Rarely has every member of the book group finished the chosen book in time for the meeting and rarely has the group been so vocal and animated in its discussions. What do I draw from this? Well, we obviously need to read books that we don't understand more frequently. With one exception, we were all new comers to Haruki Murakami's work and some, but not all, may go on to read more. If this one is anything to go by, a Murakami book can variously be described as odd, enigmatic, mysterious, surrealist, detached, curious, inexplicable, wierd..... and so it went on at our meeting last night. We commented on the apathy, indifference and "flatness" of the nameless characters, how emotional detachment was a theme and how this contrasts with the bizarre journey which the narrator undertakes, necessary perhaps to force him to make changes in his life.... or was it? Somehow, despite the fact that we struggled with its apparent lack of meaning or a moral narrative, we were all taken in by this novel and we all wanted to finish it in order to find out what happened; the only issue being that we were not really too sure about whether or not what happened really happened and if it did, what it meant. Mysterious and enigmatic indeed.
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