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A new collection of stories by Haruki Murakami bring back author s dreamy vibe and magical realism
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A new collection of stories by Haruki Murakami bring back author s dreamy vibe and magical realismAP
Last Updated: Apr 06, 2021, 04:26 PM IST
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Synopsis
The best story in the collection, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, is Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova .
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If you re not a fan of Murakami s dreamy vibe and magical realism, if you think that life is confounding and interesting enough without needing to add fairy dust, then this probably isn t the book for you.
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Haruki Murakami has a new collection of stories told in the first person by an unnamed older man obsessed with baseball, music, and the porous borders between memory, reality and dreams.
First Person Singular.
The stories in Haruki Murakami s new collection,
First Person Singular, have a sort of fractal nature you re reading a story by a middle-aged Japanese man in which a middle-aged Japanese man is telling you a story (and sometimes that story involves him telling other stories). You get drawn into the spiral, and soon you re in that strange world where many of his stories exist, a place full of his favorite things (jazz, baseball, the Beatles, though surprisingly few cats this time) and yet unmistakably odd, existing at a slight, unexplained angle to reality. In this book, I wanted to try pursuing a first person singular format, but I don t like relating my experiences just the way they are, Murakami tells me in an email interview. So I reshape them over and over and fictionalize them, to the point where, in some cases, you can t detect what they were modeled after. Through these steps, I gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the experience.