Wednesday, September 07, 2005

The wound-up Darby chronicle

Recently read (as in, sprinted through) Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I liked it rather a lot. It's...troubling. (So is this post, in its haphazardness. You've been warned.)

See, here's the deal. The novel, I was told or was informed ahead of time, was weird, or surreal, or post-modern, or just plain not normal. That's cool. I dig the not-normal. But when you launch into a book that is supposedly not-normal, and the first half or so is focused on the disruption of the routine of a completely normal guy's life (with maybe a psychic or something thrown in there for flavor), you start to wonder if all that talk about the not-normal elements was misplaced. Not, mind you, that anything in the first half is anything less than compelling. Just, ya know, there's no footnotes, and nothing so terrifically weird as to make one stand up and take notice. Unless, I suspect, one has never read anything too-weird before, in which case, well, yes. That being my other concern: maybe I've read so much not-normal stuff by this point that I've gained a sort of immunity. A resistance, if you will.

Nope. No resistance. At least, not to this book.

See, thing is, this novel, it's got a fascinating shape. Picture for yourself--or click here for assistance--the stereotypical mushroom blast. Sort of a column of smoke, upon which a cloud sits. Hang on to that image; tip it over on its side. You can slice it horizontally through the middle if you wish but it's not necessarily crucial here. Either way, what you've now got, reading that image from left to right, is the shape of Murakami's novel. The narrow focus of narrative through the first two sections of the book, the drive and direction of it, giving way to...a point, where things change. Where the book becomes less a story and more a rush in outward directions.

I was hooked on the book through the first two sections fine enough, but it's in the third part (which comprises half the book) where the story really begins to dance. The story expands and connections begin to form and it just really becomes something other, more cloud than column. I'm repeating myself; point being, if you're new to Murakami (like me), and you find yourself wondering, through the first two sections...just, keep going. It's good. It's really damn good.

It's funny. I mean, occasionally. There's little bits that are laugh out loud hysterical. (A Van Halen t-shirt? That's just awesome. Or maybe that's just me. Dunno.) But what I really mean is that it's funny in that there's the funny stuff and then there's the brutal stuff, the stuff that's just...oh, lord, there's a bit with people digging a hole, it happens in a flashback (of sorts), and there's a baseball bat...yeah, it's just. Geez. Really compelling stuff.

And it's funny in that, though this is definitely literature, capitalized or whatever, your call--the books it brought to mind weren't really what the literature-crowd would think of as literature. I found myself occasionally thinking of Stephen King, though not necessarily for the most convincing reasons. I also found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, in the way the book dealt with modern-day (okay, 1980s, but close enough) material versus World War II-era material. Not that I want to drive the comparison too far but I think there's something illuminating here in reading the books side-by-side (or as distanced by years, hey, whatever) in that, both books were written well after the war in question, but in completely different cultures. There's something to seeing that one book was written in a culture that came out of that war this way, and that the other book was written in another culture that came out of the war that way, and those are very different ways. Something to that. (Hint: I liked Stephenson's book plenty well enough, but I think I like it slightly less now, after reading Murakami's book.) Or maybe I'm way off base here. Dunno.

But okay, what I really mean when I say it's funny, is that it's funny that the book should change character midway through. To go back to that. The book, so much of its subject is the ways in which people change. And I don't mean change over the course of a lifetime, but the ways in which people become literally (philosophically? you be the judge) entirely different people. Who are still the same people, but different people nonetheless. It's funny. Funny, like that.

Anyways. Random babbling aside. If you're like me and you heard the hullabaloo over Kafka on the Shore coming out a while back, but the library's got you queued at like 78 and the number keeps getting bigger, I'd happily recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Just, y'know...keep an eye on your cat.

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