The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

As one character says in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the protagonist (Toru Okada) is a normal guy which abnormal things happen to.  The novel starts out with Toru, after throwing in an unsatisfying entry level job at a law firm, searching (not very hard) for a purpose in life – or at least something half-way fulfilling to do with his day.  Just as his life is going nowhere slowly, there is also something not so great about his relationship with his wife.  Their cat has also just disappeared, which his wife sees as a bad omen.

Then the cast of quirky characters start to appear in Toru’s life. Most have a somewhat dark and bizarre story to tell.  Maybe I am a bit slow, but as I got about half way through the book I started to realise that these people all had something significant to say to Toru (and the reader) and there were some connected themes spanning their disparate stories.

The book has many elements which are recurring in many of Murakimi’s works – cats, wells (the water kind – not sure if there is any other kind), men who are overtly passive yet at some level searching for meaning in their life, the bizarre (if not surreal), and references to music and popular culture.

It also ends, as many Murakami books do, with some aspects of the story resolved, but many others threads left hanging.  Rather than being a frustration of the book, I found this added to its magic.

The novel is written in Japanese, but the writing is so captivating and the translation so good that I found it is an absolute joy to read in English.

After finishing it, I was left feeling grateful to have revisited this wonderful novel as a part of my journey through the 20 novels I had loved most when I first read them. Pity I didn’t feel the same about the next novel I read…..

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

 

Atlas Shrugged lost none of its power or ability to hold me for over 1,000 pages on the second reading. Both times I read it, I enjoyed the griping narrative as the underlying plot unfolded and the mystery at the core of the novel was slowly resolved.

The novel is set in a world where the politicians, on the premise of equalising opportunity and wealth, impose levels of taxation and industrial regulations which make individual success an impossibility.  The underlying reality is that these laws and the redistribution of wealth is driven more by political power and “pull” than any true socialist ideal.  The book tracks how those who are the drivers of the economy and higher aspects of the culture respond, and the effect this has on the society and economy.

Certainly the theme is heavy but the storyline, in large part, kept me totally engaged.  As with many (maybe most) really large books, there seems to be an excess of needless repetition.  In Atlas Shrugged this occurs mainly when the author gets into a philosophical monologue. My view was once I got the idea of what she is banging on about, I felt free to skip forward.  On the second reading I only did this once – but really a 60 page lecture seemed to me a bit OTT.

The novel challenged my paradigms and asked questions which I had not deeply considered before:

• Does our society and its laws (including the tax laws) encourage and reward success or the opposite?
• When a politician says they are allocating money on the basis of ‘need’, how are they assessing ‘need’?
• When all humanity (except those who are enlightened) are fundamentally motivated by maximising their own happiness, is acting selfishly fundamentally bad – as most religious teaching tells us?
• Why should you, who have been motivated and hard working, be obliged to give some of your wealth to people who are lazy and contribute nothing to society?

Clearly the novel is only going to support Ayn Rand’s agenda and I felt she didn’t answer some other questions (though she may have done so in other books):

• Should society support its members who  have a lack of capacity – either mental or physical?
• Further to this, how does a society help those members who are stuck in the poverty trap maximise their opportunity?
• Are there services that are important to provide to all members of society regardless of their wealth – access to hospitals, education, police, etc.? Would a regressive taxation system deliver enough money to fund these and still leave enough for the low paid to survive?
• What would the law and order implications be if simultaneously the government cut all social security payments and the community stopped giving to charities?

If you are extremely left wing and only want to read books for the “converted” then this novel is not for you.  If you are willing to have your paradigms challenged (or if you are  really right wing, reinforced) and want a engrossing read, then this is a recommended read.