Reading

I am reading The City’s Uncertain Walls and this brings me back to the horrors of the past four years, the lockdown, the feeling of hopelessness, the isolation. The author wrote this novel during the lockdown, and I read that for the whole duration of the madness, he did not go out at all. I remember the despair at seeing the gym closed, the hideous signs of the madness, masked zombies, and what can only be described as mass hysteria. Travelling without the satanic stamp of approval was hard, and costly, work. 

A small town

This brings me back too to the small town. One is that the narrator discusses, in his youth, with the girl he loves, and who later disappears. The girl told him her “real self” lived there; they take long walks, and he fills a note book with sketches of what she describes, and also what they two imagine: the river and the sandbanks, the willows, the night birds songs in the tree, the high wall that surrounds the town, and prevents its entry. At some point, after years of despair, he finds a way -but is it a dream? – to enter the town. He’s separated from his shadow, and joins the town as “Dream Reader”, which entails other transformation, for example to his eyes. We know of another transformation, caused by the miraculous cure…

The Dream Reader

In the town, in the town’s library, he meets the girl again, but she ignores who he is, being only committed to help him in his work as Dream Reader. For this library contains no books, only old dusty dreams. This version of the girl is too without shadow, and we may speculate that the girl of his youth may be merely her shadow.

Fate reunites him with his own shadow, so that he is back in the “real” world. He takes up a new job and years pass. He has once again no news for his love, and gradually accept he won’t see her again. More than ever he feels the isolation, his dissociation from society.

Lies

Of course we lived through this, the interdiction, the utter rubbish flowing everyday from the media, the double speak, the lies. The narrator one day realises he has to leave his job, and find work in a small town – this is number two – in a library. This is the point I have reached in my reading. I will do a proper job when I finish the book, to share my impressions. But let me mention the third small town.

Retrospective

This is the one I wrote about in my novel The Page, whose hero eventually sink into a severe mental illness. The small town is where he was brought up, in a world as different from ours as the walled city of Mr Murakami. There the hero’s first love is murdered, and there lie his ruined dreams. The story follows him through hardship, renewal, the wonderful woman he married, and the sinister conspiracy he unveils. Three small towns: the stage of a murder, a walled city where a beautiful girl works helping a Dream Reader, and a town in a mountain area and a small private library.