Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (January 2019)
Haruki Murakami’s regular position atop worldwide bestseller lists owes much to his first major success, Norwegian Wood. This 1987 novel put the Japanese novelist on the international map and has left readers over the ensuing three decades eagerly awaiting his newest release.
It was challenging for me to determine exactly what I thought about this book. It wasn’t my favorite of his works, my conclusion based mostly on how little I recall about the book just four months after rereading, but I did zip through the novel and that’s usually a good sign regarding my reading experience.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a handful of good insight tucked into the notes I took on Norwegian Wood. Those should be enough for an additional post or two over the next few days. For today, I thought I would be too clever for my own good and use some thoughts from Norwegian Wood to tear down the fourth wall of these reading reviews.
One up: Norwegian Wood starts with the protagonist reminiscing about a time from two decades ago. Murakami notes here that in addition to all the standard losses in life such as friends, times, and places, memories are also subject to eventual disappearance. This thought ties closely to the point of these reading reviews – without them, I fear I would lose some of the lessons and ideas I experienced while reading.
One down: Murakami writes in one scene that people sometimes develop habits and routines as a survival technique. For these people, change forces them to confront their fear of losing control. A similar thought pointed out that someone going on in great detail about the trivial or inane might simply be avoiding another topic. I thought both of these insights suggested the danger in a routine reading review because using a regular structure is a convenient way to hide my ignorance or discomfort in writing about certain ideas that emerged from a given reading experience.
The fourth wall: The one major ‘behind the scenes’ insight about a reading review is the difficulty of removing ideas from the final draft. It is like one of Norwegian Wood’s many lessons – being surrounded by endless possibilities means it will be very difficult to pass any of them up.
The fourth law: It’s easy to think too much about these reading reviews and ask myself – what is the point? What is the point of hammering these out while the rest of the world passes right on by, drinking and carousing in the streets of Beacon Hill? I’m reminded of a thought from this book about grammar – although it has no concrete daily purpose, it does equip students to think systematically about large, complex concepts. My goal is something similar – although the reading reviews alone are pointless (and are doomed to remain so), the process of sorting, selecting, and synthesizing my notes is good practice for applying certain vital skills in my life outside TOA.
Just saying: The key to being a good conversationalist isn’t much different from figuring out these reading reviews – the task is to the find the most interesting things someone said (or wrote) even if that person isn’t saying (or writing) anything interesting.
