Quote:Hespire
Right now I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Norweigian Wood, a novel that offers many imaginative thoughts while exploring political, dramatic, and psychological interests.
Regrettably, I'm going to diverge here a bit. If anyone wants further discussion on this point of departure, I'm certainly willing to transfer it to another OT thread. Or stay here; it doesn't matter to me.
I've read some Murakami a few years ago. What little I can remember is that he injects his own ideas about the motivations for various events in his narrative, bringing what I see as useful insights into the human condition--how/why people act as they do in varied circumstances.
And he seems to bridge the differences between Japanese and mainstream western thought on occasion, bringing yet further food for thought.
So his stories are vehicles for an intelligent observer of human nature to make sense of events. In this way they are potentially instructive--presenting the reader with new ideas to consider and to accept or reject--rather than simply entertaining.
It struck me that two modern western writers, Michel Houellebeq and Hunter S. Thompson, do the same. Both see the world as highly irrational and at present socially diseased. In Houellebeq's case, he sits above it, to give himself a refuge--it's irony.
Thompson was I believe, a deeply idealistic person driven to excesses, knowingly as a mode of escape from the same basic reality that Houellebeq sees. Instead of irony, it's excess.
Two individualistic thinkers seeing the same things, but finding different ways to attempt to live with them.
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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