BIBLIOMANIA

Books you should read before you become near-sighted…

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (The Harvill Press/Vintage)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru (1997 – English translation) by the celebrated avant-garde Japanese author Haruki Murakami is perhaps his most intricate work to date. It chronicles the seemingly mundane life of Toru Okada, a passive, apathetic unemployed young man. Things begin to take an interesting – and confusing – turn when his pet cat goes missing and he sets out to find it. During his “journey” he encounters eccentric characters who converse with him about death, human cruelty, violence, and the irredeemable deterioration of human life. Big, bold, tender, at times subtle yet shockingly graphic, this is a huge book with huge philosophical ideas about the state of being. It was the book that catapulted its author to intergalactic fame, which he spent years shunning after the book’s publication in Japan. These days the name Murakami is almost synonymous with alienation, the way the European greats – Sartre, Camus and Kafka – are. It is a book which draws you in with its curious intensity and does not let go until you have finished all 613 pages.

The Catcher in the Rye (Penguin)

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger, a reclusive writer who has not published anything since 1965 and has not been interviewed since 1980, can be predictably found in most high-school reading curricula. Curiously, this was a book that was first lambasted for its use of explicit language and handling of a very controversial theme in the 1950s: existential teenage angst. The book’s anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, ploughs through adolescence by flinging expletives at all the injustices that he sees and by shooting down anything that resembles “typical” American social/family values. He questions and challenges the idea of the nuclear family, peer pressure, the overvaluing of athleticism in American society, the American education system, and, ultimately, the accepted concept of a carefree, stress-free teenage life. Millions of young readers around the world (the book has sold over 65 million copies) have come to identify themselves with the surly, abrasive narrator – for the right reasons. The book can be seen as a predecessor of contemporary works of disillusionment such as the tragic-comical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) by Dave Eggers.

Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

The Metamorphosis or Die Verwandlung (1915) by Austrian-Hungarian author Franz Kafka is one of the most memorable and unsettling works of short fiction of the 20^th century. It tells of the overnight transformation of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who has to support his needy family on his own, from a normal human being to a man-size insect. As he descends into insectoid insanity, the reader is given a full view of his family’s hypocrisy and society’s indifference to Man’s suffering. Highly disturbing and touchingly autobiographical (no, Kafka never turned into a bug), this is Existentialist literature at its very best. It is concise (less than 80 pages), powerful and thought-provoking. Its famous opening sentence (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning with uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.”) unnerves with its matter-of-fact tone. Simply delightful! If you like this, also try The Trial (1925) by the same author, or Steppenwolf (1927) by the German author Hermann Hesse.