Book Review: The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

You know you're in for a strange turn in The Strange Library before you read a single word.  The "art direction and design" by Chip Kidd, for which he is credited on the back cover, would be better credited as a co-author.  The front cover bears cartoonish eyes above a distorted face where the nose (mouth?) is a circle labelled "107" and the title and author's name appear to be features of that face.  A strip along the left-hand side tells us the book is "FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY," a designation (along with the number 107) which figures prominently in the story.  Red dominates the front cover.  The bottom half of the cover folds up from the back cover, laying an attacking, fanged snout below the cartoonish eyes, a masterpiece of juxtaposition.  The reverse cover features an emblem that seems a cross between a mandala, a decoder ring, and an air force badge.

But each of these design elements gives way to the first page, the inside front cover (the story springs right upon you, with the copyright page tucked away at the back, though one senses that Chip Kidd would rather do away with copyright pages and bar codes entirely).  That first page is filled with a startlingly open eye, an animal eye with an oblong iris, surrounded by bristly fur.

The image itself has no direct bearing on the story (perhaps), but sets the tone - this tale will be something of a nightmare vision, a dream from which you struggle to awake, similar to Miyazaki's Spirited Away, where confusingly malignant forces imprison the naive.  This story will stare back at you as you stare at it.  That gaze will make you uncomfortable, and a little frightened.

Chip Kidd's design work has long enthralled me, and his book, Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design guides my teaching on design in my gifted classes, and as much as I was enthralled by Murakami's mysterious, disturbing story, Kidd's freewheeling, exuberant design drew me into the book - by which I mean the book itself, as an object, a thing you hold in your hand, whose pages you turn and whose words and pictures design and build a world much like our own yet entirely different.  You can feel the designer's joy as he searched old Japanese catalogs and children's books (and who knows what else) to crib and crop images that link to the story, that tell the story.  One of my favorites is, after a boy is led through a labyrinth to a reading room / prison cell below the public library (yes, the story is that strange; refer back to title) on the verso page, the recto (right-hand side) page shows an unsolvable maze pattern, red on sepia, with the image of an eye and eyebrow floating up on the edge.  Turn the page and the verso continues that design with the same maze and the other eye, with text reappearing on the recto.  The design imparts a sense of the character's feeling of entrapment, that cry of, Hey, get me out of here!

The book bears all the markings of a children's book - a young protagonist, the large print and short length - but it is more a moral fable, a troubling fairy tale for grown-ups.  What's the moral of the story?  Perhaps this: the world is a dangerous place, and the imagination much more so.

Book Notes: What I've Been Reading Lately

So, after a two month hiatus to welcome our baby into the world (thank you very much), "Head of the Class" is back, but with something different this week.

It only makes sense to write reviews of new books, but lately I've been reading some older titles, some only from last year, others decades old, and this week I'll pass those recommendations on to you.

I named our new boy Cormac Aran McGrath, which derived from and sent me back to two literary sources.

First was Cormac McCarthy.  Previously I had only read Blood Meridian, The Road, and All the Pretty Horses.  Returning to him now, many years later, I started by rereading Pretty Horses and then completing the Border Trilogy with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.  It's a strange sort of trilogy, where the second book has no character or plot connection to the first, and then the second pairs up the main characters from the first two books - more like a triptych than a trilogy, but one in which the story arc climbs higher throughout all thousand pages of the works.  The overarching theme could be summarized as "what fools these mortals be."  And then they die in a pool of blood.

No Country for Old Men fell within this same genre and feel.  At times, you'd think this story was happening just down the road from John Grady's familial hacienda.  No Country, however, seems more written for the movies, with an unsympathetic bad guy and more of a thriller plot line, slightly unoriginal (unsuspecting dude comes across a cache of drug money and keeps it, prompting the bad guys to pursue).  It says a lot that you might as well just watch the movie for that one, whereas the movie of Pretty Horses is a complete waste of time and does no justice to the book.

Lastly, I added Child of God to my McCarthy roster as well, a shorter, more deliberately violent work, and honestly an earlier, immature work where the violence is less thematic and more ramped up for shock value, a sort of proto-Silence of the Lambs.  You won't be missing much to miss this one.

I also circled back around to Stones of Aran, a two-work meditation on nature and history (both human and geological) by Tim Robinson.  The first book, Pilgrimage, details his musings as he walks the perimeter of the largest of the three islands, Inishmor.  For the second tome, Robinson turns inland and walks the Labyrinth of stone walls that define this tiny, harsh land.  His writing bears that perfect balance of the scientific storyteller, and reading these books is like going on a trip.  By the way, if I ever have the choice or chance, I would trade in my Savannah digs for a seaside cottage on Aran, a place I have never been but which Robinson taught me to love.

Besides my baby's namesakes, I read Jamie Quatro's collection of short stories, I Want to Show You More, a recommendation which came from, of all places, Runner's World magazine.  She is a runner, you see, and has one story in this collection about running, a surreal tale that reads like a cross between a moral fable and a nightmare vision.  Most or almost all the stories have character connections - the narrator of one story is the husband of another story's narrator, who appears as a passing minor character in yet another story, and so on.  At first I found these connections enchanting, but about two-thirds through the book they grew annoying and frustrating, and I felt like I would have to read the book twice through for earlier stories to make complete sense - keep in mind that some of the stories (I think?) had no connection to the others.  Overall, though, Quatro is a masterly writer, and I look forward to reading her in the future.

One of my favorite books of all time, Danny the Champion of the World, we are reading now in my fourth grade gifted class, which prompted me to pick up another book of Dahl's somewhat randomly, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.  I read this one backwards, starting with the essay called "Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer," in which Dahl touches on his youth, schooling, and service in the RAF during WWII.  The stories in this book, by the way, appear written for a younger audience, but only just so.  Some are definitely for young adults or older adults.  Anyway, the essay (which my students will read when we finish Danny) guided me to Dahl's two autobiographical works, Boy and Going Solo, which were quick, delightful reads.  He did more by the end of his twenties than I'll probably do in my whole life.  I've always admired Dahl as a writer, but add to that now a personal admiration.