Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood – Huruki Murakami

“Memory is a funny thing”, writes Toru Watanabe, the narrator of Norwegian Wood. A song plays on board his flight to Hamburg, causing him to recall a period of his life 18 years earlier and “times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.” He focuses on a particular scene from his college days, reflecting that at the time he thought nothing of it, “I never stopped to think of it as something that could make a lasting impression”.

It has made a lasting impression though, one that forms the rationale for “writing this book. To think. To understand.” The story itself is an account of Toru’s college days and the relationships he makes and loses during that time. It is a coming of age tale, one of discovering love and sexuality. It is simply told but the story is captivating and full of characters who are complex, and deeply portrayed.

There is Naoko, the pretty former girlfriend of Toru’s dead best friend. Illusive and scarred by grief, she leaves Tokyo for a secluded retreat for those who are mentally unstable. Having fallen for her, Toru is left to wait for Naoko to recover and return to the world, cutting himself off from deeper relationships with others he meets in the meantime.

Nagasawa, from Toru’s dorm, becomes friends with Toru based on their shared taste in novels, although he believes that “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”. He takes Toru out for nights of drinking and womanising.

‘Storm Trooper’, is Toru’s roommate for a time. He does exercises around their room at 6am, insists on keeping the place immaculate and provides other humorous anecdotes for Toru to tell.

Reiko, Naoko’s hospital roommate, believes she is the sanest patient at the institution, but is marked by a complicated past. She is incredibly honest, tells Toru her backstory and becomes close with him.

Midori, one of Toru’s course mates, is eccentric and charming. She befriends Toru in a café and takes him on outings with her, even to visit her father in hospital. Midori is full of life despite the death of her parents and is both a free and freeing presence. Her relationship with Toru develops and forms some of the most endearing parts of the novel. For example, when Toru tells her she is cute, “so cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up”. When she asks how much he loves her, “enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter”.

The presence of death is strong in the novel, haunting the characters’ pasts. Toru, although lonely and serious, seems to put others at ease. Yet, in the end, it is unclear whether he himself gains resolution.

Norwegian Wood is not surreal like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Named after the Beatles song that Naoko loves so much, it is set in Japan in the 1960s and evokes time and place, although these merely serve as a backdrop to Toru’s personal life. The novel is beautifully written and I would definitely recommend it.

My Sister the Serial Killer

My Sister the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

This book is a funny, slightly disturbing read set in Lagos, about a woman whose sister (as the title says) is a serial killer! In an interview with the Observer, Braithwaite revealed that it was written during a short period of slight madness when she was trying to break writers block; she did not think My Sister the Serial Killer would turn out to be seen as her best work yet.

The novel is fast-paced from the outset, opening in medias res: “Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again”. We are immediately thrown into the story: Korede’s sister, Ayoola, has killed her boyfriend and it is not the first time this has happened. Its short chapters keep the pace going throughout. Braithwaite also switches between the present day and the girls’ childhood, gradually revealing a past trauma. The genre mixes thriller, romance, crime and family drama in a short compelling read which is full of dark, dead-pan humour. At the start, Korede focuses on bleach and how to clean up the blood. They move on to taking the body in a lift and the clumsiness and narrow escapes add to the sense of comedy about (rather than in spite of) the situation. Korede checks the apartment landing is clear and is tempted to pray no one comes out, “but I am fairly certain that those are exactly the types of prayers He doesn’t answer. So I chose instead to rely on luck and speed”.

The relationship between the two sisters seems to be the focal point of the novel. The narrator, Korede, the older sister, constantly feels a sense of responsibility over Ayoola, “that’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her […]” This seems to drive her to protect her sister from the police, to clean up after her, remove the evidence and put herself at risk as an accessory to murder. This does not come without a sense of injustice and bitterness, “it takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul” – her job is harder and more straining! To make matters worse, Ayoola does not even seem affected by her actions, “Do you not realise the gravity of what you have done? Are you enjoying this?” and remains as glamourous as ever.

Korede also feels jealousy for her sister’s attractiveness and the way she wins men and gains popularity with ease. Their mother only seems interested in Ayoola’s marriage prospects, “as though love is only for the beautiful” and when Ayoola walks into Korede’s workplace (the hospital), all heads turn because “she looks as though she has brought the sunshine in with her”.

