The best books that are magically real

I read this Nobel laureate’s book when I was a boy, some years before I started writing. Reading fiction has always been as much of an escape from sometimes-difficult circumstances as it has been simple entertainment. Writing fiction is that and more.

The magical quality of even the translated versions of this classic novel transported me to the author’s world. Even now, I can readily conjure the scene where the inhabitants of a town, including dogs, stand silently in a square, waiting for a puff of wind to drop flowers from a tree as if they were raindrops.

There was simply no way for me to lose this book from my life. It is with me every time I put my own pen to paper. There’s a reason. It's that great.

As both a novelist and a monk whose life focuses on blending the material and spiritual, I consider this a very important work. Despite a privileged Jewish upbringing in New York City, Latin culture has forever been an important part of my life. The fact is, I’ve always been surrounded by South American friends and spent time in South America in my teen years.

This book brings to life the mystical heart of so much that drives South American culture, revealing it in a way that pulls you straight into the arms of a parallel world, or if not parallel, then one that exists both above and below what we superficially see and feel. I find it a great read and one that remains alive in my imagination year after year.

I find an ineffable strangeness to all of Murakami’s work. He’s a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for good reason. His stories, indeed his worldview, defy categorization. I find myself surprised when I think I have one of his tales figured out. Not so easy for a writer who spends as much time as I do concocting unpredictable twists and turns.

Beyond the plotting, though, what links this book to his others in my mind is the mood Murakami’s work evokes in me. Creepy yet solidly material, with outlandish characters that nevertheless make twisted sense. It’s a long book, but I never once felt it drag. Like a fine hallucinogen, it’s a ride that leaves you questioning what you think you know about reality in general and your own reality in particular.

I grew up speaking Russian with my grandparents and always yearned to read classic Russian literature in the original. Perhaps it was my great love for those grandparents or the stories they told that led me to major in Russian at Yale University. Like any translated work, Russian literature loses something in translation. Still, it gains something, too, effectively juxtaposing a culture that is neither Eastern nor Western yet entirely alien to most of us today.

Satire, dark humor, and perfect pacing make this story a laugh-out-loud work, at least to me. Despite being ridiculous, its delivery is straight-faced, which at least makes the humor and the social commentary all the more powerful. The gritty reality of Russia in the age of tsars is so palpable you can taste it, and so is the humor.

I cannot forget this book, even though, at times, I am desperate to do so. Ishiguro, one of my chosen authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is beyond masterful in the unique way he portrays quotidian events before a horror that is almost theatrical in its grotesquerie.

I was deeply disturbed while reading it, yet I could not put it down. Years later, I continue to find it a source of disquiet regarding where our culture/society is going and how we must stop a very particular trend. The trend is increasingly toward science and technology that utterly and completely disregards human feelings, individual rights, and the spiritual qualities of all sentient beings.

It’s simply an unforgettable story about something unfolding in an all-too-real fashion out here in the world outside the author’s mind.