Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World sounds like Japanese strings being plucked to a traditional tone. As I read, I always reflect and ponder about two questions: "Who is the artist of the floating world?" and "Why so?". Obviously the first one should be quite easy to answer, but it's always the second question that casts doubt to my first one. Hasn't Ono left the floating world yet? And I have bittersweet sentiments about the way Ono would put it as "Again I realise that I have drifted" because I, too, have drifted off with him and I needed as much as he did to pick up from where he had left off. This book shares with us the feeling of the Japanese people after the war, and it greatly taught me how I can make the character's voice sound like my own.

Before this, I read Lee Harper's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Nancy Peacock's Life Without Water. Of course, needless to say, the former book is more well known that the latter. Yet both are life-sized drama, and I enjoy reading such books.

Now, I am going through a masterpiece, that of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I'm utterly amazed by Wilde. One paragraph has never held as much! Honestly I wonder if I'll ever have such an upper hand. To give you a taste:

"I believe that if man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream..."

Imagine that! And sadly he also broadcast this:

"We live in an age when men treated art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty."

Well, one cannot fully agree with Wilde's assertions, but one must pull back and reflect upon such words. And truly it is rather sad to treat one's autobiography as one's greatest achievement. So I must start churning up and working things round the other way.

posted by lil piggie at 8:28 AM