Korede’s role as protector is complicated when her own crush, Tade, a doctor, starts dating Ayoola and Korede must choose between them.

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by the novel is: is it possible to commit murder and not really know it is wrong? This is presented through Ayoola’s character. There is a childlike innocence about her, so much so that Korede wonders if the knife that she carries, “the way other women carry tampons”, somehow has power based on its own (or previous owner’s agenda), “as if it were the knife and not her that was doing the killing”. She seems oblivious to the damage she has caused and shows no sense of guilt and shame. The murders do not even seem to have an impact on her own happiness, “Days ago, we gave a man to the sea, but here she is, dancing”. However, she does lie about the circumstances and she does enlist Korede to cover it up, suggesting she at least has some awareness of the consequences of her actions. This is left unresolved and leaves the reader with many unanswered questions.

What, then, is the novel’s moral? Does it have to have one? Perhaps it is human nature to look for a meaning. Braithwaite has said that is not trying to make a statement about Africa, though she does make subtle statements about race, for example, “she comes close to the colour black that we are all labelled with”. And the novel does not end with resolution or moral comeuppance. Braithwaite’s parents decided it was too dark for them and Braithwaite has admitted to struggling with the tension between her faith and the moral ambiguity of her work. However, she has said that writes to entertain, to make people laugh and therefore to bring some joy, “if there’s a story and you learn something along the way, it’s a bonus”.

Whilst Korede may have got away with covering up murder, she does not get away scot-free because she cannot escape the guilt. There are echoes of Macbeth with the washing away of blood and in her declaration, “What’s done is done”. Korede knows there is no going back and that after Muktar (the coma patient who hears all her secrets), “there will never be another opportunity to confess my sins or another chance to absolve myself of the crimes of the past … or the future”. With a stoic acceptance, she acknowledges that there may be more to come but considers her sister more important than her conscience:  “Ayoola needs me; she needs me more than I need untainted hands”. The novel seems to be asking if the reader would do the same.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

An unusual book and an incredibly popular one, this novel has won several awards and was even claimed to be one of the best novels of the 21^st century. The central character is Oscar, an overweight sci-fi nerd from the Dominican Republic growing up in the USA, a “social introvert” who has no luck with women.

Yet, it is not just about him. We are told the stories of his sister and mother and grandfather, giving backstory to the family. Lola, his sister, has a particularly moving story. She was, for me, the most likeable character and seems to be the one holding the family together, though she does at one point run away. One of the sad moments in the book is when Lola experiences the discovery of her mother’s cancer. The chapter opens with, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything”, and the use of the pronoun ‘you’, throughout the description of the change makes it more relatable for the reader: “and at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change”. She is not treated well by her mother who seems to have no compassion for her daughter, “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life”.

Beli’s backstory, however, allows us to forgive her somewhat for the negative treatment of her daughter. She too has suffered. For example, in a section where she is beaten, the narrator concludes that, “all that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly”.

The colloquial style is friendly and engaging, “You get the picture”, “Dominican parents! You got to love them!”, and “So what happened? A boy happened. Her First. NUMERO UNO Jack Pujols of course”. The novel is full of such phrases and also contains a lot of humour and sarcasm, for example, “she batted her eyes so much at him that she almost sprained her eyelids.”

It is, however, also very sinister at times, the light-hearted tone sometimes intensifies the shock of the reality of the character’s lives. For example, when Beli is at school, a boy in her class (in response to essay on where they would like to see themselves and the country in the coming years) says, “I’d like to see our country be a democracia like the United States. I wish we would stop having dictators. Also I believe that it was Trujillo who killed Galindez.” The response is, “That’s all it took. The next day both he and the teacher were gone. No one saying nothing.” This is also where it is left in the narrative, the shock hanging over the reader.

A book full of Caribbean history, cultural, literary and sci-fi references and a story with several narrators, and Spanish words interspersed, is often quite hard to follow! At least that’s what I found. In a BBC radio book club interview with Junot Díaz, he is asked if the reader is meant to understand it all. Reassuringly, he said that it is like life, so if you get two thirds of it you are doing well.

