Rare is the occasion when I close a novel and wonder, What the hell did I just read? Kafka On the Shore feels like a few hours spent chasing a deranged author through a maze to an ambiguous ending.
There are some books that are driven by characters, and other books that are driven by things like setting. This is a book about places and time (and other dimensions), not people. In a private library which is more like a mausoleum, one of the rarified places which Murakami portrays so well, a Tiresias-like character named Oshima muses on books and music which remain interesting because there's something tedious and frustrating about them. The discussion of the otherworldly forest, limbo village, the shore, and the library are worth the price of admission. The characters, however, are so mediocre as to make me want to throw my hands in the air.
The characters, especially Kafka, are so different that applying the categories of hero / villain make very little sense in the book. In the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, readers find a dream hero, a kind of schmuck who does something awesome in dreams or in a parallel dimension and thereby saves people in our world. In Kafka on the Shore, readers find a dream antihero, who does terrible things in dreams but for not-so-terrible reasons. The kid is set up, and Murakami gives him an out.
The book leaves open many questions. Who and what is Kafka? It's harder to identify with this strange teen than, say, the Holden Caulfield-like protagonist of Norwegian Wood. Kafka is an innocent killer, and, perhaps an innocent rapist. He seeks to overcome his Oedipal curse, which he does through a kind of dream-time exposure therapy. The only way to overcome a curse, apparently, is to go through the damn thing. That sounds okay, except that it involves hurting other people. Eh...overall this is a great meditation on what it means to choose and to be guilty, but there's little joy in this read.
No comments:
Post a Comment