cucharilla's review against another edition
4.0
A good book. Very interesting format and I liked the Roshomon idea. As grim as the other David Peace books.
paul_cornelius's review against another edition
2.0
Essentially, a failure. In Occupied City, David Peace allows form to overwhelm content to the point the story becomes lost and uninteresting. Peace is not as daring and innovative as he seems to imagine; otherwise, he would have brought more control to this novel. I have seen this before in genre writers who simply can't let an initial insight go--it was common in science fiction writers in the late 1960s and 1970s. The obsession with an elliptical form to the point of indifference. I can see how this might appeal to first year graduate students in a literature program who have just discovered modern and post-modern challenges. But it really is imitative. And the tone is monotonous.
bettyvd's review against another edition
3.0
Dit is een goed boek. Enige bereidwilligheid bij de lezer is echter wel noodzakelijk. Peace maakt een hypnotiserend maar ook verwarrend verhaal in twaalf stukken, de twaalf stadia in een geestoproepende seance, over een misdaad die in het bezette Tokyo na WOII gepleegd wordt. Die context was voor mij al interessant, want nieuw. Ook de medeplichtigheid van zowat alle betrokkenen in het vertroebelen van de waarheid is een fascinerende visie, een zwarte en enge realiteit die ons in de keel gegoten wordt.
jeremyhornik's review against another edition
4.0
The story of a terrible crime, from 12 perspectives. Done with great artistry in the prose. Guilt and fear drip from even the driest sections. The second policeman section, done in three rapidly alternating voices, is a marvel... hard to take, but incredibly compelling.
gh7's review against another edition
4.0
Tokyo 1948: a man posing as a health inspector tells a bank manager there has been an outbreak of dysentery nearby. He asks the bank manager to gather together all the staff because he has brought with him a serum that will protect them from the infection. The health inspector shows the sixteen staff how to administer the serum. However, he isn’t a health inspector and the serum isn’t a serum. It’s a deadly poison. The killer disappears with some of the bank’s money though not all of it. A mystery. This is a true story of a crime that still causes controversy in Japan. Many believe an innocent man was hanged for the crime.
Peace uses for his structure a ghost-story-telling game popularised during the Edo period in which each narrator extinguishes a candle when they have told their tale of supernatural horror. In other words, the darkness increases as the night wears on. Peace’s narrators include the victims of the crime, the investigators of the crime and those accused of the crime. He explores one popular hypothesis that the killer was a disgruntled member of Unit 731, a Japanese biological weapons division that bred plague-infected rats and fleas to spread disease in China and infected prisoners of war with deadly incubated toxins.
This is story telling at its most inventive and, you could also say, at its most challenging for the reader. I would argue that the no writer has quite managed to employ rhythm as such a key illuminating component of storytelling as Virginia Woolf did in The Waves. The repetitive rhythm of her sentences in that book is like a hidden accumulative part of its reach and meaning. Peace also is a rhythm-master and here reminded me of Woolf, though like Woolf on heroin. Both he and Woolf use rhythm to probe into the darkness of the human psyche. Except where Virginia seeks out light, Peace seeks out new depths of darkness. His hammering highly stylised repetitive prose style will probably alienate 80% of readers – it doesn’t always work but when it does it’s fabulous. I’m going to quote a passage at random to give an idea of how he writes –
But the War Machine rolls on, never stopping, never resting, never sleeping, always rising, always consuming, always devouring. On and on, the War Machine rolls on, across empires and across democracies, on and on, over the well-fed and over the ill-fed, on and on, and, all the while, from hand to hand, hand into wallet, wallet into bank, bank into loan, loan to stocks and shares, my stocks and my shares, money passes, money changes, money grows-
If you fancy a different kind of read….
Peace uses for his structure a ghost-story-telling game popularised during the Edo period in which each narrator extinguishes a candle when they have told their tale of supernatural horror. In other words, the darkness increases as the night wears on. Peace’s narrators include the victims of the crime, the investigators of the crime and those accused of the crime. He explores one popular hypothesis that the killer was a disgruntled member of Unit 731, a Japanese biological weapons division that bred plague-infected rats and fleas to spread disease in China and infected prisoners of war with deadly incubated toxins.
