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Showing posts from October, 2011

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

My first novel by Murakami and I am blown to pieces. The portrayal of characters, events and the emotions weaving them together is just too fantastic. The main character is Toru Watanabe who remembers his college days in Tokyo after hearing the song "Norwegian Wood" by Beatles. The entire book revolves around suicide and about how Watanabe struggles to overcome his grief. The beginning of the book: Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? Be as it may, it's all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to ke