Attention culture: Murakami.

I am a snob and bourgeois, so the term "feminine literature" makes me vomit. I am not saying that I have never, even myself, wiped off a few times for lady's novels, I return to Bridget Jones very willingly today - especially during the meals, because with pleasure and satisfaction I celebrate this crude habit, and I wouldn’t like to dirt high value book with the splash of tomato soup.

But I didn’t want to speak about this.

I met Murakami's books for the first time in high school. Cruelly excited during reading description of from the cover of "A Wild Sheep Chase”. I threw myself like a fool on the shelf with Japanese literature with huge expectations. I dreamed about psychedelia, about a strange, twisted climate, about paranoia, I thought it would be a book of my life - and I was disappointed. On a scale of 1-6, I rated this book for about 4, or "cool." But there was a feeling of disappointment that discouraged me from taking another approach.

The revelation came later - "After Dark”, a Christmas present from a friend, crushed me into the ground. Later, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, heavier, more tasteful, amazing. Touching and bland "Norwegian wood", a bit colorless "Dance, dance, dance".

But I'm still not talking about what I want from the beginning.

When I finished reading "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” I wasn’t disappointed at all -
I was once again crushed in the first chapter, reading very Kafka (I love Kafka) description of long corridors in a minimalist building and imagining driving a silent elevator. I felt a growing atmosphere of paranoia and what I loved most about Murakami - an index finger aimed at any place in our reality with the signature "look, it's not normal".

This isn’t a review, I don’t intend to plot the story, summarize anything and build up tensions.
If someone likes Murakami's work, he probably values ​​him for his ability to create magical reality, theatricality and masterful manipulation of emotions (in a truly Japanese way). In "Hard-Boiled..." is all this - a strange, paranoid, unreal world in which you can find distant echoes of "The Trial” and "1984" (more in the sense of ideas than specific works), very tangible and very close, although its functioning is only outlined in a few descriptions. On the other hand - the dreamy world of the main character's subconscious, seemingly schematic and simple, which forces us to think about whether the world without emotion and passion would be the ideal one.

Banality. When you write about something like that, it's hard to be serious at the same time and not get stuck in pathos. Great emotions don’t necessarily require big words.

#book #writing