After Dark by Haruki Murakami
#33 in my 2007 book challenge was After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, the first book I’ve read by this author.
any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.
The book is the giant octopus, and the reader is sucked in.
We know. But we are not qualified to become involved., …We look down…from above….Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away….The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image….until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness. The movement is beyond our control.
Murakami toys with point of view and perspective in brave and exhilarating ways.
No one answers our questions. Our question marks are sucked, unresisting, into the final darkness and uncompromising silence of the night.
The author honors his readers by not explaining every little thing. The images, characters and ideas in this book linger; my brain continues to puzzle over them.