Bizarre Events contrast is set up. But maybe the events are way too bizarre and there's not enough of a point and the character doesn't actually develop, so maybe I didn't like it. But then again maybe there's a subversive thing going on with the nature of victimhood and rescue and what happens in the end with the guy's wife, and maybe I do like that. I don't know!

So . . . that was probably a really helpful book write-up for you guys. Um. However, while I'm here, I'm going to take the opportunity to lunge into a sort-of ibarw post. I have been trying, at least - with only limited success, but it's a step - to mix up my reading list so it's not All White Authors, All The Time. I am not officially doing 50books_poc, although it's a great community, because I know how easy it would be for me to read fifty in a rush and then figure I'd done my job and stop. Instead, I'm trying to change my reading habits. It's not easy - right now my ratio is still, like, 1/10, which is not really good enough (for me, and my own standards for myself right now; I am not telling anyone else what they should do!) but it's better than it was, so I count that as a start.

However, one thing I have noticed, while trying to put this into practice: I really dislike the genre categorization of books in most mainstream bookstores. I mean, I have issues with division by genre in general (shati can attest to hearing me walking around the Strand crying 'but - but that doesn't belong there! What! WHAT!') but the issue I have right now is with the creation of 'African-American' as a genre. First of all, this means that it excludes people like Zora Neale Hurston from the 'literature' category, which is a big enough WTF to begin with, I think. And how many of us who are not the target audience ever spend time in that area of a bookstore? I know, before I started thinking about it, that I absolutely never did. On a more meta level, though, while I understand the logic of having a sci-fi/fantasy section, a mystery section, a romance section for people who just want to read within a specific genre - and I certainly make use of the sff section often enough - having 'black author/black protagonist' divided from all the other books feels very, very strange to me. (Also, while we are at it, where is the Asian-American section, or the Latino/Chicano/Hispanic section, or the Indian-American section? It's just so bizarre!!) And while sci-fi, or romance, or mystery books often are allowed to rise out of their genre ghetto if they are deemed 'literary' enough by whoever makes decisions about TPBs versus mass-market paperbacks and marketing in bookstores and such things, all you have to do is go back to Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and all the authors who hang out in the African-American section to show that that's not the case here.

Now, all that being said, there is one really good reason to have an African-American section, which is so that people who are starved for representations of themselves in books know where to go to find books that are likely to have strong and positive characters. And maybe that's enough to outweigh the other issues. Once again, I have to end on an 'I don't know' - but I do think that division makes it easier for people to ignore and avoid black authors, just by not browsing in one little section of the store.