Books to Read Poster No 52

 

Yup, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Referring to The Beatles song, rather than a Nordic forest. Murakami must be fashionable these days as I am forever seeing references to him on newspaper book pages and there is another of his books on the poster, and I have to say I'm not in a hurry to read it.

This was a weird one. There's a certain compulsion to the prose, and the descriptions of the natural world are really good, but once you've said that the positives are over as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure I lost a lot because I don't understand Japanese culture and I daresay a lot else got 'lost in translation', so allowances must be made. It's also told as a first person narration, and the narrator is a young (19/20) male Japanese student in the 1960s, so you know, not a lot in common there. The men are all selfish thoughtless boors (including the narrator) and the women are all strange. Two of the four women who appear kill themselves, two of them spend an extended period in a strange sanatorium in the mountains, and one of the others should imo, be sent to join them. 

It would be interesting to read the story from the point of view of the women and get some idea about what is actually going in their heads, as the narrator has absolutely no idea - I suppose that's partly the point. I'm not terribly interested in what's going on in the head of the narrator, who is one of the most tedious storytellers I've ever encountered and a boring non-personality to boot. How three sensible women come to get so fascinated by him is a total mystery to me, and I can only assume it's some sort of autobiographical wish fulfilment on Murakami's part. I could of course be totally off beam there. 

Ah well, onwards and upwards. 

As an antidote to the general awful worthiness of the poster books I splashed out recently on an extra three audible credits (which as a member you can occasionally buy at a slight discount) since there were a lot of books coming out this month that I fancied reading. Four series from the BBC of Simon Brett';s Charles Paris books, Mick Herron's latest The Secret Hours, and J K Rowling's new Strike book, The Running Grave were what I treated myself to, plus my normal monthly credit went on Natalie Haynes' latest non-fiction book about the Greek goddesses, Divine Might. All very much more worth reading/listening to for me  than Norwegian Wood. Although the Herron was a teeny bit disappointing, and I'm only half way through the Rowling as it is very very very very long and she needs an editor.