The narrator tells us in “With the Beatles” about “one girl … whom I remember well. Memories, in Murakami’s stories, aren’t so much about facts as they are about feeling. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core.”įirst Person Singular is about memory’s hold over us. Short side trips along the way.” However, as he notes, “these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. Some of these experiences, as the narrator notes in “Carnaval,” are “nothing more than … minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Often, in the middle of a story, a memory will trigger another memory, through a sort of mnemonic leap the result can be like a confusingly drawn map that means more to the creator than the reader. In this collection, an older narrator goes sifting through the events of his past, some of them surreal and unexplainable. These elements are certainly on display in his new story collection, First Person Singular, but the dominant mode here is memory. There is his immense popularity, of course, but also the strange radiance of his work and his tendency to present mysteries or puzzles with no solutions. One begins a new Haruki Murakami book with high expectations. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
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