The main narrator is Yunior, supposedly Díaz’ alter ego, a self-conscious writer, “I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao […] this is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the matrix”. He is in love with Lola but blows their relationship by being unfaithful to her. At first his friendship with Oscar is to try and win around his sister but it comes to be more genuine and it is Yunior who narrates the final part of the novel: Oscar’s death and the aftermath. He admits that “Years and years now I still think about him. The incredible Oscar Wao. I have dreams where he sits on the edge of my bed.” He marks Oscar as a hero.

Although there is a sense of fate throughout the novel – we know Oscar’s life is ‘brief’, and he comes close to death through suicide attempts, the end still comes as a shock. However, Yunior is also there to remind us that life goes on. He salvages Oscar’s copy of Watchman, which has a circled passage: “in the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” This may be the end of Oscar’s life but the supposed family curse is not over, nor is the power of the past and brutal history. More positively, neither are the lives of his friends and family over and there is some hope in the prospects of Lola’s daughter to break the cycle.

The Outsider/The Stranger

The Outsider – Albert Camus

I am surprised that I have never read this before, but for such a famous novel, it was a lot more understated than I expected. This modest style of writing, however, seems to be exactly the point. Meursault, the main character, lives a life of simplicity. He is matter-of-fact and always speaks the truth. He is affected most by physical aspects of the world around him rather than emotions – for example: heat, hunger, tiredness, sexual drive.

Hi lack of sentiment is expressed from the very first sentence: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know”. He does not show any sadness at his mother’s death – when he hears the news, at the funeral, or afterwards: “after all, nothing had changed”. He strikes up a relationship with Marie, an old acquaintance, and when she asks if he loves her he tells her he doesn’t think so. He seems indifferent also, when his friend Raymond confesses to abusing his mistress and is easily persuaded to cover for him.

This is not to say that Meursault is unaware of his surroundings. He describes the “luminous, sun-drenched countryside” at the funeral and the “blood-red earth tumbling” onto the coffin. When back home, he also seems to enjoy people watching from his window and is shown to be observant as he considers “a small rather frail man”. “Seeing him […] I understood why local people said he was distinguished”.

Part one of the novel ends when Meursault shoots an Arab on a hot beach without reason. It seems initially that there will be a fight between Raymond, Meursault and the Arabs but they retreat and it is only when he returns to the beach alone that he kills a man. He doesn’t seem to know why he does it, only that the heat is unbearable – he can feel his skin burning and there is a “dazzling red glare” from the sand; the Arab’s spear is also “dazzling”. His narrative expresses “all I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against by forehead”. But as he shoots and kills, he realises the gravity of his actions and firing the four bullets is “like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness”.

Part two focuses on his imprisonment and trial. When questioned by the magistrate he remarks “I’d read similar descriptions in books before and it all seemed like a game”. In fact the trial is presented almost as a game – the prosecutor using irrelevant details to assert Meursault’s guilt and constantly bringing it back to the death of his mother, as though he had killed her too.

At one point Meursault’s lawyer states: “Here we have the epitome of this trial. Everything is true and yet nothing is true.” This also seems to epitomise the novel – it has a sense of unreality to it, and yet, at the same time, is driven by factual detail and a character who is unable to tell anything but the truth, even when his life depends on it. Even when considering his fate, facts seem to comfort Meursault. He thinks about what the guillotine will really be like, “you always get exaggerated ideas of things you know nothing about. I was made to realise that on the contrary everything was quite simple”.

He does, however, realise that he “used to feel happy” and sleep an untroubled “dreamless sleep”. He seems to try and convince himself that it doesn’t matter whether he dies now or in twenty years, but the “leap” his heart gives suggests otherwise.

Meursault does not like to gives things meaning. Throughout he asserts “it didn’t mean anything”. He grows angry with the priest when he tries to convince him to turn to God. Here Camus’ absurdism is shown: “Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why […] throughout the whole of this absurd life I’d been leading […] in the equally unreal years I was living through” – everybody will die. “What did it matter if he was accused of murder and then executed for not crying at his mother’s funeral?” – In the afterward, Camus explains this: Meursault is an outsider to society because he refuses to play the game, to conform, to lie. According to Camus, he is “the only Christ that we deserve”.  Meursault’s lawyer also argues, he is “an honest chap, a regular and tireless worker […] a model son who had supported his mother for as long as he could”. He may be honest, but he is still guilty, and yet, through the first person, direct and simple narrative, we are made to empathise with Meursault and the way he is unfairly challenged.

