Norwegian Wood

 Norwegian Wood

By Haruki Murakami

Even after reading the book, I was a bit confused about the title. Music and art often play supporting roles in

Murakami novels, but putting a song in the title suggests it will take center stage. And while the song does appear several times in this story, I didn't quite get why the author would give it such significance. Then I read this New York Times review and the opening sentences cleared it up for me. It's the lyrics, silly: "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." Which is the book in a nutshell. So I guess that's why I make my living teaching middle school and not writing book reviews. 

Anyway -- back to Murakami! Yes! The "I" in this story is a typical Murakami man, this time named Toru Watanabe. Like most of Murakami's main characters, he is a soul adrift and detached from the world. Despite his good nature and intelligence, he is inexplicably friendless in the busiest city in Japan. And he is haunted as he tries to make sense of a traumatic past.

The trauma in this story stems from the suicide of Toru's best (and only) high-school friend at the age of 17. It bubbles up when Toru, now studying at a Tokyo university, runs into his best friend's girlfriend, Naoko. The three were inseparable during their high school years -- a relationship that conjures Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki -- and become so again in this new stage of life, taking long walks on Sunday afternoons before Toru's shift at a record store. Naoko has a mesmerizing pull on Toru -- much like Murakami's effect on the reader -- and the two fall in "love". I put it in quotation marks because it is an attraction that seems to strive more  to make sense of their common friend's death than to take joy on one another.

Not long after they meet, Naoko moves to an sanitarium of sorts to recover from an unnamed mental illness. Toru visits her there, and, when he does so, enters an world separate from the seemingly inane drivers of "reality". This seems to be one of the central meditations of the book: Whether it is better to be of the world or detached from it. Symbolizing this choice is a relationship Toru develops with a fellow co-ed named Midori. As Midori explains after announcing her love for Toru: "I'm a real, live girl, with real, live blood gushing through my veins." In the end, Toru -- unlike many other characters in the book -- chooses real life.

I simply cannot imagine picking up a book whose sole plot is a love triangle. And that is Murakami's magic: It doesn't matter what he is writing about, his style and tone and mood draw you into world. Reading him is like being in a meditative trance. It's a place I haven't visited for a year or so, and I was glad, as always, to be back.  

The Odyssey

 The Odyssey

A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds

Erin picked this up as something she might use for a mythology club that'll be running at school beginning in a few weeks. Since I was between books, I picked it up to. Given that it is a graphic novel, I ripped through it in an evening.

I guess what struck me about it, other than the pretty-cool graphics to go along with the story, was just how familiar it all is. I have no recollection of ever reading The Odyssey, though I must have at some point in school. It just feels like something running in the background of our culture. Which is pretty crazy given how old this story is. It is kind of amazing to think that humans have been telling and retelling the tale of Odysseus' travels for thousands of years. 

It is an idea that connects back to Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was certainly on my brain as I leafed through this book. It is interesting how the reading of one book can color your reading of another.

A Burning

 A Burning

By Megha Majumdar

The literal burning of the title happens late at night at a train station, where shadows of men are seen

fleeing while one after another train car is lit ablaze. More than a hundred are left dead. 

Meanwhile, in a nearby slum, a young woman named Jivan is pondering this atrocity. When her previous Facebook posts on the incident fail to garner enough likes as she wanted, Jivan reposts a video of a weeping woman who declares that police were at the seen and failed to act and so isn't the state just as much a terrorist as the people who lit the flames in the first place.

Jivan, it is clear, is striving, hoping for more. She has dropped out of school for a clerk job at a fancy clothing store, where she brings home her family's first steady income in a long while. She wants to be seen, to be somebody. 

But, it seems, in modern India, Muslims are not destined to be somebodys.

Because, due to her post or some other motivation, Jivan is arrested for the crime that she has nothing to do with. The poor, Muslim girl becomes a scapegoat for the nation, a charade of justice that fools enough people. 

Along the way, Jivan's fall allows others to rise. There is her former physical education teacher, PT Sir, who parlays testimony as the accused's former teacher into a plum job with a rising nationalist political party. And Lovely, a hijra -- which, based on some quick research, I think is an Indian term for someone who is transgendered --  follows a similar path to a starring role in a new movie. Both make the conscious decision to quicken injustice for Jivan for a better life for themselves. 

There is a cruel irony running in the background. The nationalist political party to which PT Sir belongs, and which wins election amidst Jivan's trial, preaches service to the state, subordinating the self for the good of all. But is self-service that leads party leaders to doom Jivan to what they know is an unjust fate. It is a commentary not just on India but the facade of the zero-sum game that many seem to think they must play to get ahead throughout the world.

As a reader, I will say this was a difficult but mesmerizing one to get through. You are sympathetic to each character in their striving. But it is Jivan with whom your loyalty lies, and it is hard, at the outset, to imagine anything but justice coming her way. That it doesn't is a gut punch that will be a bit hard to recover from.

The Eye of the Needle

 The Eye of the Needle

By Ken Follett

I came across this book one evening after the kids had found and ransacked a box of books my parents' dropped off about a year ago. I was just off Cloud Cuckoo Land, and thought I'd give it a shot. It was a winner.