This is story telling at its most inventive and, you could also say, at its most challenging for the reader. I would argue that the no writer has quite managed to employ rhythm as such a key illuminating component of storytelling as Virginia Woolf did in The Waves. The repetitive rhythm of her sentences in that book is like a hidden accumulative part of its reach and meaning. Peace also is a rhythm-master and here reminded me of Woolf, though like Woolf on heroin. Both he and Woolf use rhythm to probe into the darkness of the human psyche. Except where Virginia seeks out light, Peace seeks out new depths of darkness. His hammering highly stylised repetitive prose style will probably alienate 80% of readers – it doesn’t always work but when it does it’s fabulous. I’m going to quote a passage at random to give an idea of how he writes –
But the War Machine rolls on, never stopping, never resting, never sleeping, always rising, always consuming, always devouring. On and on, the War Machine rolls on, across empires and across democracies, on and on, over the well-fed and over the ill-fed, on and on, and, all the while, from hand to hand, hand into wallet, wallet into bank, bank into loan, loan to stocks and shares, my stocks and my shares, money passes, money changes, money grows-
If you fancy a different kind of read….
ilsussurrodelmondo's review against another edition
4.0
Peace vi strappa il cuore dal petto e gli occhi dalle orbite, ve le imprime sulla carta, vi obbliga ad ascoltare. Non possiamo essere ciechi di fronte alla storia, dobbiamo lottare per la verità
5wamp_creature's review against another edition
4.0
This has that dreamy quality similar to Murakami with the split strands of a mystery. It's a fascinating read. I was not let down by the denouement.
I have a theory about the seance. PM me if you have read it and care to comment with spoilers.
Recommended for open-minded readers.
I have a theory about the seance. PM me if you have read it and care to comment with spoilers.
Recommended for open-minded readers.
katspectre67's review against another edition
3.0
In my review of this books predecessor (Tokyo Year Zero, I had a little rant about how much I admired Peace's ability to make crime (and its victims) matter. This book picks up on that theme early, with "The First Candle", written in the collective voice of victims of a mass killing:
"Do we matter to you? Did we ever matter?
Our mouths always screams,
already screams, screams
that mouth:
You apathy is out disease; your apathy, a plague..." (p.6)
Notice a bit of repetition there? Just a smidge? Well hang on to your hats, people, because there is a lot more where that came from. Peace is not the first to use the technique, and while others have complained (and even satirised)it, until now I have always felt he uses it to good effect. With this one, though, I was cursing the geek who had ever invented the "cut and paste" function. When I should have been hanging on every word while my head pounded with the rhythm, my eyes were skimming over paragraphs I had read one, two or three times before, thinking "Okay, Dave, okay. I get the point, already."
The book opens with a writer fleeing with an "unfinished book of unsolved crime" and the collective dead telling him that "we are here (...) because of you, our dear sweet, sweet writer dear, because of you..." (p.4). The theme of story telling, truth and lies runs through the book (and lends it a structure), suggesting Peace continues to grapple with the morality and motive of mining the annals of "true crime" for his work.
While these reflections should, in theory, enrich the novel in this case it didn't do it for me. I ended up feeling it was a valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at a very ambitious project.
I can't help thinking that if Peace has come to the conclusion that in bringing the victims back to life the writer is "their wound", "their plague",(p.287) then perhaps the author's own ambivalence about the task is this book's biggest enemy.
"Do we matter to you? Did we ever matter?
Our mouths always screams,
already screams, screams
that mouth:
You apathy is out disease; your apathy, a plague..." (p.6)
Notice a bit of repetition there? Just a smidge? Well hang on to your hats, people, because there is a lot more where that came from. Peace is not the first to use the technique, and while others have complained (and even satirised)it, until now I have always felt he uses it to good effect. With this one, though, I was cursing the geek who had ever invented the "cut and paste" function. When I should have been hanging on every word while my head pounded with the rhythm, my eyes were skimming over paragraphs I had read one, two or three times before, thinking "Okay, Dave, okay. I get the point, already."