It is very powerful for such a short book and one that will stay with you. I would definitely recommend The Outsider.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy

So, instead of reading, I listened to this one as an audiobook. It felt almost like cheating! It was a very different experience and I found it quite difficult to follow the plot. Though, I don’t think that was only due to the experience of listening to a book rather than visually seeing words on a page. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a complex and exhausting novel, covering a great deal of time, characters and historical information, often breaking away from the storyline to describe the physical and political landscape. This is dissimilar to Arundhati Roy’s first book, The God of Small Things, which although touches on many of the same themes, felt to me much more contained, focussing on a family.

In an interview with the Guardian, Arundhati Roy said: “To me there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.” Perhaps that is what she is doing through this novel and that is why it is fragmented – like a dance trying to make sense of the world and as chaotic as the characters’ experiences: “They continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts defying gravity”.

What stood out for me with Arundhati Roy’s writing, as with The God of Small Things, was the way even the most ordinary things are given the most beautiful descriptions. This was perhaps intensified by hearing the words in her own voice. She writes of “raw haunting music” that “shook the dust of the stars” and the heat that “shimmered on the streets like a belly dancer”. She seems to care for her characters by giving them attention and warmth. The little girl they take in to look after, the ‘mouse’, is said to “[absorb] love like sand absorbs the sea” and the character Saddam Hussein who works as a security guard has eyelashes that “looked like they worked out in a gym”.

Consideration is given throughout the novel to language itself and the way in which it helps create the world we live in. At the beginning, when the mother finds out she has given birth to a transgender child, she is described as falling “through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed”. She considers that in her language, Urdu, everything is masculine or feminine, even objects so “was it possible to live outside language?” In this world, language restricts understanding and almost denies a place for this baby.

Arundhati Roy seems to play with language to show how she can change the reader’s (or listener’s) experience. For example, on several occasions in the novel, she uses incredibly long lists with repetition (for example items of ‘steel’) which is uncomfortable and breaks the flow of the prose. She also draws attention to the book as a book by talking to the reader through the reading of one of the central character’s notebook, for example, “Question 1: what is the moral of the story?”

Language also creates irony: in disdain for media invasion, she writes that the “breaking city” is shown as “breaking news”, and “no one pointed out the irony”, by her writing she does just this and her tone is often sarcastic. Words from the notebook: “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature” also seem ironic – Roy is creating literature out of Kashmir, though not in a conventional way.

The novel spans decades and momentous world events take place in its duration. They watch the twin towers on TV on 9/11 “[buckle] like pillars of sand”, distant and foreign. Roy demonstrates the fragility of life and human created-things, as well as the destructive power humans themselves create. The ensuing war brings warplanes that “sang in their skies like unseasonal mosquitoes” and fleeing people.

The story itself mainly follows Anjum (a hermaphrodite) various stages of her life and the people that come in and out of it, as well as the background of Delhi during the course of her life. There is also the narrative following Tilo (an activist with the notebook), and the happenings surrounding her in Kashmir. The two eventually meet. There are many other minor characters throughout the course of the novel with their own sub-plots. Roy challenges gender stereotypes and questions existing structures. She points out the senselessness of certain boundaries, for example, women not being allowed in the cemetery; “was it to protect the grave from the women, or the women from the grave?” It is not just gender boundaries she exposes, but those of religion, caste, politics and space. To Arundhati Roy, however, all are valuable, often choosing to focus on those shunned by society.

The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things is the tragic tale of two twins who experience loss and death too early to at first understand. It is the story of an accident, of fate and of different kinds of love. What I found most striking about the novel was the beauty of Arundhati Roy’s writing. Each sentence is so well crafted it seems like poetry rather than prose. She gives ordinary things splendour and creates a world so vividly by appealing to all the senses.

