http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
I have two quotes from the article that might help shed light on the writer:
"The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized."
"He is notoriously obsessed with metaphors of depth: characters climbing down empty wells to enter secret worlds or encountering dark creatures underneath Tokyo’s subway tunnels. (He once told an interviewer that he had to stop himself from using well imagery, after his eighth novel, because the frequency of it was starting to embarrass him.) He imagines his own creativity in terms of depth as well. Every morning at his desk, during his trance of total focus, Murakami becomes a Murakami character: an ordinary man who spelunks the caverns of his creative unconscious and faithfully reports what he finds.
'I live in Tokyo,' he told me, 'a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism. Not magical. While I’m writing, it’s very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable.'”
Indeed, Murakami is able to blend the ordinary and the extraordinary very well-and he does so throughout the novel. Just the beginning, as an example. It appears to be an ordinary book describing an ordinary's man's ordinary life; however, with that weird phone call, the author is able to slowly introduce this extra-ordinary into what started as completely normal story.
ReplyDeleteAs the storyline develops, things get more and more extra-ordinary,
Murakami is also able to pass from dreams to reality extremely easily and smoothly, so much so that we don't realize when this switch occurs. We are reading this text with not the slightest idea if these events occurred in reality or in Toru's dreams, and it seems that the narrator is in this same confusion as we are in.
'I live in Tokyo,' he told me, 'a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism. Not magical. While I’m writing, it’s very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable.'”
ReplyDeleteIt is true that sometimes it is very difficult to find inspiration from external stimuli as Harukami already said and so one needs to focus and just dwell in their own imagination. They have to see the world not through their eyes but mind. Another interesting point is that of magic realism, one is free to believe whatever they want, everyone perceives the world in a different way. Thus if Harukami perceives it in one way his mind which is different from what others see as the apparent world then people may call it magical realism. However let us keep in mind that it is his righ to perceive however he pleases, it's his realism. Peace out yo....
So what is inside our heads, is just as real as what is outside of them.. Better not tell this to kids who have nightmares, yo!
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