The Elephant Vanishes
By Haruki Murakami
If Murakami’s stories were fine wines, they’d smell familiar, taste peculiar, and linger on the tongue. You’d want a second glass.
Murakami’s characters are certainly not what stay with you. Indeed, most of the characters in this short story collection have no distinguishing features other than their profound humanity; they hang their laundry to dry, make dinner and wash the dishes, lounge around in their gardens and thumb through magazines. In other words, don’t pick up this book expecting action-packed adventure or windows into a protagonist’s inner world.
What can you expect? A complaints department employee responding to an innocuous letter of complaint with a long, rambling love letter. Newlyweds experiencing a hunger so intense that they hold up a McDonald’s. People emerging from a television set at three-quarters the size of “normal” people. And yes, an elephant vanishing without a trace.
Tossing aside the conventions of novel writing, Murakami hurls absurdities at the reader and offers no resolutions. You’re left on your own to ponder the pointlessness of existence, as you sit on your balcony turning the pages.
Thought-provoking? Yes. Confounding? A little. Depressing? Maybe. But there’s a lot more in these stories than echoes of Kafka and Camus: The beautiful writing is half the point, or perhaps three-quarters of it.
Alison Case
©Copyright 2011 Libretto,
Inc.
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