It is fitting for her to write in such a way when the story itself is concerned with the ‘small things’ as suggested by the title. The God of Small Things himself is Velutha, an ‘untouchable’ who lives nearby and is adored by the twins and their mother, though they visit him in secret. His title comes from the passage where Arundhati Roy describes the two lovers in their happiness, before tragedy strikes: “They stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.” Their relationship is doomed from the outset, and they know this, so they choose to dwell on the details, the simple pleasures, the moments of contentment.

Arundhati Roy draws our attention to ‘the small things’ throughout. When Velutha is beaten and arrested after being falsely accused of abducting Sophie Mol (the twins’ cousin, visiting from England), one of the details I found most moving was the fact that he is “naked but for his nail varnish.” This is nail varnish that the children have given him when playing and he entertains them by joining in: “a grown man entertaining three racoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction”.

It is fiction the children turn to in the face of a tragedy too much to bear – when they lie in the hut whilst Velutha is beaten, and when Estha is forced to falsely agree that Velutha is responsible for the death of Sophie Mol, the twins pretend that he is someone else: “You were right. It wasn’t him. It was [his cousin] Urumban.”

Fate is strikingly present throughout the novel. Not written chronologically, but with the grown-up Rahel looking back, The God of Small Things gives the sense that history had already been written for them and they couldn’t have done anything to change what happened. Each character is flawed and blame is not placed on any one of them. Even the hypocritical policemen who beat up Velutha are “only history’s henchmen” and the opportunistic Comrade Pillai “merely slipped his ready fingers into History’s waiting glove.”

Though it seems unchangeable, this history or fate they are given is a heavy burden for the characters to bear, particularly the twins who see too much, too young. Estha is tainted by a sexual encounter with one of the cinema staff even before Sophie Mol arrives. These events stay with them, “History’s smell. […] It would lurk forever in ordinary things […] In the absence of words.” The death of Sophie Mol and the events surrounding it have haunted the twins all their lives.

In the episode where Estha is sent away on a train and Ammu tells the children that she is going to set up a school which they both can attend. Rahel is excited about this and the thought of “proper punishments” – she wants everything to come with a price, which once paid, allows them to move on: “They didn’t ask to be let off lightly. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with build-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.” Their trauma remains unresolved which is somehow portrayed as worse than Velutha’s fate: “Death came for him. And for the little family curled up and asleep on a blue cross-stitch counterpane? What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.”

The novel is also concerned with the ‘big things’: westernisation, communism, corruption of authority and India’s caste system to name a few. Through her writing, Roy shows distain for the tourists coming to India and ignoring its reality: “they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigour and Air-conditioning”. She exposes the hypocrisy of the police – the sign on their wall (“Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courtesy. Efficiency.”) at odds with their behaviour. She portrays the injustice of the caste system through Velutha – he is the least-flawed character in the novel but he is killed violently as a result of his taboo relationship with Ammu. “They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.” Roy is an activist. Although The God of Small Things may not be as explicitly political as her non-fiction writings, it demonstrates how the ‘big things’ impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people in India.

The God of Small Things also has something to say about the nature of storytelling. Roy’s own story moves around in memories and its omniscient viewpoint allows us to see the child’s point of view along with the backstories of many characters. Each one has unlikeable characteristics but with reason. All are broken. She questions the idea of beginnings and endings, “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it.” And she describes familiar events in new ways, dispelling cliché – at the drowning of Sophie Mol: “There was no storm music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy.”

The novel talks about India’s Kathakali and what makes them great: “they don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings […] you know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.” The God of Small Things is written in a similar way – the reader knows the tragedy from the outset, yet is enticed by her writing. The novel begins with a funeral and it ends with the lovers’ encounter, a bittersweet ending: “She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow.” We know that their tomorrows will run out but in this moment, ‘tomorrow’ is what matters.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This novel is set during the 1960s and the Nigerian Civil War which was fought to counter the secession of Biafra (Igbo people) from the Republic of Nigeria. The story is told through three perspectives of characters connected but also very different, though all on the side of the Igbos. We do not have an omniscient narrator, or three first-person narrators, instead, the narrative follows them closely but without a full exploration of their thoughts. I found it a struggle to read at times but worth the effort and despite the heavy subject matter, there are comic moments.

