Summer Reading Society #7
Well, it's Wednesday & you know what that means! Time for the seventh installment in the summer reading series! I'm finally getting around to posting about one of my all-time favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a Japanese author known for his surrealistic novels and short stories. It was so, so hard for me to pick just one book of Murakami's to post about -- I wanted to pick something approachable, but still interesting & representative of his style -- to me, the consummate Murakami novel is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it contains some pretty heavy stuff & the opening also contains some sexually explicit material, so I decided against posting it here.
Instead, I've chosen to post about another favorite Murakami novel of mine, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is, like most of Murakami's novels, a bit difficult to explain -- the story is told through two parallel narratives, one taking place in "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" (odd-numbered chapters) & the other taking place at "the End of the World" (even-numbered chapters). There's a nice & not very spoilery plot summary on the book's WikiPedia page.
From the back of my text:In this hyperkinetic and relentlessly inventive novel, Japan's most popular (and controversial) fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is simultaneously cooler than zero and unaffectedly affecting, a hilariously funny and deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
I've also typed up a bit of the first chapter for you to sample.
Chapter One: Elevator, Silence, Overweight
The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn't moving at all. But let's just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?
Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building, scarcely one notch up the evolutionary scale from a well bucket. You'd never believe the two pieces of machinery had the same name and the same purpose. The two were pushing the outer limits conceivable as elevators.
First of all, consider the space. This elevator was so spacious it could have served as an office. Put in a desk, add a cabinet and a locker, throw in a kitchenette, and you'd still have room to spare. You might even squeeze in three camels and a mid-range palm tree while you were at it. Second, there was the cleanliness. Antiseptic as a brand-new coffin. The walls and ceiling were absolutely spotless polished stainless steel, the floor immaculately carpeted in a handsome moss-green. Third, it was dead silent. There wasn't a sound--literally not one sound--from the moment I stepped inside and the doors slid shut. Deep rivers run quiet.
Another thing, most of the gadgets an elevator is supposed to have were missing. Where, for example, was the panel with all the buttons and switches? No floor numbers to press, no DOOR OPEN and DOOR CLOSE, no EMERGENCY STOP. Nothing, whatsoever. All of which made me feel utterly defenseless. And it wasn't just no buttons; it was no indication of advancing floor, no posted capacity or warning, not even a manufacturer's nameplate. Forget about trying to locate an emergency exit. Here I was, sealed in. No way this elevator could have gotten fire department approval. There are norms for elevators after all.
Staring at these four blank stainless-steel walls, I recalled one of Houdini's great escapes I'd seen in a movie. He's tied up in how many ropes and chains, stuffed into a big trunk, which is wound fast with another thick chain and sent hurtling, the whole lot, over Niagara Falls. Or maybe it was an icy dip in the Arctic Ocean. Given that I wasn't all tied up, I was doing okay; insofar as I wasn't clued in on the trick, Houdini was one up on me.
Talk about not clued in, I didn't even know if I was moving or standing still.
Recs from week 6
Rec request! scissor_katkins is wondering if anyone knows of any good books about witches.
nativegirl recs Goodbye Tsugumi and Kitchen, both by Banana Yoshimoto
chailin recs The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (seconded by tigersfury)
ekm recs On Beauty by Zadie Smith
norway recs Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill (I second this!)
misscrumbs recs The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
tigersfury recs After Dark by Haruki Murakami (I second this!) and The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Raif Larsen