JETAA NY Book Club Reborn!
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Note: While the JETAA NY Book Club is aimed at NYers, non-NYers are encouraged to read and get in touch as well, as there’s potential for virtual participation.
Dear JETAA Book Clubbers,
Hajimemashite! This is Jessica Langbein, co-organizer of JETAANY’s new book club, along with Michael Glazer. Apologies for being out of touch for so long. It’s been a busy fall so far.
I’m very excited to announce the first meeting of our book club. To kick off the fun, we will be reading Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue.
Here’s a blurb:
“Almost Transparent Blue is a brutal tale of lost youth in a Japanese port town close to an American military base. Murakami’s image-intensive narrative paints a portrait of a group of friends locked in a destructive cycle of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The novel is all but plotless, but the raw and often violent prose takes us on a rollercoaster ride through reality and hallucination, highs and lows, in which the characters and their experiences come vividly to life. Trapped in passivity, they gain neither passion nor pleasure from their adventures. Yet out of the alienation, boredom and underlying rage and grief emerges a strangely quiet and almost equally shocking beauty. Ryu Murakami’s first novel, Almost Transparent Blue won the coveted Akutagawa literary prize and became an instant bestseller. Representing a sharp and conscious turning away from the introspective trend of postwar Japanese literature, it polarized critics and public alike
and soon attracted international attention as an alternative view of modern Japan.”
The book can of course be ordered off of Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Almost-Transparent-Japans-Modern-Writers/dp/0870114697
We will be meeting on December 10, at 7:00 p.m. Katrina Barnas has very generously offered the use of the lounge in her apartment building in downtown Manhattan. Light refreshments will be served.
For those who can make it, please RSVP and I will provide you with the address of Katrina’s building and her phone number. Then, please buy or borrow the book and get reading! Michael Glazer will be in contact with the group in the near future, to get us started with a few discussion questions. If you have any questions or comments in the meantime, please feel free to e-mail me or share them with the group.
I look forward to hearing from you all!
Jessica
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