Sharp, clear writing, but it left me wanting
Best selling authors in Cashiers Friends of the Albert Carlton Cashiers Library will present two author speaking events, 3 p.m. July 9 and July 30 at The Village Green Commons Hall. These events are by reservation as seating is limited. The first event on Friday, July 9, features Karen White, New York Times bestselling author of 28 books, including the popular Charleston-set Tradd Street mystery series. On Friday, July 30, USA Today bestselling author Susan Meissner will be speaking. She is the author of several award-winning historical fiction books such as Bright As Heaven, Secrets of a Charmed Life, and Fall of Marigolds. Books will be available to buy and the author to sign at both events. For reservations, call the Cashiers library at 828.743.0215. For more information, visit www.villagegreencashiersnc.com and click on the calendar to read more about each author and event.
from your
Hometown Bookstore since2007
G WITH READIN SH
A RON R YOUR GET
S
TICKET
MAGAZINES & NEWSPAPERS
428 HAZELWOOD Ave.
Waynesville • 456-6000 MON-FRI 9-5:30 | SAT 9-3
Smoky Mountain News
in with human beings, particularly women, and other monkeys. At one point, the monkey confesses that he steals the names of women to whom he is attracted. “If I feel like it, I can steal someone’s name and make it my own.” He then explains he makes the name “a part of me,” which can apparently leave the women sometimes feeling disoriented. Near the end of their chat, the monkey says, “But even if love fades away, even if it’s unrequited, you can still hold on to the memory of having loved someone, of having fallen in love with someone. And that’s a valuable sense of warmth.” The narrator never sees the monkey again. Years later, however, he meets a beautiful woman for a “work-related appointment,” who has trouble remembering her name. Her purse was stolen, then returned, with only the driver’s license missing. Regarding her confusion, which he attributes to the monkey, he tells us, “She was blameless, after all. Nothing about it was her fault. I do feel bad about it, but I still can’t bring myself to tell her about the Shinagawa monkey.” “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” brings us a narrator who in college wrote a piece
describing this famous jazz musician as playing Bossa Nova, which never happened. Years later, he stumbles across an album in a used record store titled “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova.” The list of songs perfectly matches those he had made up in college. Because the record costs $35, which he considers overprices, he doesn’t buy it, but realizes he’s made a mistake and returns the next day to purchase it. The record’s gone, of course, if it ever existed, and the narrator then has a vivid dream of speaking with Charlie Parker. At the end of the story, he asks: “Can you believe it? “You’d better. Because it happened. “It really did.” And those lines sum up my difficulties with First Person Singular. I didn’t believe it. Any of it. I found much to like in these stories. The narrator is engaging and at times humorous, the writing is sharp, clear, and warm, and I enjoyed the narrator’s commentary that followed these mysterious encounters. But I just couldn’t buy into the stories. And my disbelief made me wonder whether I, and not the author, was at fault. With his credentials and reputation, the prolific Murakami is clearly admired and read by a host of fans around the globe. The blurb at the front of the book touts these stories as having “a signature Murakami twist,” so I assume these stories are typical of the writer’s work overall. So perhaps our mutual misunderstanding derives from my own ignorance. Once upon a time — I use those words deliberately, as that part of my life now seems a fairy tale — I taught literature to seminars of homeschooling students. Occasionally, after reading a classic like The Old Man and the Sea, a student might say to me, “Hemingway sucks.” Inevitably, I’d offer a correction, pointing out that the writer had earned a reputation and won awards like the Nobel Prize. “Better to say,” I’d tell them, “I don’t get Hemingway.” And so it is with Haruki Murakami and myself. He has a huge following, and I’m either too dense or too narrow-minded to find the magic in his stories. (Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust On Their Wings, and two works of nonfiction, Learning As I Go and Movies Make the Man. minick0301@gmail.com)
JULY 17
Jeff Minick
work for the inn, later agrees to meet the man for conversation in his room. He arrives with two large beers, which they share, and the monkey explains he has difficulty fitting
June 30-July 6, 2021
“Call me Ishmael.” That opening to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the most famous lines in literature. “Call me Baffled.” That is how I felt after reading several of the short stories in Haruki Murakami’s collection, First Person Singular (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, 247 pages, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel). Though unfamiliar with Murakami’s work, I selected his book from the “New Fiction” shelf at the library, read the list of works by this prolific author, found that his fiction has been translated into more than 50 languages, and after Writer reading a few pages, liked his prose. So Murakami joined me on the ride home, where later that evening I began reading his stories. In “Cream,” the narrator tells a younger friend “about a strange incident that took place back when I was eighteen.” He receives an invitation to a recital from a beautiful female pianist he’d had a crush on in school, arrives on time at the appointed place and hour, finds the building and grounds deserted, sits on a bench in a small park, overhears a brimstone-and-fire sermon, presumably from a passing car, and wakes up to find an old man seated on a bench opposite him. “A circle with many centers,” the old man says, and then goes on to describe what he means. “Close your eyes and think it all thorough. A circle that has many centers but no circumference. Your brain is made to think about difficult things….Right now is the critical time. Because this is the period when your brain and your heart form and solidify.” At the story’s end, when we return to the narrator and his friend, he confesses that he has thought of this encounter many times, speculated without much success on the meaning of the old man’s message, and that “whenever something disturbing happens to me, I ponder again that special circle.” In “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” our narrator stays in an old, rundown inn. While he relaxes in the public bath, a monkey enters, speaks to him, and offers to wash and rub his back. They discover an affinity for music, Bruckner and Strauss, and the monkey, who claims to
arts & entertainment
HAPPY
On the shelf
29
