"Adnan Ashraf - On Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murakami Haruki)
Adnan Ashraf - On Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Adnan
Ashraf
On
Haruki Murakami's 'Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the
World'
Issue 1 1996, aRude
Magazine
Perhaps the most
intriguing aspect of studies of split-brain patients has been the possibility
that each cerebral hemisphere is separately conscious following bisection. The
question has interested philosophers and scientists alike and the celebrated
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has written a book that may well be its
fictive apotheosis.
Enter a nameless 35 year
old "Calcutec" who processes data for a quasi-governmental data-bank called the
System. His career goal is to retire by 50 to an idyllic retreat where he can
study Greek and play the cello. With this in mind, he has submitted to a
neurosurgical experiment that enables him to "shuffle," or encrypt, data,
thereby boosting his fees.
The first chapter leads
him into the subterranean lab of the visionary scientist who invented the
practice of shuffling. The fusion of neurophysiological/technological rhetoric
that Murakami uses to describe this and other of the novel's fanciful processes
is inspired and most persuasive. Combine such qualities with a deep affection
for the narrator and you get precise renderings of a world wherein the mind,
saleable and upgradable as a cpu, is literally up for grabs, and the protagonist
spends his downtime ruminating in bed with a glass of scotch and a copy of Red
and Black. This touch of vulnerability marks him easily as a focal pawn in an
information war being waged between the System and the hackers who sell its data
for megaprofits on the black market. But the Calcutec's wits are adroitly about
him, and he proves more than adequate in espionage.
These preliminaries
point only to the 20 odd-numbered chapters of the novel, which appear under the
heading Hardboiled Wonderland.
The novel's
even-numbered chapters contain The End of the World, that inaccessible
alternate "reality" that is the Calcutec's "core consciousness." Rendered in
uncanny prose, it takes on the form of a walled town containing mindless people,
unicorns and a narrator cruelly separated from his shadow. This latter fellow,
the Calcutec's double, occupies himself by reading dreams from the skulls of
dead beasts, romancing the town's undead librarian and mapping the end of the
world with hopes of helping his imprisoned shadow to escape. The sense that our
bilateral narrators are onto each other provides the plot with rare urgency as
the Calcutec/Dreamreader wends his way towards an inkling of himself, learning
in the process that such knowledge resonates eternally.
Murakami's fourth novel
is a poetic and extremely entertaining metaphor for the corpus callosum, the
brain's main pathway for interhemispheric communication. Thematically conversant
with cyberpunk, detective fiction, hypodiagetic tomfoolery and other genres, it
offers many things besides. Reading it was like travelling from the wingtips
into the depths of a textual rorshach blot, wherein a rush of vertigo appeared
along with the image of an escaping bird and the memorable line, "What's lost
never perishes." The absorbing, permutative tour de force of narrative symmetry
in which Murakami embeds his unique exploration of bilateralism puts
Hardboiled... in a class of its own.
Adnan Ashraf - On Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Adnan
Ashraf
On
Haruki Murakami's 'Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the
World'
Issue 1 1996, aRude
Magazine
Perhaps the most
intriguing aspect of studies of split-brain patients has been the possibility
that each cerebral hemisphere is separately conscious following bisection. The
question has interested philosophers and scientists alike and the celebrated
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has written a book that may well be its
fictive apotheosis.
Enter a nameless 35 year
old "Calcutec" who processes data for a quasi-governmental data-bank called the
System. His career goal is to retire by 50 to an idyllic retreat where he can
study Greek and play the cello. With this in mind, he has submitted to a
neurosurgical experiment that enables him to "shuffle," or encrypt, data,
thereby boosting his fees.
The first chapter leads
him into the subterranean lab of the visionary scientist who invented the
practice of shuffling. The fusion of neurophysiological/technological rhetoric
that Murakami uses to describe this and other of the novel's fanciful processes
is inspired and most persuasive. Combine such qualities with a deep affection
for the narrator and you get precise renderings of a world wherein the mind,
saleable and upgradable as a cpu, is literally up for grabs, and the protagonist
spends his downtime ruminating in bed with a glass of scotch and a copy of Red
and Black. This touch of vulnerability marks him easily as a focal pawn in an
information war being waged between the System and the hackers who sell its data
for megaprofits on the black market. But the Calcutec's wits are adroitly about
him, and he proves more than adequate in espionage.
These preliminaries
point only to the 20 odd-numbered chapters of the novel, which appear under the
heading Hardboiled Wonderland.
The novel's
even-numbered chapters contain The End of the World, that inaccessible
alternate "reality" that is the Calcutec's "core consciousness." Rendered in
uncanny prose, it takes on the form of a walled town containing mindless people,
unicorns and a narrator cruelly separated from his shadow. This latter fellow,
the Calcutec's double, occupies himself by reading dreams from the skulls of
dead beasts, romancing the town's undead librarian and mapping the end of the
world with hopes of helping his imprisoned shadow to escape. The sense that our
bilateral narrators are onto each other provides the plot with rare urgency as
the Calcutec/Dreamreader wends his way towards an inkling of himself, learning
in the process that such knowledge resonates eternally.
Murakami's fourth novel
is a poetic and extremely entertaining metaphor for the corpus callosum, the
brain's main pathway for interhemispheric communication. Thematically conversant
with cyberpunk, detective fiction, hypodiagetic tomfoolery and other genres, it
offers many things besides. Reading it was like travelling from the wingtips
into the depths of a textual rorshach blot, wherein a rush of vertigo appeared
along with the image of an escaping bird and the memorable line, "What's lost
never perishes." The absorbing, permutative tour de force of narrative symmetry
in which Murakami embeds his unique exploration of bilateralism puts
Hardboiled... in a class of its own.
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