Monday 26 March 2007

March Meeting

We will be meeting for lunch at Schezan on Cunningham Rd. 12:30pm Sunday 1st of April to discuss 'Kafka On The Shore'.

Friday 9 March 2007

WARNING: Reading can make you talk funny

I came across a nice piece in the Guardian today. Some readers can apparently drop the voice or accent of a favourite literary character into their daily lives. I've just finished a Salman Rushdie and I can't say any of his vocabulary has rubbed off, no dinner parties for me.

The best I can do is to attempt just reading the book in the accent intended by the writer. From the voice in my head it sounds like I'm reading a lot of Irish/Jamaican literature these days.

Sunday 4 March 2007

Book for March



'Kafka on the Shore' by Haruki Murakami

Synopsis:

15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal—we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship.