Sunday, October 16, 2011

Murakami madness!

Release of 1Q84 being barely a week away, you already see a kind of Murakami madness all around. Frankly, I'm also caught in it.

My translator-friend, V. Ramaswamy, himself a Murakami fan, sends me a link to a recent Murakami interview.

By sheer coincidence, though, I'm now reading Kafka on the Shore. I feel addicted to a novel - after a long time. It's a real page-turner,and no cheap material in spite of lots of sex. In fact, I'm having a great time with Kafka, Nakata, Colonel Sanders, Oshima and Hoshino. These characters, not the plot, drive the novel. They are not very real but not unreal either. Hegel, Rousseau, Beethoven, Mozart all pop up during your reading journey, and they help you glean insights about the characters and the life you live. Add to it the dollops of humour that Nakata provides through his naivete and "not being bright'. Murakami is not only a seasoned pro, he is also a writer of huge intellectual capacities.

I also read an old Haruki Murakami interview published in the Paris Review to know about the novelist and his art of fiction.

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