Reading between the lines

My second Murakami novel after Norwegian Wood. The book is all about love and loneliness is modern times. Written in the first person, the main character tries to capture the love he felt for Sumire and depicts the love that she felt for another woman. Several biting pieces from the novel that I just couldn't resist quoting. It ends in tragedy finally as Sumire disappears mysteriously. In the spring of her twenty second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing fields up int eh air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. T...

Another masterpiece by Coetzee. It tells the story of Michael K who escapes the city during a civil war with his ailing mother with aim of taking her back to the house where she grew up as a girl in the countryside. But eventually ends taking her ashes instead when she dies on the journey. The story vividly tells the day to day struggles of a man who survives the harsh countryside, trying to go back to the old ways of tending to a garden and growing his own food. He is eventually captured but has lost all the will to live in the "system". K closed his eyes and rested his face on his hands. It was clear to him that it was not soldiers who were camping at the dam, who had earlier camped at the house, but men from the mountains, men who blew up railway tracks and mined roads and attacked farmhouses and drove off stock and cut one town off from another, whom the radio reported exterminated in scores and newspapers published pictures in pools of their own blood. That was wh...