Reading reading reading

This week I want to talk about two books I read recently that I’m not sure I fully understood. The first is Richard Powers’s PLAYGROUND, and the second is Haruki Murakami’s THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS.

PLAYGROUND is somewhat similar to Powers’s THE OVERSTORY, with a rotating cast of characters in play. We follow Rafi and Todd as they grow up together, two boys from different sides of the tracks. Todd is a computer geek, Rafi is into literature and philosophy. Their main point of connection is competition: chess, and then the Chinese game Go. We are introduced to Evie (Evelyn), a French-Canadian woman who is besotted with the ocean and would love nothing better than to dive all day. She is modelled after Dr. Sylvia Earle, a world renowned expert on marine biology. Then there’s Evie’s husband, whom she hardly sees since she’s off on expeditions all the time, and who finds solace in his own work modelling the ocean and looking after their kids. There’s Ina, Rafi’s girlfriend who ends up on Todd’s couch one night while Todd sleeps on the floor. Bad move, as Rafi comes over the next morning and finds them together. Even though nothing has happened, their relationships are irrevocably shattered. And of course we can’t forget all the 100 residents of Makatea, an atoll in the Pacific where Todd’s company wants to pilot “seasteading” with his vast fortune. Makatea is the heart of the book, the place where most of the players live, and where they all gather one last time.

The book shifts between present and past narratives, and has many threads: Rafi and Todd’s adolescence and university life, Ina’s introduction into Rafi, Todd’s present-day life and his brain illness, Evie’s life and how it conflicts with having a family, and everyday life on Makatea.

The story not only revolves around Makatea, but around the online gaming platform Todd has created using AI, which has made his fortune. It’s called Playground, and is a virtual reality where people can connect with others, make virtual money, and play roles they might not in real life. The word ‘playground’ also comes up in Evie’s dives: she describes one dive as being in a playground of colour-shifting fish and a multitude of marine life.

Powers’s novel is complex and multilayered, like the marine life Evie explores in the ocean. The points of contact between the characters are deftly handled and the story grows almost seamlessly from the lives of each character. The timelines overlap, with Ina’s kids reading the book Evie wrote for children about sea life.

But what stumped me was the ending. Partial spoiler alert: people who were supposed to be dead were alive again. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around that.

Plus everything turned out too perfectly in the end; it was a bit too pat. I think I preferred Powers’s BEWILDERMENT and THE OVERSTORY over PLAYGROUND.

SPOILER ALERT!

THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS is a different beast altogether. The only other Murakami book I’ve read is his non-fiction: WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I THINK ABOUT RUNNING. So I wasn’t prepared for the magical realism of this book, the difficulty in defining truth vs. fiction, and the isolated, singular life of the unnamed narrator.

The narrator meets a girl in his teens with whom he shares an all-encompassing, chaste love. She tells him about a city she’s heard about or seen or been to or dreamed of (we’re not sure which). In the midst of this she disappears. The narrator is bereft. He can’t stop thinking about her or make new relationships, even into his 40s when he’s working as a book distributor.

One day he finds himself in the city the girl has described. She is there, but in her teenage form, and she doesn’t know him. He is The City’s “dream reader,” and must leave his shadow behind in order to live there.

At some point he is able to leave The City and regain his shadow, where he follows his intuition to move to a small town closer to the mountains in Japan, and become the head librarian of a library funded by a local philanthropist. Here, again, the narrator is exquisitely alone. There are singular characters around him: a librarian, the woman who runs the café he frequents, but that’s it. No crowds. No people walking the path the narrator walks on the way to and from the library.

At the library he meets a teenage boy who spends his days in the reading room speed reading and committing to photographic memory a wide range of books. He doesn’t speak, except to introduce himself by asking a person’s birthdate and telling them what day of the week that was. The boy gives the narrator sketch maps of The City, so detailed that the narrator wonders how the boy knows about it. When the boy disappears, the narrator knows he has gone to The City.

Somehow the narrator follows the boy to The City, and they form a mutual agreement. The boy will live inside the narrator and help him with his job of “reading dreams.” The narrator has access to every book the boy has read, and can read them himself when he wishes to. Every evening, the boy and the narrator meet in a “room” inside the narrator’s psyche, lit by candlelight, to talk. The boy tells the narrator that, if he blows out the candle before it goes out on its own, he can go back to the “real” world.

This is clearly an allegorical novel, about books and libraries, love and longing, reality and make-believe. Which library matters most: the dream library? The library where he works? The library the boy has created in his head? What is reality and what is fantasy? Why does the narrator have a woodstove in both his “real” library and in the dream library in The City? The narrator’s nighttime tête-a-tête’s with the boy are also similar to those he has with the previous head librarian, right down to the candlelight.

Murakami himself has said that The City is a metaphor for the COVID lockdowns, which is an interesting aside to a book that doesn’t mention ill-health at all. The only characters who are sick are the shadows, cut off from their owners and slowly dying in The City. He also notes that the major theme of the novel is: “How is it possible for both extreme isolation and warm feelings of empathy to coexist?”

In reading this book, I felt like I was always on the edge of a revelation, that I was just about to “get it.” That at the end of the next chapter I’d figure out what was really going on. That didn’t happen—I just kept reading and digging deeper into the strangeness of Murakami’s world. I think I enjoyed it, but I wish I had a book club to discuss it with so we could work together to unravel some of the questions the book raises.

So those were my heavy reads over the past two months. I also read ALL THAT GLITTERS by Margo Talbot, about how ice-climbing saved her from her drunken, drugged-out life. Not super well written but an interesting read. I read Eiren Caffall’s ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD (stay tuned for an in depth review), WRITING A WOMAN’S LIFE by Carolyn Heilbrun (exactly as the title says and a good resource for those of us writing about our lives as women). THE MONSTER AND THE MIRROR, by KJ Aiello (Canadian content!), about mental illness and culture. SENESCENCE, by Amal Alhomsi, which wasn’t a book I’d imagine Rocky Mountain Books publishing. It tried too hard to be lyrical and mysterious about the natural wonders of living in Canmore. Coming up in the reading list is DUST by Alison Stine; THE MOURNER’S BESTIARY, also by Eiren Caffall; WEATHERING by Ruth Allen; and DOUBLE BIND: WOMEN ON AMBITION by Robin Romm.

What are you reading right now? And what do you have on your TBR list/pile?

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