The Book Club

I neglected to mention in the last entry that we had another meeting of the book club last week. This is the second time I’ve come along and the first that I’ve attending after having read the book. In this case it was Ryu Murakami’s (the other Murakami) Coin Locker Babies. Although I didn’t enjoy the book, I did enjoy the evening.

By way of background, Coin Locker Babies is a novel set in a surreal version of 1980s Japan. The story folows two characters, Kiku and Hashi, both of whom are abandoned in coin lockers in the summer of 1972. They grow up to lead quite different lives but remain motivated by powerful emotions their unorthodox upbringing engendered.

I don’t want to go much further into the story here. This isn’t a book review. Suffice to say I found most of the characters distasteful and the graphic sex and violence largely pointless. What was interesting about the evening though was seeing the different reactions people had to the book. Some really enjoyed while others were more ambivalent. A few felt similarly to me. The most striking thing was the depth of analysis.

Perhaps I’ve been reading non-fiction too much of late. In a non-fiction book one rarely wonders why a character feels a certain way or performs a certain action. That’s just what happened after all. But with fiction these sorts of questions are always pertinent. It was really interesting to see people’s different reactions and different interpretations. Some were really well thought and even though I initially felt they were reading too much into something after they’d laid out their evidence I was more convinced they might have been onto something.

The next book on the list is Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country. I’m back with non-fiction it seems but I’m already intrigued a bunch of Americans, an Englishwoman and an Australian might make