Short Review (No Spoilers): The Strange Library
A short review for a short book.
This little book is a bizarre, dreamlike story that weaves illustrations into its storytelling. It evokes the fears and wonder of childhood, blurring the line between imagination and reality.
As with much of Murakami’s work, there’s a lingering sense of mystery; you’re left wondering what it all means, and that ambiguity is part of its charm.
The following quotes/passages contain some spoilers.
Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?
“What if I say no, if I refuse to go in there? What happens then?”
“Then he’ll hit me even harder.”
I felt sorry for the sheep man, so I entered the cell.
“So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all.”
“Our worlds are all jumbled together – your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes the don’t.”
“Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course”
The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it’s usually too late to go back and start again. That’s the problem with mazes.
I do occasionally think about the new leather shoes I left behind the basement, though. That leads me to memories of the sheep man and the beautiful voiceless girl. Did they really exist? How much of what I remember really happened? To be honest, I can’t be certain. All I know for sure is that I lost my shoes and my pet starling.
My mother died last Tuesday. She had been suffering from a mysterious illness, and that morning she quietly slipped away.
