Kafka on the Shore

Apricots

Haruki Murakami

Title of the book: Kafka on the Shore

I have read most of his books and I am still a fan of his novels. I appreciate this one too although it is as lengthy as the Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It is a typical Haruki book, his imagination takes the reader immediately to another world of talking cats and absurd events as people who step in and out our daily world, he so easily tells about. It is a dream and not a dream. It is raining fish. The common and the absurd are brothers, the usual and exceptional are sisters, the story flies, jumps, crashes and effortless takes off again. The woods are silent, sometimes branches crack and leaves rustle. I have nothing else to do but read and swim. Memory and the Great Forgetting clash, turn around, crisscross and embrace.

Travels with Herodotus by Kapucinski

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Author Ryszard Kapuscinki

Title of the book  Travels with Herodotus

Recently I read ‘Travels with Herodotus’ of the Polish author Kapuscinski. Years ago, I read  his book on Africa, ‘The Shadow of the Sun.’ What about the title? At times the moon has a shadow on earth, hasn’t it? But the sun, does its light breed a shadow on earth? Yes, it does and it provides a wonderful, metaphoric title on top.  It was the first  travel book about Africa that moved me deeply and for a long time. I think it was foremost his style of writing, appealing and seductive, informative and realistic, at times meditative. A reflecting style, one calls abusively literary, which undermines the truthfulness or even the sincerity of the writer. The style, however, is the author, as once a Flemish writer stated.