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WINDUP_BIRD
November 29, 2015
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" was
certainly a readable book, but it left me feeling
that he's an astoundingly over-rated writer.
Take the Wind-Up Bird motif of the title. The
conceit is that this is a bird that makes a noise
that sounds like it's winding up the main spring
of the world-- but for some reason hearing this
sound is an ominous sign, bad things happen to
people who can hear the wind-up bird.
Then there's the fact that this conceit starts out
as something the main character talks about with
his wife... and then it comes back again later,
from completely different independent sources.
How can it be that these other people are also
talking about the Wind-Up Bird? Ooo-EE-ooo.
Could it be that Nutmeg and Cinnamon are unreliable
narrators, and they've incorporated the Wind-Up Bird
in their stories only after hearing about it from the
main character? But wait, could it be that the main
character is an unreliable narrator, who only *thinks*
he's hearing other people say this?
Or, how about even simpler: Murakami is an unreliable
narrator, he makes things up on the fly, and hides
behind ambiguity and spooky coincidence to try to get
things to tie together in a most Literary way...
I wanted to like this book, and it genuinely is pretty
readable, but it started to lose me on a simple point of
physical reality. A major turning point in the plot has the
main character trapped without a ladder at the bottom of a
well that's gone dry, in the back yard of an abandoned house.
First of all: he goes down in this well
just wearing a T-shirt, and only belatedly
realizes that it's fairly cool down there.
And he doesn't climb back up his ladder
and get a jacket: instead he hunches up in
the bottom of it and falls asleep. Note: Undergoing physical
Murakami mentions it's unexpectedly cold, trials for the sake of
but I don't get the sense that Murakami a spirit journey are
really understands what it means to be all very well and good,
subjected to a chill for days on end-- but it would be nice if
really, at this stage, the main character the author had some
has died of hypothermia. sense of the limits of
human bodies.
Secondly, once he wakes up and finds
his ladder was stolen, why doesn't he
even try to climb out? It's evidently
a 3 to 4 foot diameter well, and
chimney-climbing something like that 25 You can imagine reasons he
feet wouldn't be that hard. I submit might not be able to climb
that if you were stuck down in that it-- he might be too weak from
well, and even if you didn't know shit fasting, the surface of the
about climbing (as many of us humans well might be unusually smooth
don't seem to, despite being primates and dusty-- but trying to
and all), you'd probably figure it out. climb it and failing is not
what happens in the story.
What I think is going on: Murakami
doesn't know how to climb anything
and wasn't able to do a good job of I read Murkami's "The Wind-up
envisioning what it would be like to Bird Chronicles", while I was
be trapped down in a well. Writers reading Patti Smith's "M Train",
are often very sedentary people, and she was traveling with a copy,
they have to fake anything that gets re-reading it, looking for some
near physical action. additional details concerning
the man-in-the-well scenario...
I speculate that there's a
certain lack of reality about
this scene that was nagging at
her without her quite realizing it.
There are other flaws
on different levels... The stuff about computers
is completely nonsensical,
but one gets used to that.
As a rift begins to appear
between the narrator and his
wife, he begins making contact SPOILERS
with a number of different women.
One woman is a mysterious, anonymous voice on the phone,
and it turns out that this is something like his wife's
troubled spirit reaching out to him in a different form.
There's at least a suggestion that all of these women may
be his wife in different guises... to the extent this
book is About Something, that would probably be what it's
about. It's hard to get that to make much sense, it
isn't really satisfactory on any kind of emotional level,
let alone as a matter of plot logic.
In this kind of pomo-magi-real
stuff, the violations of plot
logic are supposed to be highly
significant in some way-- no doubt
they're intentionally designed to In a lot of ways,
highlight the mechanisms by which this book reminds me
fiction works by boldy breaking of a lesser Philip K
the conventions, but I'm so low Dick novel like
brow, I regard them as evidence of Ubik, where I had
sloppy writing. the definite sense
he was just making
If the idea of fiction like this is it up as he went
that you're supposed to enjoy along and not really
mulling over what the different getting anywhere.
glitches really mean-- for that to
work you need to have some reason
to believe that there's something
there. If you get the feeling that
the author is just screwing around,
then why would you bother trying to
tease out some deep meaning?
Belle Warring mentions
she finds Murakami to be
"luminous"... I can't say
that I do. My take would
be "mildly amusing".
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