Isn’t it good: a few journal snippets exploring connections between literature and songs I like

PART ONE: NORWEGIAN WOOD/NORWEGIAN WOOD

It’s halfway through the first semester of my second year at university, and the dreaded reading week has rolled around, once again. I have been summoned home by my parents unexpectedly while all my friends parade around sunlight-flooded Europe, having the time of their lives. Instead, I sit at Leuchars station awaiting the dreaded slog home on the train which will consume multiple valuable hours of my life, and although I have armed myself with an artillery of stereotypical and annoying London post-punk albums to ease my pain, it becomes increasingly clear that eight hours of travel will not exactly sail by. There is, however, one other tool tucked away in my backpack that will come in handy in a scenario such as this one; a slightly dog-eared copy of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

I don’t expect to love it, but amazingly, I do, and through the haze of bland sex and even blander femininity cast upon the pages by Murakami, there’s a light that cuts through the male gaze. And I feel an ache in my chest, much as I am sure that Midori feels throughout the novel – I will have to stop myself from saying too much, in case it spoils the novel for anyone who hasn’t read it. In my headphones hums the very same song that Watanabe, the protagonist, hears upon his plane landing in Hamburg. And despite my ambivalence towards his character, I am sure that I feel very much the same as he did; a little lost, a little nostalgic, but also strangely content in my little liminal space between Peterborough and London. 

PART TWO: THE SPY/A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE

It is the high summer of 2024 and what feels like the most stressful thing in the world to any Londoner has just happened; my train has just been delayed, and during prime corporate minion hour. I am sitting (miraculously) surrounded by a sea of grey and navy suit jackets on the Overground to Clapham High Street, in order to change and take the Northern line from Clapham North station. It is a short walk of three minutes from the other station but I am breaking in my new pair of Dr Martens boots and at this point I feel like every footstep is just bringing me closer to hell. 

Even then, knowing that I have a semi-panicked shuffle towards the Northern line ahead of me, I am unwilling to put down the book that I am reading; A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin. The blue clothbound cover of the volume I’m holding matches my outfit, which I am happy to announce in my close friends story but not to anyone else for fear of sounding shallow and uninspiring. After all, they do say never to judge a book by its cover. 

Having said this, I quickly find that the narrative’s beauty exceeds that of the clothbound cover. One of my friends, also an avid reader, is a huge Anaïs Nin fan, which reassures me somewhat, but nothing could have prepared me to love the book as much as I did. I’ve always had mixed opinions on erotica (the ‘booktok’ style smut and my hatred of pornography combined) but this somehow felt deeper than that, and I felt as though I was seeing, feeling, touching (but never loving!) every time I turned the page. I did not feel like a mere observer, as the lie detector considers himself to be in the novel, but truly immersed in Sabina’s life. 

The next day, I finish the book and cry behind my sunglasses in Battersea Park. Nobody can see me apart from the runners in bondage-style vests who sporadically hurtle past the tree I’m sitting under. 

I am not listening to The Doors on the Overground. I do vaguely remember listening to Guess by Charli XCX at one point (not the remix, I need pure, unadulterated brat to power me through TFL), but other than that I’m not entirely sure what else. Having said this, I did remember the following day when I’d turned the final page that I had recognised the phrase from The Spy, a song I’m about 99 percent sure was inspired by this work. As with most of this band’s work, it’s sultry and sexy, much like Anaïs Nin’s content and general tone (and how reading the book made me feel, obviously). In my favourite collection of essays, The White Album by Joan Didion, the author discusses her initial meeting with the band and her interactions with Jim Morrison. Something that seems to come up rather often is the idea of “love-death as the ultimate high”, and the peculiar mystery of their lyricism. These ideas seem to be especially compatible with Nin’s depictions of how mystery and the erotic both connect and add to each other in the novel – if something intrigues or inspires fear us, we want to know more about it, whether this is literally or carnally. Hence the appeal of, “I know your deepest, secret fear”. 

So, according to the Doors (and probably Anaïs Nin too), love inspires sex which inspires death, as a book inspires a song inspires an essay. I love to make seemingly meaningless connections hold weight sometimes… 

PART THREE: I DON’T WANT TO GET OVER YOU/THE OUTSIDER

I am sitting in the sprawling gardens of the Jardin des Plantes in Toulouse on a crushingly sunny day in late July. I am on a trip abroad to study French, and I am the last of my friends to return home to reality and a lifestyle which is less conducive to extensive reading and creating huge playlists that I will probably listen to once in their entirety before deleting them, a bad habit I’ve got into. It is perishingly hot, and a drop of my lemonade falls onto my slim pink volume of The Outsider, smudging the red painted details a little. Jerskin Fendrix yells incoherently in my ear and I burn my leg hairs idly with the end of my cigarette for no reason. I’m in a slightly sulky mood for two reasons; firstly, I’ve lost two of my favourite rings, and secondly, I leave for London the following day. 

I’ve already read The Outsider/The Stranger/L’Étranger/whatever the fuck you want to call it at the beginning of 2023 – at pretty much the same time that I read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel that I found to be pretty average and had no further thoughts about. It’s safe to say which one stuck with me more. I brought my slightly sticky English edition with me to France in the hope that revisiting it in my mother tongue would help me understand my French edition a little more. (This we have yet to see, as I’ve found myself distracted by slightly too many books since returning home.) 

When I read The Outsider, it’s not the Cure that I think of, despite the success of Killing an Arab, their song directly inspired by the narrative, which is both incredibly catchy and almost painfully literal. No, it’s the Magnetic Fields and the piece of art of gargantuan proportions which is 69 Love Songs. I think, specifically, of I Don’t Want To Get Over You, which refers to its protagonist dressing in black and reading Camus like his adolescent self in order to get over a partner or lost love. I heard this song for the first time in the autumn of 2022, when I was barely older than the lovesick teenagers the song is making fun of, and the deep, crooning vocals stuck with me ever since. So, it is this that I think of when sitting alone in the botanic gardens, and not Robert Plant. (Insert missed opportunity for a plant pun. Whoops.)