Set in England during World War II, the book tells the tale of a German spy whose codename is "The Needle" owing to his penchant for killing with a stiletto knife. As cover, he goes by Henry Faber. With D-Day approaching, German officials send Faber to East Anglia to assess the size of the army amassing there. What he finds is a ruse -- inflatable tanks, plywood planes, and half-built barracks designed to trick the Germans into thinking that the landing target will be Calais. Faber photographs the truth and sets about returning the information to Germany so it can better defend the true location, Normandy.

Standing in his way is Britain's Military Intelligence (MI), whose ranks have expanded to include the likes of Percival Godliman, a Medieval historian who served with distinction in the previous war. Godliman (whose name is, come on, a bit obvious) and his colleagues track Faber to a remote island off the coast of Scotland, where he awaits a rendezvous with a U Boat. But it is one of the inhabitants of the island, Lucy, who becomes the real hero. She and her husband, David, had sought refuge on the island four years before when a car accident on the couple's wedding night left David legless -- and humorless. When Faber shows up, they are initially just glad to see another human being, and Lucy especially so. She conducts a tryst with Faber, who becomes uncharacteristically smitten with Lucy and so holds off on killing her -- which becomes his fatal mistake.

Whoa, what a page turner this was! Full of fairly graphic violence and, toward the end, sex, this was more of a book than I bargained for. I'd picked it up expecting silly cliches, but by the end I couldn't put it down -- even though I knew what the outcome had to be. I might check out more Follett in the future.

Still Life and A Fatal Grace

 Still Life and A Fatal Grace

By Louise Penny

I read these two mysteries, the first in the Armand Gamache series, back to back, and they are blurred in my head. In the first, a beloved community member is killed by an arrow. The search for the perpetrator leads investigators to her house, which the victim had kept under wraps from even her closest friends for decades. The reason, it turns out, was that it had been covered in folk art that held the clue to solving the crime. In the second, a decidedly unbeloved newcomer to the community was murdered at a post-Chritsmas curling match in an unusual way: through electrocution. On ice. In a crowd. The subsequent investigation revealed it was the victim's daughter, who had endured enough suffering at her mother's hand and mouth that no one could blame her for the crime.

But it isn't really the plot that keeps me coming back to these novels; it's the characters that really draw you in. There's Clara and Peter, the resident artists, and Ruth, the curmudgeonly poet, and Oivier and Gabri, the owners of the Three Pines Bistro, and, of course, Gamache himself, a man of inscrutable integrity and kindness who is, we learn, on the outs from the rest of the Surete because of his attempts to hold a fellow officer accountable. It is this drama that weaves through all of Penny's books. This stuff is literary candy -- I'm looking forward to going back for more.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

By Anthony Doerr

This is a paean. Not only does Doerr say as much in his afterward, but so does a New York Times book

review. Seems like people really like to use that word when they can. So: paean. That much is clear. A paean (why not squeeze as many as we can in?) to books.

The book that this book focuses on is a fictional Greek myth called, as the title suggests, Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is one of several threads that connects the many characters and settings that inhabit this book. Chronologically, there is: Anna, who lives in an about-to-be-besieged 15th-century Constantinople; Omeir, who is drafted into the military machine about to do the besieging; Zeno, a motherless son of a Greek immigrant trying to make a life for himself in rural Idaho; Seymour, of the same Idaho town, who is also trying to make sense of his place in the world; and Konstance, who, in the 22nd century, on a spaceship that has embarked on a 500-year journey to an exoplanet the inhabitants of the Argo hope will be a replacement for the ravaged earth they left behind. 

It is, chronologically, Anna who stumbles upon Cloud Cuckoo Land while trying to discover ancient manuscripts for paying Italians. In doing so, she sets the rest of the story in motion. The book is one of two possessions Anna takes with her while fleeing Constantinople; the other is a snuff box with an image of Urbana, Italy. During her escape, Anna runs into Omeir, a harelipped outsider who does not speak Anna's language. Still, the two stay together and make it to safety, a feat that Omeir believes is owed to Anna's mysterious book. And so as his final act, Omeir, his wife Anna long dead, takes the book to the city on the snuff box so it will be safe for all time.

Four centuries later, Zeno is in a North Korean prison camp when he meets and falls in love with a classics scholar named Rex. The two are soon separated, but not before Rex teaches Zeno some of the old language. In their last meeting, Rex encourages Zeno to try some translating, which he does upon his retirement from a highway department job in Idaho. Not long after, a discovery of an ancient text -- which turns out to be Cloud Cuckoo Land -- is made, and, amateur though he is, Zeno sets about making a translation. Which somehow captures the imagination of a group of fifth graders who urge Zeno to help them stage a play based on the old story.

It never happens. That is because Seymour, reeling from the destruction of a forest that killed a beloved Great Gray Owl to build condos, brings bombs into the library during play rehearsal so he can exact revenge on the development company just a few feet away. Zeno dies removing the bombs from the library. Seymour ends up in jail, where he matures and works to atone for his crime. Eventually, he does so by bringing back the 5th-grade survivors and presents them with a bound copy of Zeno's translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

One of those survivors is an Australian woman who will become the great grandmother of Konstance, who, spurred on by her father's quotations from the book, pieces a full story together. This gives her the courage to break out of the Argo, which has become beset by a pestilence, when she realizes that it is not actually hurtling through space but in fact sitting on the Icelandic tundra as part of a corporate experiment. 

So it all comes together. The story helps give meaning to five lives and, we can presume, many more. A paean indeed.