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A review by drmaernardi
Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami
5.0
"December's come again, and the winter birds fly overhead, and I keep on getting older."
What does it mean to lose touch with reality? Socrates argued that writing made people forgetful, since a backup depository of whatever you're learning makes it irrelevant to actually remember and analyze the conversation (be it spoken or in a book) on the spot. You can do it later, and if you forget you can remember it later. But what about life? Memories are recollections at best, patchworks in most cases, trusted lies at worst.
What I read in that last sentence is the frustration of living year after year without learning anything of real use, the tingling feeling that you've become used to glaze over stuff (even if your job as a writer is mostly to observe, as the "boyfriend" invitedly points out) and that maybe this time your habit really did harm to the world, that by missing a detail you've caused a great deal of suffering.
I will throw the obvious statement that this short story reminded me a lot of Lynch's movies, there's the concept of an "all-evil" persona (Lost Highway's Mistery Man, Twin Peaks' BOB), the concept of doubles (well, pretty much the whole filmography) and of the parallel reality (again, really present in most movies in various amounts).
I will probably read in soon to see if I get different feeling compared to the Audio version.
Listened on: "The New Yorker: Fiction" podcast, episode "Andrea Lee Reads Haruki Murakami".
What does it mean to lose touch with reality? Socrates argued that writing made people forgetful, since a backup depository of whatever you're learning makes it irrelevant to actually remember and analyze the conversation (be it spoken or in a book) on the spot. You can do it later, and if you forget you can remember it later. But what about life? Memories are recollections at best, patchworks in most cases, trusted lies at worst.
What I read in that last sentence is the frustration of living year after year without learning anything of real use, the tingling feeling that you've become used to glaze over stuff (even if your job as a writer is mostly to observe, as the "boyfriend" invitedly points out) and that maybe this time your habit really did harm to the world, that by missing a detail you've caused a great deal of suffering.
I will throw the obvious statement that this short story reminded me a lot of Lynch's movies, there's the concept of an "all-evil" persona (Lost Highway's Mistery Man, Twin Peaks' BOB), the concept of doubles (well, pretty much the whole filmography) and of the parallel reality (again, really present in most movies in various amounts).
I will probably read in soon to see if I get different feeling compared to the Audio version.
Listened on: "The New Yorker: Fiction" podcast, episode "Andrea Lee Reads Haruki Murakami".