Another great book. This time the focus is the international trade in illegal weapons and its links to the narco-mafia of Central and South America and also to the big banks of Europe and the U. S.
Tuesday, 1 December 2020
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami
Fairly straight-forward plot - an early life trauma, its effects and the final quest to untie the knots. Perhaps a look at how great a distance there can be between our memory or image of reality and the actual reality itself.
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
An earlier book by Murakami. Like all his books, the plot is continually unraveling out in left field somewhere. A mix of daily grit and occult with some parallels to Greek mythology thrown in - Hades, trips to the land of death. The characters are unusual well- developed. Especially the old man, Nakata, grows on you - in his mental simplicity, he has almost a Zen character. The nominal theme would seem to be about the search for identity and the sense of self, but there are other threads - nature of time and death, the act of reading, the shallowness of most social constructs we live by.
Worth a reread.
The Lemur - Benjamin Black
Like all of Black's books, not bad. Evokes an older Dublin. Some Irish social criticism, but always the same - corrupt church in league with corrupt politicians and criminal gangs. It is like the same book over and over with subtle plot changes. Rankin's work is far more varied, and his characters are much more complex.
However, they do pass the time.
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