The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Author: Haruki Murakami

Rating: 5/ 5

Most books tend to appeal to one's conscious mind, only a few rare ones appeal to the sub-conscious. THIS, is one such book with beauty more than skin deep and intelligence so surreal.

It talks to you. More than the author, the characters, it is the book, each word straight out of some hidden crevice of your mind. It dives into the dream world, and slowly, the dreams become reality, and reality becomes dreams.

To do complete justice to the book, read it calmly and patiently, let it seep into your conscious to envision the beauty of its words. Name, gender, rules, traditions, truth, logic, life does not matter, when you realise that one can live a life in a dream. This is no story of hope, perseverance, victory, or discovery, but unfolding the layers of one's mind.

There is a story and plot, there are characters and portrayals, but that's not important. Murakami redefines the art of writing with digging deeper and deeper in to the story and opens the mind of its characters to you - what they are feeling, what they are thinking, till its empty and there is nothing more to think or feel. Yes it peels off the skin outward to show the innards out, the ugliness of human body and the beauty of human mind.

Well its a book one can never fully comprehend, but yes you can feel it if you let yourself go. Let the book take you into its world, the world of nothingness, to empty your mind of everything you thought existed, to a timeless and depth less world, the world so dark that it hurts your eyes, the world so bright that it soothes your eyes. The world behind the blank TV screen, the world behind the horizon, the world behind the darkness, the world behind your dreams, the world in the white noise - the sound of the wind up bird.

Some beautiful words from the book:

When you get used to that kind of life - of never having anything you want - then you stop knowing what it is you want.

But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of the one thing I really want to do.

Have you ever had that feeling - that you'd like to go to whole different place and become a whole different self.

Hatred is like a tow-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself.

Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability. 

When I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I'm looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back. 

I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just can't stop. That's my greatest weakness. 

So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films "reality".

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle, a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge. 

You have to say 'Men with a thinning problem'. Bald is discriminatory. I was joking around once and suggested 'gentlemen who are follically challenged.

MUST-MUST Buy The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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