I prefer not to categorize books. Like music, they’re either good or bad, and discussions about genres and sub-genres tend to illuminate the critic rather than the author.
However…
I think that, within the “good” camp, it’s somewhat helpful to separate the page-turners (pretty much anything Stephen King writes) from the profound—like, say, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s not that King can’t write beautifully when he wants to. To cite just one example, there are several passages in “The Body,” a novella included in the book Different Seasons, that gave me pause. But let’s not kid ourselves: Robinson occupies an entirely different plane of existence.
There’s a point to all this, I promise.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, and, well…it’s remarkable. It might be the first book I’ve ever read that somehow strikes an appropriate balance between compelling, hard-to-put-down story and meaningful disquisition on the utter strangeness of our existence…
“Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people’s lives be so convoluted?”
…and on the anguish of love.
“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
I’ll be thinking about Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki for a very long time.
