I have not seen the show and will be avoiding it until I have finished the book.
I am listening to the Ralph Lister narration, which was recently made available in two parts on Spotify, and for free to Spotify Premium listeners.
**Tag your spoilers, please!**
I am about 5 hours in on the audiobook, so roughly 20% of the way through Part One.
Just a few thoughts/first impressions.
1. Clavell is a master of the third-person-omniscient narrative. The switches between each character’s voice and point of view are seamless.
2. Lister’s narration is the perfect pace and his character voices are so immersive to an already utterly immersive text. I started listening whilst doing some mindless hand-intensive crafting and I could immediately see the story play out in my mind. Clavell’s descriptors are fucking *succulent.*
3. I have heard, for only being about 10% through the entire tale, a *delightful* amount of narrative concerning penises, feces and urine. I say that jokingly, but it really does paint a raw, gritty and matter-of-fact picture about the in-world conditions and clashing cultures.
4. The way Clavell writes women is refreshingly simple, respectful and to-the-point. I myself am female, and even when sexual themes do arise it does not seem like the women are objectified much, if at all, from the narrator’s point of view. The events simply occur, and that’s how I wish all men wrote sexual material, especially involving women.
5. I am somewhat familiar, though not a scholar of Japanese history or culture, but it seems that Clavell did a lot of research. The way he explains certain customs, objects or important events in the Japanese canon is really succinct and he does a perfect job integrating the information into the story flow.
That’s basically it for now. I’m listening to it every chance I get and I cannot get enough.
by beelzeflub