The Strange Library: Haruki Murakami

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Readers looking for a light diversion in a heavily loaded holiday season should enjoy this existential vision. The Strange Library is not an equivocal success, but rather an interesting experiment, and Ted Goossen’s translation is generally fluid and unmarred by strange syntax or constructions. When translation of "The Strange Library" was announced with a release of just mere months after his most recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, it was like Christmas came early for me. His usual fascinations—the instability of identity, the uses of knowledge, the oppression of memory—fade in with just enough time to fade out, offering just enough light to coax you forward, deeper into the dream. Less bold, the words themselves seem to lack confidence in the same way that the young narrator does.

The Strange Library | Book reviews | RGfE - Reading Groups The Strange Library | Book reviews | RGfE - Reading Groups

Murakami succeeds in creating an aura of suspense and surreality - announced by the sounds "echoing ominously" - as we venture into the maze that is the underground Library, towards the basement and the erudite little old man in Room 107 who contrives to somewhat forcefully lead the Kid to the Reading Room. It looks like a beautifully designed and illustrated children's book, though it's rather dark for small children, and YA feels wrong as well.

A single page into the story, and we know - as does the nameless Kid - that all is not right at the Library today. The back cover folds over the top and bottom of the book, creating a slip-case like box out of the book itself, and each page corresponds to a full-color image that reflects the current actions of the story. The men looked so similar that they could have been brothers, just a shade off looking like identical twins. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The Strange Library: Murakami, Haruki, Goossen, Ted

The story is a fairly simple fable: a boy goes to the public library because he was idly wondering about the Ottoman tax collection system, and his mother always said, "If you don't know something, go to the library to look it up".It is the type of plot you would find in a children’s book, and what I enjoyed most was the way the story seems to play on the irrational fears you have as an over-imaginative child, always wondering how even the most mundane events could suddenly break into a life-or-death fantasy full of heros and villans.

The Strange Library | Haruki Murakami

Here, now, he finds himself swallowed up in something much larger and more terrifying, from books as completely immersive texts (as even something as dreary-sounding as The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector pulls him completely into its reality) to a surreal reality of characters verging on the absurd, from the old man who led him into this maze to, yes, a sheep man. The tricky thing about mazes is that you don't know if you've chosen the right path until the very end. And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don't know something, go to the library and look it up. I like to come to terms with a book’s themes and techniques on my own, without someone else pointing the way. He forces the boy to read three books and will only allow him to leave if he can recite them word for word.Sheepman sometimes turns into a beautiful young girl who speaks through her hands -- not with her hands as in sign language, but with her hands. Creí que el argumento tendría más desarrollo, o qué por lo menos ocurrirían más acontecimientos o aventuras, pero desafortunadamente todo terminó con un inexplicable «Fin» que me dejó muy descontento y amargado. Nightmares can be so terrifying that they cause the dreamer to wake up, but there are also bad dreams where the anxiety never reaches a level that awakens the dreamer.