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Fuck. I have to retract two stars and my rave review. I mean, clearly it was a rave. I'd say this book loses the plot about half way through, but to be fair, there isn't really a plot. Once the book leaves Japan and finds its home in Basque land, it rapidly becomes close to unbearable. I am afraid that whilst I savoured the first half, the second I ended up just skimming. I have way too many good books on the shelf to be spending precious time on this one.
I am leaving my half-cocked first discussion of this as it, testimony to my idiocy. It follows.
I’m only half way through, but my opinion will not change. This is a clear-as-day 5-star book and that’s from a fussy star attributor.
After having to read – or start, at least – popular best sellers of late which are so badly written: Harry P., the third volume (and the others?) of Northern Lights, the Dragon Tattoo trilogy – it is a vast relief to be reminded that a book can be both finely written and unputdownable fun, thrilling and thoughtful. It can even be propagandist, if it is done the right way.
Now that I think of it, is this a pattern: HP, NL, DT are all volumes produced ad infinitum. Shibumi could easily be like that, dragged out for ever, but instead it is one, standalone book. And boy, does it stand alone. Class of its own.
This, quoted from Trevanian’s own site:
Does this mean that HP, NL and DT had to be badly written? That although Shibumi was a best seller in its day, late seventies, now it would not survive, it is too intelligent and well written? The point is not that they are reading blockbusters, but that once upon a time these blockbusters were well crafted things, at least if this book is any guide. In fact, Shibumi has been an eye-opener for me. I have been sticking up for some of these books lately when clearly I should not have been. But if Manny is correct in suggesting, as Trevanian is also observing, that English is going through a period of simplification and that this is the consequence, badly written tripe being lapped up by the reading public, what a tragedy. I can’t imagine a world in which we have lost the capacity to say interesting things, because we have had the linguistic skills necessary to do so taken away by generations of illiterate facebookers and smsers.
I expect there will be more to come here after I have finished the book, but for now, I thought it was interesting to read what the author had to say later about his opinion on Israel and its neighbours:
I wonder when this was written, it shows an unlikely trust in the United Nations, which in my opinion, is shamefully bereft of moral purpose.
Oh, and this: I must take issue with all my friends who have reviewed this. It is not just a fun book, or a thriller. It is a very strongly felt position about how we are living and how we should live. This book manages to hammer and hammer and hammer this message home, whilst making you feel like you are 'just reading a best seller'. That he has managed to write something so entirely enjoyable whilst doing this is such a feat, I am completely in awe of it.
I am leaving my half-cocked first discussion of this as it, testimony to my idiocy. It follows.
I’m only half way through, but my opinion will not change. This is a clear-as-day 5-star book and that’s from a fussy star attributor.
After having to read – or start, at least – popular best sellers of late which are so badly written: Harry P., the third volume (and the others?) of Northern Lights, the Dragon Tattoo trilogy – it is a vast relief to be reminded that a book can be both finely written and unputdownable fun, thrilling and thoughtful. It can even be propagandist, if it is done the right way.
Now that I think of it, is this a pattern: HP, NL, DT are all volumes produced ad infinitum. Shibumi could easily be like that, dragged out for ever, but instead it is one, standalone book. And boy, does it stand alone. Class of its own.
This, quoted from Trevanian’s own site:
Q: Americans are reading lots of books, but at least anecdotally it appears they are reading blockbusters and that smaller, literary titles are being pushed to the margins. Do you see a similar trend in Europe, and what impact will this have?
A: Alas, yes, it’s coming to Europe as well and it’s a great pity. A lot of excellent new writers will never get read. This is hardest on the story-tellers of America, because writers of attractively-packaged fact and history are still doing fairly well, although even these readerships are dwindling, captured by the internet and by the electronic games that consume so much of the time of the kinds of kids who used to read history and science.
The shadow of ‘literary globalization’ is falling across all of western Europe, and will hit the English-writing countries first, as English is the language of commerce, and therefore it’s the foreign language of preference for the teeming populations whose five hundred word vocabularies limit them to language on a comic book level. Hence Barbara Cartland is still the most popular English language writer in India. And I’ve heard there is a similar dumbing-down impulse at home, where a series of children’s books by a very canny English writer is the most popular read on American campuses.
Does this mean that HP, NL and DT had to be badly written? That although Shibumi was a best seller in its day, late seventies, now it would not survive, it is too intelligent and well written? The point is not that they are reading blockbusters, but that once upon a time these blockbusters were well crafted things, at least if this book is any guide. In fact, Shibumi has been an eye-opener for me. I have been sticking up for some of these books lately when clearly I should not have been. But if Manny is correct in suggesting, as Trevanian is also observing, that English is going through a period of simplification and that this is the consequence, badly written tripe being lapped up by the reading public, what a tragedy. I can’t imagine a world in which we have lost the capacity to say interesting things, because we have had the linguistic skills necessary to do so taken away by generations of illiterate facebookers and smsers.
I expect there will be more to come here after I have finished the book, but for now, I thought it was interesting to read what the author had to say later about his opinion on Israel and its neighbours:
Q:Since I first read Shibumi and then reread it twenty years later, my opinion of the Israeli-Palestinian situation has changed entirely, as a result of becoming much better informed...Has your opinion in this regard at all changed since Shibumi has been published?
A:I hope there are many Americans who can remain flexible through the fog of prejudice and fear about this issue.
Things have changed almost entirely in Israel/Palestine over the nearly thirty years since I wrote Shibumi: the underdogs have become the bullies, and intractable fundamentalists call the shots in Israel; what in Shibumi we called the Mother Company (the Petro-chemical Mafia) have inserted their creature into the White House; and the greatest potential for ecological disaster is no longer man's lazy thirst for oil, but rather his soaring over-population.
Nicholas Hel would not have lent his support to the current leaders of Israel. He would have wished the current rational leaders of Palestine all good fortune in negotiating towards peace with justice, now that Arafat is no longer in the way. (Footnote: Arafat's end has all the marks of an inside job, almost surely with the assistance of the second bureau. Israel, of course, knew what was going on, and it's likely that they informed the United States, but that's not sure. It's hard to put limits on the incompetence of American intelligence services. Each time we find a lower value, they prove they can fail even that; so Israel might not have informed us early enough for us to get our clumsy hands into things and mess them up.)
What should America do now? Using such tatters of even-handedness as we still possess, we should guide (drag, if necessary) the Israelis into as fair and honest a sharing of land and water as is possible. Then we must open our hands and carefully step back, out of Middle East affairs, turning them over to the United Nations.
I wonder when this was written, it shows an unlikely trust in the United Nations, which in my opinion, is shamefully bereft of moral purpose.
Oh, and this: I must take issue with all my friends who have reviewed this. It is not just a fun book, or a thriller. It is a very strongly felt position about how we are living and how we should live. This book manages to hammer and hammer and hammer this message home, whilst making you feel like you are 'just reading a best seller'. That he has managed to write something so entirely enjoyable whilst doing this is such a feat, I am completely in awe of it.
