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A review by book_cryptid
Wind/ Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami
3.25
don't have much to say, except that this is the perfect book to read at the end of summer, preferably by the sea somewhere.
based on what i've read so far, murakami has a beautiful way of choosing just a few themes for a book, and then really building on those themes throughout the story. in these two stories, i'd say the themes were writing, summer, silence, and change and meaning in our lives.
i also love the paragraphs murakami writes, that you can't help but underline in their entirety, and it's one, long, beautiful quote. i'm afraid there's quite a lot of them down below. please enjoy <3
it had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever. then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.
one season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. you might run to the open door and call out, wait, there's something i forgot to tell you! but no one is there. when you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. if you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? i might pass the message along if i get the chance. no, that's all right, you say. it's no big deal. the sound of wind fills the room. no big deal. just another season dead and gone.
all things pass. none of us can manage to hold on to anything.
in that way, we live our lives.
each of us had all the troubles we could carry. they rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. why we did that stumps me, even now. maybe we thought they were something else.
on any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. it may be any old thing. a miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. lingering for two or three days, that something soo disappears, returning to the darkness. there are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. birds fly over them.
it feels strange somehow. like none of it really happened.
oh, it happened all right. but now it's gone.
does it make you sad?
no. there was something that came out of nothing, and now it's gone back to where it came from, that's all.
what we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past/ and i would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.
based on what i've read so far, murakami has a beautiful way of choosing just a few themes for a book, and then really building on those themes throughout the story. in these two stories, i'd say the themes were writing, summer, silence, and change and meaning in our lives.
i also love the paragraphs murakami writes, that you can't help but underline in their entirety, and it's one, long, beautiful quote. i'm afraid there's quite a lot of them down below. please enjoy <3
it had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever. then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.
one season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. you might run to the open door and call out, wait, there's something i forgot to tell you! but no one is there. when you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. if you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? i might pass the message along if i get the chance. no, that's all right, you say. it's no big deal. the sound of wind fills the room. no big deal. just another season dead and gone.
all things pass. none of us can manage to hold on to anything.
in that way, we live our lives.
each of us had all the troubles we could carry. they rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. why we did that stumps me, even now. maybe we thought they were something else.
on any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. it may be any old thing. a miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. lingering for two or three days, that something soo disappears, returning to the darkness. there are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. birds fly over them.
it feels strange somehow. like none of it really happened.
oh, it happened all right. but now it's gone.
does it make you sad?
no. there was something that came out of nothing, and now it's gone back to where it came from, that's all.
what we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past/ and i would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.