Wed 27 Sep 2006
After having just finished reading Catch-22 on Sunday and two other excellent books this summer, I was desparately in search of something new to read. Last year, I finally got myself around to reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and absolutely loved it. Thus, on Sunday evening, I pulled out my copy of The Charterhouse of Parma. Twenty pages later, it just wasn’t happening for me, so I decided to leave it for some future date. I then turned to one of my alltime favorites, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (of whom I have written about previously). Norwegian Wood gets its name from the Beatles’ song of the same title, and is one of those stories that I wish I could re-read a hundred times for the very first time. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Curiously enough, the novel tends to be better received by my male friends than my female ones . . .
In any event, after having re-read the first chapter, I find myself incredibly frustrated by the fact that Murakami has written exactly what I have been aspiring to say in my unwritten, unpublished novel entitled Digressions. In its essence, Digressions covers the relationship people have with their memories and memories of memories over time, and precisely how our memories of events in life change over time creating in and of themselves a new sensory experience. As a consequence of re-experiencing each memory uniquely, we are given the impression that we have lost something or that something essential is missing in our lives. When I re-read Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart last year, I was also disturbed by this same notion and how similar the story was going to be to my first unwritten, unpublished novel (whose title I shall not reveal at this time). I have since had to readjust the novel’s entire plot scheme.
October 9th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
[…] I am just about to go to bed and finish off the long day by reading Haruki Murakami’s short story, “The Year of Spaghetti” from his new book of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. As you may know from two previous posts (Noruwei no Mori and Haruki Murakami), I am very much a fan of the Japanese novelist. In any event, this story is about a guy who spends an entire year cooking pasta for himself everyday, seven days a week, and always eats the pasta by himself. As a matter of fact, he believes that pasta should be eaten by oneself in solitude. When I read the following lines, a huge smile formed stretched across my face (emphasis added in italics): “Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti –especially on a rainy afternoon — I had the distant feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person I imagined about to visit me was each time different. Sometimes stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once it was a girl with slim legs whom I had dated at school, and once it was myself from a few years back, come to pay a visit. And one time it was none other than William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm . . . Not one of these people, though, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.” […]