Let’s talk about books!
Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer who, with his novels full of magic realism and science fiction narration with surreal scenarios, took the literary world by storm. His oriental writing manner is very recognizable in all of his books and I think that somehow, reading his stories, you won't be able to forget him easily.
Long story short, I propose two reviews of two different books by this extraordinary author which caught my attention from the first pages and are still in my heart. The first is "The colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage", a novel full of love, struggles and mystery. The protagonist is Tsukuru Tazaki, a guy that suddenly, in his twenties, is excluded from his closest group of friends without any explanation. Following this event he completely loses every reason to stay alive and is only focused on death. Only 16 years later, thanks to Sara, a girl he is hanging out with, he starts to find out why all that had happened. In this ‘bildungsroman’, based on themes like friendships or love, Tsukuru makes us understand how it feels to be lonely and lost, without a way out - feeling just colorless, without any remarkable features.
It makes you reflect on the fact that maybe we really start living and finding what we are and what we want only when we start to die a little bit.
The second book that I suggest you should read is a collection of short stories called "First person singular". Here we find 8 stories and the main point in every of them is exactly the internal " I " of the protagonist.
Maybe at the end of some stories you’ll be left speechless and some existential questions will pop up in your mind and won’t leave it easily…but trust me, it’s worth it.
By reading this book, especially if you have already read something by Murakami, you will notice very easily how much the author’s point of view is present in each story - where he literally plunges himself. I think this short book is the right point of departure to approach Murakami’s books in the future.
Long story short, I propose two reviews of two different books by this extraordinary author which caught my attention from the first pages and are still in my heart. The first is "The colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage", a novel full of love, struggles and mystery. The protagonist is Tsukuru Tazaki, a guy that suddenly, in his twenties, is excluded from his closest group of friends without any explanation. Following this event he completely loses every reason to stay alive and is only focused on death. Only 16 years later, thanks to Sara, a girl he is hanging out with, he starts to find out why all that had happened. In this ‘bildungsroman’, based on themes like friendships or love, Tsukuru makes us understand how it feels to be lonely and lost, without a way out - feeling just colorless, without any remarkable features.
It makes you reflect on the fact that maybe we really start living and finding what we are and what we want only when we start to die a little bit.
The second book that I suggest you should read is a collection of short stories called "First person singular". Here we find 8 stories and the main point in every of them is exactly the internal " I " of the protagonist.
Maybe at the end of some stories you’ll be left speechless and some existential questions will pop up in your mind and won’t leave it easily…but trust me, it’s worth it.
By reading this book, especially if you have already read something by Murakami, you will notice very easily how much the author’s point of view is present in each story - where he literally plunges himself. I think this short book is the right point of departure to approach Murakami’s books in the future.
Susanna Ferracuti
