1Q84

Two moons, the one paper-like, a cheap lantern, lit from behind and green with dust. Together the moons are a signpost of an alternate reality that the protagonist of Haruki Murakami's novel calls 1Q84. Get it? I'm not sure I do, but it is best to embrace your weaknesses when reading anything written by the master of relativity, Murakami.

I am back, dear reader, albeit not in one piece and not without a few scars. One is a pretty star shape and positioned like a gangster tat. There is only one moon here, but it is anaemic-pink with pollution and on sale.

So it is fitting that 1Q84 is my first review in a few months. It is the codex to my present. It is my white rabbit. It is a post-modern Ulysses sitting next to said tome on my bedside table. It is 1000-and-something pages light, and I read the first 100 pages three times and each time it was a different novel.

The novel is actually a trilogy, but what isn't in the aftermath of Peter Jackson's assault on Mordor? It was first published in three parts in Japanese in 2009 before being translated and published in English in 2011. Since then Murakami has written one more novel: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which is news to me too.

My books travel with me. I never know when I may find an opportunity - and an almost physical need - to read, from doctors' waiting rooms to coffee breaks to shop queues. I have been (interrupted and) asked to describe this book many many times in many many contexts and each time I flapped my cheeks a few times before sighing, hoping this would suffice. When it didn't, I squinted at the back cover:

The year is 1Q84.

This is the real world,
there is no doubt about that.

But, in this world, there are
two moons in the sky.

In this world, the fates of two people
Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined.
They are each, in their own way,
doing something dangerous.
And in this world, there seems
no way to save them both.

Something extraordinary is starting.

"So," I would start. "This 1321-page book is set in an alternate universe, where everything is the same as ours except that there are two moons." I would look up from the blurb then, hoping this would have answered the question. "Um, ok. The story is told from the perspectives of two characters: an assassin-cum-gym-instructor and a writer-cum-maths-teacher. They are separately part of a conspiracy that is loosely bound to a cult that believes in faeries. The Old World kind of faerie. The nasty kind.

"I haven't finished reading it, yet," I would apologise. Still, my audience would stare.

Stop staring.

This standoff reminds me of a mistake I made once of asking an elderly sculptor what one of his pieces 'meant' - I was chewed out in Italian before being given the cold shoulder for the afternoon. Yes, meaning is relative - but meaning is also democratic, sir, and you are responsible for mowing the grass along your stretch of road whether you vote or not. Or something.

I imagine Murakami chewing me out for turning to the blurb for meaning.

In a previous novel, Kafka on the Shore, loose ends flip around like live electrical wires in the street after a violent storm. (The same street whose sidewalks you mow.) In 1Q84, the street is not only triple the length, with triple the number of sparking wires, but it also inhabits all 26 possible dimensions and then some. In other words, the novel is too long to safely sustain relativity.

The problem with the author scrapping his name from the voting ballot and setting fire to all evidence that he was ever there is that, the longer the novel, the more frayed plot points spark in the street and many of these streets are cul de sacs, each with kaleidoscopes of authors hightailing it in all sorts of directions, possibly dimensions, and while I don't mind singing for my supper, I would prefer it if we could stick to one metaphor. Right?

1321 pages is too long for the author to leave me to my own devices.

As if to punctuate this, my pet bunny ate the last 6 pages of the novel before I could finish reading. So, technically, I have not finished the novel. But neither do I have the urge to acquire those 6 pages and read them (imagine me curled up behind a bookshop bookshelf, listening for the footsteps of a bookseller who will politely ask me to buy the book if I want to know how it ends - they don't believe the story about Munroe the paper-munching rabbit).

This review is like one of those puzzles where you have to count how many shapes you see and you are supposed to count shapes in the shapes and shapes made of shapes and the shapes these shapes make. There are multiple blurbs in this post and not all of them belong to the same union. I was going to count them out for you and then I thought, nah, you could do with some exercise after your six-month break from my meanderings.

'Et vu' and other translations

Sooner than expected and probably more meandering than I intend, here is my post (not the first, I see, because there is a label in my selection of labels labelled 'translations') on, yes, translations. Translations of books, to clarify, for the semantically minded. Bear in mind that I only have a first language (yes, smarty-pants, English); a smattering of a second language and a smatter of a third language, Zulu. To further convince you of my qualifications, I studied linguistics, briefly. Although I have no interest in learning languages, I am interested the idea of language, like any good graduate with a useless degree.

First, let me explore my credentials. English is my home language. My mother grew up in Durban, which was a British port - before war upon war of someone against an other, which is how rational people and not playground bullies solve their problems - and her mother was some degree of Jane-Eyre Victorian. So, like all good mothers, she insisted we say 'hair' as in 'air' with a silent 'h' and 'r', instead of 'ghe'. A 'kid' was a goat not a child, 'mom' just sounded bad and 'ja' (Afrikaans for 'yes') was not English.

