THE MORNING LIST
Four of the most anticipated Books of the new year and a discovery: the winter literary season is off to a flying start in « The World of Books ». With, in the cast: Haruki Murakimi and his new novel (he hadn't published one for seven years), The City of Uncertain Walls ; Jean Echenoz and his new eponymous hero, who is not one at all, Bristol ; the Irish writer Paul Lynch, whose The Song of the ProphetBooker Prize 2023; Vanessa Springora, who, after Consent2020 event, publishes Surname. The discovery? A nun from the Middle Ages, escaped from the convent, whose adventures the novelist who hides under the pseudonym Paul Thurin tells us about.
NOVEL. “The City of Uncertain Walls”, by Haruki Murakami
Murakami had not written a major novel since The Murder of the Commander (Belfond, 2018). With The City of Uncertain Wallswhich is inspired by a short story written in 1980, it reconnects with the vein of Kafka on the shore et 1Q84 (Belfond, 2006 and 2011-2012). Decentering, solitude, love, wonder, we find here everything that creates typically Murakamian climates.
In a river populated with silver fish, two lovers walk forward. He is 17, she is 16; the fine sand envelops their feet “like a soft cloud in a dream”, and that's all it takes for this dream to inspire us. As in the myths that we know Murakami is fond of, the beauty made it known that she would belong to her lover if he discovered her “real me”. “The me that is here now (…) is just a stunt. »she told him. “The real, living self is found in the City surrounded by high walls. » Then she disappeared. With this Japanese Orpheus, we go in search of him in the said City, a place beyond dreams where time does not exist and where bodies have no shadow.
Will the narrator find the young girl? In any case, he knows that he will never stop looking for her. Almost all of Murakami's novels are quests. Dreamlike, tragic, bizarre, realistic and magical. Constantly oscillating between two worlds which perhaps become one, this one is also imbued with this beautiful and subtle sensation that the Japanese call « mono no aware »the melancholy of ephemeral things. Fl. N.
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