...or so Murakami teaches us in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" which is a wonderful romp through an "ordinary man's life". As I told my good friend 35 minutes ago, it is a haunted mystery tale on steroids with more than enough philosophy to fill books. This book is Murakami's Ulysses, filled with references every 5 minutes, all objects in place have meaning to the story (which is inconceivable from the first 300 pages), and the story-telling style is so interesting because I've now encountered it multiple times.
Boys and girls, the word for today is Epistolary.
An epistolary is essentially a collection of documents that tell a story. In my review for Pattern Recognition, I had commented on how much of the story is told in email and forum postings. Little did I know that this type of writing has a name. The book chosen for my book club, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is another epistolary novel. Many books have taken this form, such as Flowers for Algernon, which is told through Charlie's journal entries, and Haunted which is told both through narrator observation and short stories and poems the characters write. In fact, the very first epistolary novel would have to be the Bible (duh... the Epistles of Paul?), or maybe a less controversial choice would be The Canterbury Tales. Wikipedia has a long yet incomplete list of contemporary epistolary novels.
Anyway, back to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. This is a polylogic epistolary about an ordinary dude in a marriage who leaves his job and then a month later, his wife leaves him. He then spends the rest of the book looking for her and himself. That's all I'll tell you; I really want as many people(well adults; it is a bit X-rated at points, but to good purpose) to read this book as they can, for it really is a work of art. To make this point short, I really connected with the story and went through the emotions with this dude to the very end.
Okay, I promised my friend I'd be brief, so I am. :D
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