Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
One of my coworkers gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, suggesting it to be a good place to enter his writing. Little did I know as I took it from his hand I would end up blogging about the book.
The book alternates between two worlds. In each world, the main character interacts with a librarian, who becomes one of the other primary characters. In one world, the library seems like a normal, modern library. In the other, the library is a world of wonder with lots of materials behind closed doors. The main character visits there daily because of its collection of skulls. The purposes of the two libraries seem like they’re trying to get the person to think about what the role of the library should be. In the world with the normal library, it’s a place where everyone goes to get information. It seems to be a collection intended for use. In the other world, the library seems to serve the role of preserving specific materials and only serving specific people in the community, like the main character. During the book, I don’t think anyone else besides the main character and the librarian use the library. The librarian is there, it seems, only to serve and care for the main character and the collection.
In this age when people are considering tossing out their newspaper subscriptions, there is at least one compelling reason to keep receiving the pages:
“When at last I awoke, it was half light out. The clock read six-fifteen, but I couldn’t tell whether it was morning or evening. I pulled on a pair of slacks and leaned out my door to check the neighbor’s doormat. The morning edition was lying there, which led me to conclude it was morning. Subscribing to a paper comes in handy at times like this. Maybe I ought to.”
Newspapers are mentioned several other times during the book, too.
I found Murakami’s writing style to be quite enjoyable. To me, it’s not like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ work where I carefully read each line and enjoy the way he crafted the sentences together. Rather, I enjoy the prose for its simplicity and every so often stumble across a phrase or paragraph that makes me think “Wow! That’s great.” I recently finished a mystery that did not move the plot along nearly as well as Murakami does. I found lots of good tagline material in the book, but I’m not yet sure if I will write them all down for use later.
I am glad my coworker encouraged me to read this book. I almost did not because I’m in a phase where I am trying hard to make progress on my “I’ll read that someday” list and not add more to it.
