The Crabshack Gallery

Recent Reads: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

23rd June, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - No Comments

Toru Okada is a young man in Japan with a wife and home but unsure of his place in life   Soon after he leaves his job to discover what he really wants, his cat disappears, then his wife… and to find them, Okada must search at the bottom of a deep well.  OF HIS MIND.

Well, not exactly, but close enough ;)

As may be apparent from my flippancy, I did not like this book.  It wasn’t a matter of it being a chore to read (although I personally found the writing a bit choppy, which may partly be due to translation issues), but the book as a whole seemed less than the sum of its parts.  There were some interesting scenes, some mildly interesting characters (although most were too intentionally quirky for my tastes), but these were connected by only the slimmest of threads.  In the end, I realized I had managed to travel from point A, and, by ambling about randomly, had landed at an arbitrary point B.  And while I realize that post-modern books often don’t follow the usual structure of a novel, this left me very unsatisfied.  Unresolved plot points, weird events without explanation, and being waaaaay too long has a way of doing that (and yet I liked Infinite Jest).

I dislike using the term “self-indulgent” in describing artistic works, because I feel that if an artist likes their own work, they’ll probably think others will like it too; by being self-indulgent, they’re creating something they think is good (this is probably a very naive view) and  that term is only used when they don’t quite pull it off, even when it can be applied to successful works.  Anyway, the point of my bringing this up is that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle struck me as self-indulgent: more an exercise in writing than a book for others to read.

Looking back on this review, I sound harsher than I really feel.  I didn’t like the book, but it wasn’t terrible by any means.  It’s just I got nothing out of it, and sometimes indifference is more disappointing than visceral hatred, which at least has entertainment value (I’m looking at you, The Lovely Bones.  Six years after the fact and I still remember the crappiness).

And on that note, I’ll leave you ;)