The book opens with a writer fleeing with an "unfinished book of unsolved crime" and the collective dead telling him that "we are here (...) because of you, our dear sweet, sweet writer dear, because of you..." (p.4). The theme of story telling, truth and lies runs through the book (and lends it a structure), suggesting Peace continues to grapple with the morality and motive of mining the annals of "true crime" for his work.
While these reflections should, in theory, enrich the novel in this case it didn't do it for me. I ended up feeling it was a valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at a very ambitious project.
I can't help thinking that if Peace has come to the conclusion that in bringing the victims back to life the writer is "their wound", "their plague",(p.287) then perhaps the author's own ambivalence about the task is this book's biggest enemy.
rosseroo's review against another edition
2.0
David Peace is one of those authors whom I feel I ought to like, but whenever I've picked up one of his books, I just haven't been able to connect with it. I like British crime fiction, but just couldn't get into his Red Riding quartet. I picked this latest book of his (the second in his Tokyo trilogy) up because I find the period of American-occupied Japan pretty interesting, but once again, after 25 pages, I just couldn't take it any more, and I can't see myself picking it back up.
The story is apparently about a real-life 1948 crime in which twelve people were poisoned in a Tokyo bank, and how that may or may not have been related to Japanese experiments with biological weapons during WWII. The compelling subject matter is treated in a framework that is a direct homage to the Ryunosuke stories Rashoman and In A Grove. The book presents twelve narrators, each telling their own stories in a variety of formats (cryptic diary entries, redacted memos, newspaper articles, interviews, rambling stream of consciousness, etc.), resulting in a multilayered narrative. This is an interesting approach, but Peace's execution of it falls way to far over on the experimental end of the spectrum for me, sacrificing coherency and flow in the process. I'm not adverse to the hard work required by experimental literature (I made it through House of Leaves, for example), and I understand that Peace is deliberately working with an impressionistic palate, but this particular effort descends into incoherency.
To be sure, others will find it compelling stuff, and more power to them, but it's not my cup of tea. For a gripping story set in postwar Japan, I'd rather reread Akira Yokimura's excellent novel One Man's Justice. For non-fiction about the bank murder case, I'd turn to William Triplett's The Flowering of the Bamboo, and for more on Japan's biowarfare program, I'd check out books like A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, and Unit 731 Testimony.
The story is apparently about a real-life 1948 crime in which twelve people were poisoned in a Tokyo bank, and how that may or may not have been related to Japanese experiments with biological weapons during WWII. The compelling subject matter is treated in a framework that is a direct homage to the Ryunosuke stories Rashoman and In A Grove. The book presents twelve narrators, each telling their own stories in a variety of formats (cryptic diary entries, redacted memos, newspaper articles, interviews, rambling stream of consciousness, etc.), resulting in a multilayered narrative. This is an interesting approach, but Peace's execution of it falls way to far over on the experimental end of the spectrum for me, sacrificing coherency and flow in the process. I'm not adverse to the hard work required by experimental literature (I made it through House of Leaves, for example), and I understand that Peace is deliberately working with an impressionistic palate, but this particular effort descends into incoherency.
To be sure, others will find it compelling stuff, and more power to them, but it's not my cup of tea. For a gripping story set in postwar Japan, I'd rather reread Akira Yokimura's excellent novel One Man's Justice. For non-fiction about the bank murder case, I'd turn to William Triplett's The Flowering of the Bamboo, and for more on Japan's biowarfare program, I'd check out books like A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, and Unit 731 Testimony.
joesilverfox's review against another edition
1.0
On the cover of this book it says "A writer of such immense talent and power" The Times. Well, I guess that I got the wrong book. This book achieved something I am pretty sure no book has ever done before. I stopped reading after the first chapter. What a load of pretentious hogswash.
Continually repeating words, paragraphs, changing fonts etc. Do not interest me. Sorry. I hated this. For those that enjoyed it good for you. I have shelves of books I feel will be more interesting and so I'm done.
Continually repeating words, paragraphs, changing fonts etc. Do not interest me. Sorry. I hated this. For those that enjoyed it good for you. I have shelves of books I feel will be more interesting and so I'm done.
More...