“Usually it starts with an image. I have a particular image in mind and I suspect there’s something deeper in it, so I follow it,” said Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to Ariel Gore.
Last year, devising my list of must-reads for 2008, I wrote, “I love novels of unusual coincidences and quotidian strangeness, and apparently this one’s full of the extraordinary ordinary. Ariel Gore, author of Atlas of the Human Heart, and my future wife, said it’s her favourite book ever. That’s enough to get it on my list.”
Well, it’s been a long time since I was blown away during the reading of literature. On some rare occasions, you read a novel that just alters the course of your existence. Comparing this legendary Japanese book to anything is futile, but ghosts of Marquez and Allende and Bradbury hover near the pages.
Ariel Gore told me I would love the book, and she was right. Not knowing me from a hole in the wall, she could not have known how hung up I am on magical portals, “The Game,” tricks of fate and tricks of the light.
How to describe this? Words fail me. Alice in Wonderland. In Japanese. With ghosts and plot twists and mind games. Treading the slippery slope between science and fiction. And it was a total culture shock, but everything resonated deep inside as if the book were actually unlocking the clues to the meaning of life. It pointed at signs I’ve been seeing the all along.
So now it will be no big surprise when I start insisting you all read it so we can talk about it. And what was I possibly talking about before I read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami? I honestly do not know.
I sometimes get depressed when I read a masterpiece like this one. Why bother writing, when someone out there writes like this? And then you pull up your socks and learn while your mind is doing everything it can to absorb and learn and grow.
We’re talking about a 600 page book that manages to pull off minimalism. (New York Magazine described it: “as sculpted and impacable as a bird by Brancusi.”)
We’re talking about a book that holds your attention span the entire time. It doesn’t take any effort. It mesmerizes from the first clues, and for all its hauntings and magical realist touches, it’s incredibly literary. Its depth is astounding and it’s characters are unlike any ever put on paper.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle.
Newsday was unusually poetic, with bang-on astuteness. “Murakami aims to provoke not just a frisson of unsettlement, but a deeper, more consequential unease.”
The best part? Well, I’ve only just begun. This guy’s got a long library of books out. I’m sure after only one title: reading his work is one of the reasons for living, which means I’m blessed yet with quite a ways to go.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
You can help me by buying my books, books I’ve mentioned, or any books at all at:
chapters.indigo.ca
