Murakami - First Person Singular

 Haruki  Murakami, First Person Singular (Harvill)

Nope. I've just deleted the whole pastiche Murakami story I had put here because it just can't be done.

He makes one feel such empathy somehow, as if he's your mate, as if it's him (and sometimes it might be) that I thought I could do a story about me that served as a review of him. It didn't work, to say the least.

I don't know how long it took him to write but it took much less than a day to read, idyllically. The silky, smooth prose (in the translation into American) is like not noticing one's getting drunk on champagne because it goes down so easily, admittedly without very many words on a page, that you don't realize you're taking on a bit more.

Exactly what that is is less easy to say. It's why I've taken to commenting on Paul Muldoon's poetry with my bad impersonations. There is a trick to it or else it's magic but what it certainly is is immense pleasure, which is all we want from reading or writing.

Murakami has become derivative from previous Murakami but I'm sure, as one finds oneself at a mature age, you are allowed that. The elements of Japanese and American literature - Mishima, Tanizaki, Raymond Chandler, maybe - might be among those he owes a debt to but he's been his own hugely successful brand for a long time now and the shelves devoted to his books are evidence enough that his legerdemain, or maybe it's genius, works on me. 

I'm not entirely with his jazz. I refrained from locating my Miles Davis CD to play while I read but one can go with him further with classical music and classic pop. One also likes his memories of old girlfriends and how they still mean something to him even if the subtext suggests that all such things are temporary and that a certain solitariness, but not loneliness, are the natural human condition. 

Long-awaited, well worth the wait and certainly one of those books one can't do anything else but must read which means one destroys even sooner the thing one most wants to enjoy. But the Complete Thomas Hardy Stories, 950 pages, is here now which will provide until next week when two exciting new titles are due.