The three viewpoints are held by: Urgwu, a houseboy to Odenigbo (a University Professor); Olanna, Odenigbo’s lover and eventually his wife, a young woman who has left her life of privilege with her parents to live with her ‘revolutionary’ (as her sister calls him); and Richard, an Englishman who is writing a book about Nigeria and falls in love with Olanna’s sister.

Another narrative is woven into the story: the extracts of a book, ‘The World Was Silent When We Died’. This is the book that Richard starts to write but, by the end, we discover that its authorship belongs to Urgu. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie commented that as well as a device to give the basics of a history with which the reader might be unfamiliar, she wanted to make “a strongly-felt political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa”.

Telling the story is an important theme throughout. The book contains a lot of writers and books including the poetry of their friend, Okeoma. At the end when they finally return home, Odenigbo’s books are ripped and burnt. Olanna asks, “why did they have to burn them? […] Just think of the effort.” I found this somehow more offensive than the defecated bathtub as she points out the conscious determination it took to destroy them. Kainene burns Richard’s book when she finds out he has betrayed her. He takes this as a sign that she will not leave him and is relieved which causes him to reflect on his status as a writer: “He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love”.

The failure of stories is also highlighted. Urgwu realises that: “he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp […] But he tried, and the more he wrote, the less he dreamed.” His writing provides an important testimony but the act itself also proves to be cathartic.

Outsiders are generally portrayed in a negative light. Richard’s English friend Susan is irritating and condescending, American journalists are briefly featured towards the end of the novel as stereotypically obnoxious and racist. Richard himself is awkward and often seems weak; his initial impotence in his relationship with Kainene surely symbolic.

At first, the lives of the central characters are relatively secure. The dramas come in their romantic and parental relationships. But, when war breaks out, we gradually see Olanna and Odenigbo’s life become more and more fraught and what they have decreases. They leave their house for a flat and then later one room in a shared building. At the start they have dinner parties and by the end they are reduced to one meal a day. Yet, they carry on with an amazing resilience and share the little that they have with neighbours. When Olanna first encounters the atrocities of war – when her friend is killed and she sees a severed head in a bowl – she is traumatised and cannot walk for several days. As war goes on, however, the horrors somehow become normalised. Or at least, they have to learn to live with them.

There is a great deal of attention given to bodily needs and functions: the descriptions of food, their sexual encounters, their need to use the toilet, vomit as a reaction to shocking sights, Baby’s illness. This intensifies the feeling that these characters are real, they are human. Their lives are not glamorous; they are ordinary people and they are all flawed.

The stark contrast of life before and during the war is highlighted especially when Olanna and Odenigbo have to shelter from bombs at their wedding. Later on, Olanna receives a letter from her former boyfriend, Mohammed, which mentions his cricket game whilst they are struggling to find enough food to live on.

This letter also highlights the difference between rich and poor, another theme throughout. Olanna’s parents are rich and when war breaks out they flee to England but Olanna and Kainene choose to stay, admirably loyal to their country. Urgwu, is often a comic character in the book, overly anxious to please his master but Odenigbo does not treat him as most houseboys are treated, for example, sending him to school, giving Urgwu his own room. Urgwu becomes one of the family and they are devastated when he goes missing.

Although by the end of the novel war has ended and Urgwu is not dead as they are for a while led to believe, there is not a great deal of resolution. Urgwu goes home to find that his mother has died and his sister has been raped; Urgwu himself has committed rape when he is forced to join the army and must live with the shame; and, most upsetting of all, Kainene, only recently reunited with Olanna, is missing. She leaves one day for the refugee camp never to return and it is impossible for Olanna and Richard to reconcile with the mystery of her disappearance. Should they assume she is dead and mourn the loss or go on hoping she will return?

Although the ‘half of a yellow sun’ is the symbol on the Biafran flag, I feel that it also represents the brokenness of Nigeria as a result of the war, something that cannot be immediately repaired.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel about a man who has given up his job, lost his cat and soon his wife. Following these events, he lives alone in the house, and is visited by and encounters many strange characters, from the psychics Malta and Creta Kano who are supposedly able to help find the cat, to the teenage neighbour May Kasahara who is obsessed with death. Events get more and more surreal and his dreams seem to impinge on reality.

