When was the last time you read a book that 'wounded' you?
I picked up Murukami's The Strange Library at the Amsterdam airport on my way back to Barcelona last week. He told the story of a child hostaged in a library cell with a Sheepman and a girl without voice. The child was forced to read and consume all three books about taxation in the Ottomann Empire. If he can memorize all the words without mistake, he will be set free, otherwise, his brain will be fed to the Old Man who took him. Brains full of knowledge are meatier and have better texture, the Sheepman said. The Sheepman makes good doughnuts and makes things a little bit bearable.
They plot their escape, the child wants to come home to his mother - she must be worried sick about him. The girl without voice transforms into the image of the child's pet starling, grows big and bigger, eventually engulfing the Old Man and his dog. The child and the Sheepman run as fast as they can, and the moment they got to lawn of the school library - finally away from the Old Man and the monstrous dog, the child closes his eyes and catches his breath.
He opens his eyes to find the Sheepman gone.
He comes home to his mother, she prepares him breakfast, does not ask any question in relation to his disappearance. Two days after his return, his mother dies of an illness. He has nothing now - no mother, no pet starling, no Sheepman friend, no girl. The child looks back to the frightening experience in the Strange Library, and suddenly, that place becomes more comforting than where he is now.
I remember Kafka remarking about reading only those books which stab you, which cause your heart to break, those which wound you:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
Murukami's Strange Library tore my chest open, stabbed my heart, and gripped me.
