Shutter

 Shutter

By Ramona Emerson

This is one of the first books I've purchased in a while. I did so after hearing an interview with the author

on Fresh Air. It sounded like nothing I'd read in a long time. After I bought it, I sat on it for a long time. It's a thin novel, and I guess I was enjoying the anticipation of the story. When I did crack the pages, I wasn't disappointed.

The book is the story of Rita Todacheene, who works as a forensic photographer in Albuquerque, NM. She's had a fascination with cameras and photography since she was young. Dead people, too. It turns out she was able to see them when others couldn't. It is/was at once a gift and an affliction; it allowed her to connect with her dead grandfather; but other spirits had come to her demanding justice. That was the case when Rita showed up to document a particularly grisly death that involved a woman falling from an overpass before being smashed to bits by unsuspecting cars below. It was ruled a suicide, but the woman in question shows up in Rita's life and is quite insistent that it was murder. She won't let Rita rest until the truth is unraveled.

This book had it all. It was funny in parts, suspenseful in others. It kept me rapt and it was done all too soon -- just as I suspected.

Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World

 Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

By Haruki Murakami

January means Murakami! I'm to the point where I need to dig a little bit to find books of his that I haven't

read. 

This novel takes place in what appears at first to be two different locations. The first is a futuristic Japan in which two groups, the System and the Semiotics, are in a kind of battle over information. Our main character is a "calcutec" who works for the government-backed system. His expertise is "shuffling" data, which I think is meant to be a form of encryption designed to keep it safe from the thieving Semiotics. One day this Murakami man -- kind of ho hum, divorced, aimless -- is summoned to do some shuffling for a mad-scientist type who lives and works in an underground layer. His work there captures the attention of the Semiotics, who bust into his apartment and knife him in the stomach, which sets off a trip back to the underground to rescue the mad scientist -- and figure out what the hell is going on.

This story alternates with another tale, this one set in a vague, mystical Town described as "the end of the world." Here "beasts" (unicorns) roam in and out of the town's walls, everyone is assigned a job by a gruff gatekeeper, and everything is a facsimile of the "real" world. Our Murikami man is newly arrived in this town. He is assigned the job of "dreamreader"; every evening, he goes to a library stocked with the skulls of the beasts, which glow with memories if he concentrates hard enough. Things are peaceful and calm, but, of course, there is a catch: Murikami man was separated from his shadow upon entry to his town and, with the onset of winter, the shadow isn't doing well. If it dies, the man will lose his "mind" -- that is, his ability to think for himself and of himself as an individual. The shadow devises an escape plan, which the man seeks to execute in the novel's final pages.

The two stories converge when we learn that this "end of the world" is really a figment of the real-world Murikami man's subconscious, in which he is doomed to be stuck because of the operation that allowed him to "shuffle", a task that requires the disassociation of the left and right brains. He learns from the scientist that he has about 25 hours left before he is stuck inside this mental creation for eternity. The escape from the Town that takes place in the alternating chapters suggests that there is hope he can avoid this fate. But, at the last moment, the man decides to save his shadow but nevertheless remain in the Town. He thinks he can both retain his "mind" and stay in his made-up world. 

It all seems like a meditation on the nature of consciousness. To what extent can we, and do we, live in a world of our own mental making? How do our subconscious thoughts and make up express themselves in our everyday life? Who really controls us -- are we hardwired from the beginning or do we have real choices? Does consciousness die when we do? 

These are all questions that Murakami explores in his other novels as well. I just read that this book is supposedly one of Murakami's favorites, though I wouldn't put it in that place. I guess the science fiction components felt less mystical than his other books and more scientific. There is one chapter in which the scientist explains "shuffling" that really lost me. Still, the action picks up toward the end, and I really appreciated, though am a bit haunted by, the twist at the end. Till next January, Haruki!