This book takes its title from the “mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring” that can be heard from the house where Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko live. The bird becomes a symbol that reappears in several places in the novel and gives Toru his neighbour’s nickname for him, ‘Mr Wind-Up Bird’. Perhaps it refers to the winding of time, or the unravelling of a story.

Stories are also important in the book which is very self-reflexive. Murakami uses many literary forms: newspaper articles, letters, others’ stories, dreams and online chats are all found within the pages of his novel. When, towards the end of the book, a man called Ushikawa lets himself into the house with Kumiko’s key, he says he is running errands for her but not to worry: “She is not being held against her will. I mean, this is not a movie or a novel. We can’t really do that sort of thing.” In fact, Murakami can do whatever he likes with his work and does just that! He later points out his own style when Mr Okada is considering the stories in ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles’ he has found on Cinnamon’s computer (another strange acquaintance he makes) – a style based on the idea that “fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual”.

Elsewhere Mr Okada realises that his life is full of odd occurrences and struggles to find the difference between what is real and what is not. He notes that “the flow of [his] life – as had been foretold from the moment Creta Kano rang [his] doorbell – was being channelled in ever stranger directions.” Stranger and stranger things do happen.

The well on the nearby vacant property becomes a portal between the real and the surreal or unreal. At first Mr Okada climbs down inside and uses it as a place to think, somewhere he can go where nothing else interferes: “Down here there are no seasons. Not even time exists.” Later, the wall of the well becomes like jelly and he passes through into what supposedly lies beyond, where he gets a strange mark on his face, where he sees Kumiko’s brother attacked and visits the mysterious woman who has been telephoning him. Mr Okada seeks this place having had enough of reality and believing it holds the answers to his wife’s disappearance. When he goes to the well, he does so quietly, so as not to draw attention to himself to the people living and carrying out the motions of daily life nearby: “Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl […] The important thing was not to […] let that ‘reality’ pick up on my passing presence”, as if he can somehow cheat reality.

Loneliness and relationships are also important themes in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Near the beginning, when his wife is starting to grow distant, Mr Okada philosophises, “Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?” And what is the point in life if he spends it with someone he will never really know. Despite these morbid thoughts, people do come close to Mr Okada and confide in him throughout the course of the novel. From Creta’s tale of rape, to the stories of a war hero, many characters invest time pouring out their life stories to him. Most of these characters, however, disappear in one way or another and Mr Okada is, for the most part, alone. He does not even get to know the real names of several of them, and some not even their faces. He notes at one point an “indescribable loneliness” and at another “a violent stab of loneliness”. When he realises how scruffy his shoes have become and buys new trainers, this makes him realise “with new intensity just how alone [he] was, just how far the world had left [him] behind.”

The new trainers, though, seem to signify a turning point. They give him new optimism and he returns home to find that the cat has come back. He turns again from the old by giving the cat a new name. When he finally gets to talk to Kumiko via online messages he tells her, “I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can’t do it because they really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.” He has realised that other people give his life meaning and is determined to fight to get his wife to return.

The final letter from the lieutenant also voices that meaning comes from human relationships. He says he is “lost” because he loves no one and is loved by no one but “having managed at long last, however, to pass my story onto you, Mr Okada, I will be able to disappear with some small degree of contentment.” Murakami again shows us that there is meaning in storytelling and bearing witness.

The novel ends with Mr Okada visiting May Kasahara in her new home whilst Kumiko is in jail facing trial for the killing of her brother, a politician and mysterious figure of evil throughout the book. It is somewhat optimistic since Kumiko has at least told him the truth about her disappearance and it is likely that she will be given a light or suspended sentence, May is happy, Noboru Wataya is dead and, as Mr Okada tells himself, “It could have been a whole lot worse”. Murakami leaves the book with some hope and resolution, seeming to agree with the words of the lieutenant that, “there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for”. Yet, the final lines suggest that Toru Okada is still looking to escape the world. And, with the well filled up, he can now only find this escape in sleep, “a place far away from anyone or anywhere”.