I am an editor with a degree in English (and the slightly less meaningless Media Studies). I have read Chaucer and understood it, have a firm stance on Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe's review (Conrad is always wrong, always) and adore AS Byatt. So, instead of taking time to learn other languages, I have explored the redundantly spelled and bastard language that is English. And, to add another 'so' to this conversation, my knowledge of translations is limited to the, well, translations.

Taal Monument, which is dedicated to the 11 South African languages

My second language (and I use the term so loosely that we should insert spaces between the letters) is Afrikaans. We started studying Afrikaans in Grade 2 and followed it (albeit loosely) to Grade 12. The teachers declared there was no hope for us - one of them ran out crying, but that had more to do with a difference in political opinion (FYI, Mrs Botha, I was on your side: I would divorce myself from my parents if they were top-level management of a mining company. Any level really).

By the end of matric, I could write complex sentences (by which I mean with conjunctions) in very boring paragraphs and when I spoke no one could understand anything beneath my English accent (FYI, if you care, my sister and I bizarrely have British-sounding accents, and I am often asked where I come from). I started waitressing the day after my last exam in an Afrikaans-populated area and then moved up in the world to bookseller.

When people spoke Afrikaans to me, I shook my head but only because I needed to adjust my language setting. Occasionally, I tried to speak to them in Afrikaans, but it took me two minutes to sound out a sentence, with the customer helping. Usually I asked and then pleaded with them to speak Afrikaans because despite my muteness, I understand Afrikaans. The same has been true of friends who say they need to practise English, or some such tripe.

Let me interrupt myself to explain that my dialect of English has an even more dodgy heritage because it has pilfered words and phrases from local languages. There's 'ja' for 'yes', 'skelm' for someone between a 'petty criminal' to 'naughty person (even child)' and you can add '-tjie' to the end of pretty much any noun to create the diminutive. Personally, I pilfered 'dankie tog', which does not actually mean anything, 'jok' instead of 'grap' to mean 'joke.' This is a joke that is only funny in my head, but I think my Afrikaans friends feel sorry for me and do not correct me.

Then there's Zulu. We started studying it as a third language in Grade 8 and could choose to study it from Grade 10. Our teacher was a very enthusiastic white woman whose husband was rich which is why she could afford a BMW while teaching. There are different dialects of Zulu (and in fact it and another language are pretty much the same Nguni language, but the colonialists conquered by setting groups against each other and general bloodshed - but this could get me assassinated, so moving on) and I think we learnt the wrong one because no one understands me.

Zulu is interesting. Most of the languages I have been exposed to (I can also say 'et vu' which is French for 'and you') are European. They developed alongside, over, below and within English, so the sentence forms are similar, even when they are mixed around. English is noun and then verb, for example. The parts of speech are often distinct words with distinct functions. In Zulu, a single word can be sentence. 'Ngiyabona' means I (ngi), ya (you) and bonga (thank). 'Siyabonga' is we thank you.

But - and here is when it sets fire to the linguistic part of your brain - the tense of the sentence is continuous present: I am thanking you. This explains why Nguni-language speakers often use this tense seemingly at random. I, however, do not, because that is as far as my knowledge of the language extends. No, that's not true, I can say 'water', 'it is hot/cold', 'hello' and 'boy'. I also know that 'ama-' indicates the plural. Other than that, our Zulu dictionary was a mostly useless waste of 128 pages with a pastel green cover. I hope the publishers have addressed that, what with Zulu and Xhosa being the most widely spoken languages in South Africa.

It looks like I am running out of time, so I will introduce The Point for the next post now. You express your thoughts in language and so your language reflects some of your cognitive structures, and vice versa. I have a case study here: me. We use 'he' as a general pronoun, right? There is no more meaning than this? Even though when I say 'doctor', you assume he is a he and then are surprised he is a she but you think 'you go, girl' or something equally patronising, and applaud her for, you know, studying.

A while ago, I consciously adopted 'she' as my general pronoun. I am a woman, after all, why should my go-to word not be female? I slipped, often, at first, so my endeavour looked like just that: a liberal attempt at who-cares. After a while, though, it became natural. The other day I caught myself assuming a doctor was a woman and being surprised when he wasn't. And if you don't think that reflects the way you think: when I assume a person or animal is a 'she', people ask me how I know or why. When I explain, they widen their eyes, nod slowly and turn around as I were sprouting green air on my cheek. If they are honest they say 'Do you really believe that?' and then turn away.

Not all of this is the next Point, so you can let out the breath you are holding. I withhold my rants for when you're not expecting them, because then I can remind you that I am the sheriff here. At the least, I am holding the keys. I am not sure what relationship this mishmash of languages has with my brain, except in reflecting it is a mishmash. I suppose you also know that I am not a polyglot, because I would rather study sentence trees than learn how to say something that I can already say in English.

For those of you who enjoyed the hiking trail of my brain, perhaps you want some closure. But if you are looking for the cognitive implications of the tense in Zulu, what do you think I am, a savant?