The invitation takes him to a concert hall at the top of a mountain, bouquet of flowers in hand, only to find the concert hall long-since shuttered and abandoned. His most prominent memory of the girl in question was playing a duet of Mozart with her, and his ample mistakes hardly the sort of thing that might endear you to someone. It’s not that he was particularly close to this girl in fact, quite the opposite. The first story in the collection, Cream, is framed as a story the protagonist is telling us about having told to a friend, wherein he had accepted a postcard invitation to a piano recital from a girl he practiced alongside.
By my count, no cats this time around, but ample discussions of jazz, pop, and classical music, and plenty of anonymized male protagonists either in or remembering situations brought on by the women in their life. The stories here are perhaps looser bound to that perspective-based theme than to the eponymous throughline of 2014’s Men Without Women (though that theme is central to almost all of Murakami’s stories), but the stories still share enough similarities, given that Murakami’s fiction could practically be considered a micro-genre to itself. For all his flaws, his writing remains deeply evocative and alluring to me, effortlessly conveying the sense of longing and listlessness, the power of memory and remembering, and perhaps above all the deep unknowingness of life in a way that feels perhaps closer to my own experience than anyone else has ever expressed.įirst Person Singular contains eight stories, five of which appeared in various publications in the two years leading up to the book’s release. In my experience, people tend to either disdain his work, or adore it and I must admit here that I am indeed a card-carrying member of his fan club (or would be, should Mr. These blurbs seem to follow him around from book to book now but really, how would one top that? It doesn’t feel like a stretch to call Murakami perhaps the world’s most famous novelist he certainly is a cultural event.Īcross 14 novels, five short story collections, and various other writing across mediums and forms, Murakami has built up a near-cult-like following, as might be suggested by the blurbs above.
One of the blurbs accompanying First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami’s most recent short story collection, a follow up to his 2014 collection Men Without Women, comes from the novelist Steve Erickson, who writes: “More than anyone, Haruki Murakami invented twenty-first-century fiction.” Another, from Patti Smith, compares Murakami to The Beatles or now-Nobel-laureate Bob Dylan.
0 kommentar(er)
