The Elephant Vanishes

I actually wanted to type this post at 2.30 in the morning yesterday, but I was so tired I fell asleep instead.

I had just finished reading my newest book for the month, The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami (again). It's a short story collection, and while I truly loved some, I found a few that weren't...well, to put it short, it was like reading a school essay by an angsty teenager. Which would mean something like what I would write.

So, I've decided my posts have become too long, so I'm going to summarise it.

Whine.

Whine.

Whine some more.

Extra helping of whine.

Whine.

Ciao.

=D

Okay, so now we've got the smiles on everybody's faces, let's get onto the angsty melodrama shall we?

So there I was reading his short story, The Silence. The moment I was done, this event that happened in secondary school suddenly came back to me.

I remember it was during the SPM trials, and I had just gotten good marks in god knows what paper la. So Eng Tong heard one of my classmates (shall not name who) saying "Of course Jon Chin get good marks la, he got the soalan bocor before" (During the trials, there was this incident where the soalan bocor for the trials came out on a website, and a lot of people in my form was doing them. I didn't, but still). And then Eng Tong stood up for me, asking him not to talk nonsense cause Eng Tong knew I never looked at the soalan bocor. Pretty cool eh.

I know, pretty random. But that's the thing about Murakami. People *cough*my bro* have often said he's just this author who writes random nonsensical stories with no plot or sense in them. That maybe so, but I personally find that this are his strengths. Reading his books invoke this sense of intense nostalgia. Though most of his stories speak of alienation, of the lost of one's "self", of loneliness and love lost, I walk away feeling better about the world and myself when I'm done. Life rarely makes sense , so why should his stories? I'm not saying that he just writes bullshit. There's always this sense of connection between the elements in his stories, even though you can't grasp what it is. And on the few times you do, it's magic.

I'll give another example, my favourite short story of his, Sleep. It's about this housewife, who is stuck in a routine of taking care of her husband and child, swimming, and cooking. The way she narrates, it's as if she's just stating the facts that her life consists of days that are interchangeable. You don't know whether she's happy with her life, or not. Then suddenly, she finds that she can't sleep. This isn't insomnia, it's as if sleep has been completely removed from her life. She stays awake for a few weeks, yet she doesn't feel tired at all. In fact, nothing's different except that she can't sleep. Instead of sleeping, she starts reading, a hobby of hers in the past that she stopped after getting married. My interpretation of it was that she was given the chance to break from routine, that has come to dominate her life, but instead, she just settles into a new routine. Taking care of her husband and child, swimming, cooking and now reading during the hours she can't sleep. "My life was a nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere." At the end of the story, she drives to this harbor in the middle of the night, even though being warned before by a police the first time she went there at night that it was dangerous as there was a gang of men going around killing and raping people in that area at night. It's almost as if she wants to get killed. Then we're left hanging when 2 men approach her car, and start shaking it and pounding on the glass, and all she can do is cry.

It is the final section that truly shook me. We finally knew how she felt about her life. She hated the routine that had taken over her life, and yet, it was the very thing that gave her security in life. There's a few sentences that give evidence of this

"Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can diverge from it. If a person were to diverge from it, the person's very "ground of being " would be threatened"

She looks at her husband and son's faces' while they're sleeping, and she finds that she despises them even if they've done nothing wrong. I felt that they were the physical embodiments of the routine that she had been sucked into, and she hated them for it. Near the end, before she drives to the harbor, she starts wondering "I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness : What it called to mind was death.
Was I about to die?
And if I died now, what would my life have amounted to?"

And the final most chilling part. It was this paragraph that made this story so much more.

"Something is wrong. I'll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I'm crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can't go anywhere. It's the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They're going to turn it over."

This little box, while literally meaning the car she was stuck in, for me, symbolized the routine that she hated. She was trapped in it, and she couldn't escape. And yet, when her routine is disturbed, (They're going to turn it over), she cries. She cries because of the loss of safety and comfort of the routine.

Of course, that's my interpretation. The thing about books is that people tend to interpret them differently on their own life experiences.

I guess I have yet to become a true reader who interprets the story based on how the author wants him to. I constantly look for certain themes in books, and even if the author wasn't writing about that certain theme specifically, I would still interpret it as such.

Sigh. I've written a longwinded post again.

Ciao. For real this time =D