When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of these stories Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal.
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I'M IN THE kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. THE WIND-UP BIRD AND TUESDAY'S WOMAN
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(@vintagebooks, 10 October 2011, ebook, 336 pages, bought from @AmazonKindle, #popsugarreadingchallenge, a magical realism book)
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Murakami is one of my favourite writers and I still have a lot of his books to read. Technically, only a few of these stories fit into the magic realism genre but that's good enough to tick off this category for me. I've read some of these stories before, most notably The Second Bakery Attack which is a delight but most of them were knew to me. They share the author's trademark, intense, bizarre and dreamlike style and were a pleasure to read. I loved al of the stories but the best were The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Woman, The Second Bakery Attack, Family Affair and A Slow Boat To China.
