I finished Hari Kunzru’s Transmission Sunday night. I hadn’t originally planned to read this book, but I found myself out and about one day without my normal book, so I had to buy this in order that I would not find myself bookless for overlong. I didn’t have a lot of choice in what to buy; the only bookstore near my office is a Japanese bookseller, and while they have a lot of stock, it’s mostly not in English. I found one relatively small section of fiction written, in English, by Asian authors — it was mostly stuff like Amy Tan. This book looked kind of interesting though, and was about the right length, so I picked it up.
Did I make the right decision or what. This book is wonderful. It’s about alienation: specifically alienation in society, alienation from the Earth and alienation from oneself. It follows three main characters as they struggle with their own kinds of alienation, and how they all manage to reconnect with what they’d been missing through a single, nearly apocalyptic, act of transmission. I also really liked the structure of the book. The first 7/8 or so are labeled “signal” and tell a reasonably straightforward narrative ending in a more or less traditional climax. But then the last 1/8 of the book is called “noise” and documents the legends which have grown from the events we’ve just witnessed. The information we have form knowing the “truth” of those events also allows us to glean some interesting information from those legends, and to separate the fact from the fiction. It was a really fun book. I’m certainly going to pick up his other one.
So my stats now are:
1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342 pp)
5. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 2 – 1-20-08 (240 pp)
6. Hari Kunzru – Transmission – 1-27-08 (276 pp)
Totals:
Books: 5
Pages: 1605
Oh, and I almost forgot: the prose in this book is also great. Here’s a passage from near the beginning:
Anyone on foot in suburban California is on of four thing: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging. This person, whose thin frame was almost lost inside a grubby Oakland Raiders shirt, was moving too slowly to be a jogger. He appeared edgy, dispossessed. Defeat radiated from him like sweat. If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was as a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars.