The Wind Up Bird Chronicles (Book Review)

Reading a Murakami lets you live through the world with less reaction and more observation, setting you up for respecting more or less everything. I don’t know if it has got to do with my kind of reclusiveness, or his style of writing. But the story, despite of being one of suffering, becomes desirable. Though I guess the reasons for that are not all that deep. Murakami provides you with a thrill, and it is unique. It is one thing to be surreal and another to maintain its proximity to the real like Murakami’s writing does. The magic is drawn from what you probably have experienced otherwise, physically, but did not really feel mentally. You probably felt five percent of it, which is all you need, to be drawn. The rest is his fantastic imagination.

I had heard somewhere that a good work of science fiction may not have to be something that agrees with the general laws of science that exist, but it needs to be something that sticks to the very logic that it has set up for itself in the process of establishing the story. And this is one element that Murakami seems to have perfected with his book (though it is not a science fiction). At the end of it all, when you come out of the world he created for you, you can see a certain math that was binding it all together.

The fine observations of daily life and near inspiring philosophies that he presents would not sound as attractive if it weren’t for the modesty and in-consequential self-presence that the protagonist manages to establish. It makes for such naturally felt empathy that when comes a moment of triumph; you feel it is like your own. It actually makes me think whether presenting a thought with self-doubt is any less convincing than presenting it with conviction. Self-doubt or self-argument actually allows you to present two sides of a matter. And that is one side more than of one presented with conviction, which, not to forget, already smells of pride and bias.

Going through this book is near similar to a flight. It is as if a certain realisation of how the world works made you so light that you were lifted up. And that those realisations took away your sense of dimensions such that you suddenly began to travel in ways that defied direction. However, the controller has it all figured, and those directionless flights are all interconnected, and in the end most of it you will figure. The rest is left to imagine, which I believe is Murakami’s signature.

In all this objectivity I am missing the element of excitement in discovering a treasure of point of views, detailing, passions, imagination, quirks, preferences or way of life. And it is probably because I chose to write this review a bit late. The truth is, while I was reading it, the excitement was similar to one of discovering gold.

Black Swan …… (Less of a review, more of a reaction)

Making us question who we are,
Life's high to its deep lows,
Turning convictions into weakness,
Not touching the extremes but till an inch before,
The one that induces crime, but only in intent,
The one that turns instability into a weapon that probes negativity,
And before it bears a consequence that affects beyond self, it transforms it all into art. Streaming it into a single flow,
Running side by side with sanity,
Patiently displaying itself,
Gathering applause for its complexity,
Taking a bow and slowly gelling back to where it all began,

Back to where it started.
Where self has no meaning,
Where everybody is a nobody,
Back to large sea of average,
That place which makes everyone ordinary...till a black swan appears, again.