“Gateway to the Great Books” (10 Vols.)

“Gateway to the Great Books” (10 Vols.)

Editors in Chief: ROBERT M. HUTCHINS, MORTIMER J. ADLER

Associate Editor: CLIFTON FADIMAN

ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, INC. / 1990 / 10 Vols. / 5,000 pages

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“Gateway to the Great Books” is a 10-volume series of books originally published by ‘Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.’ in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the “Great Books of the Western World”, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. The set included selections - short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works - by more than one hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in the “Great Books”.

Authors

A number of authors in the “Great Books” set - such as Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Dante, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and William James - were also represented by shorter works in the “Gateway Volumes”. And several “Gateway Readings” discussed authors in the “Great Books” series. For instance, a selection from Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres critiqued the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, many writers in the “Gateway Set” were eventually “promoted” to the Second Edition (1990) of the “Great Books”, such as Alexis de Toqueville, Molière, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and John Dewey.

Index, editorial material, criticism

The set included an index similar to the Great Books’ Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty. Hutchins contributed an introduction that was essentially a boiled-down version of “The Great Conversation”, his preface to the “Great Books”. The set contained biographical notes on the various authors, similar to those in the “Great Books”. However, the set also contained editorial introductions to the selections, which were generally not included in the “Great Books”. In another departure from the “Great Books Series”, the set included black-and-white drawings of most of the authors by Chicago portraitist Fred Steffen, who also wrote brief notes describing the illustrations. Details from a number of these drawings were featured on the volume covers. Although the editors maintained that many selections were appropriate to young readers, the set included a fair amount of material challenging for the most experienced reader. In what may have been a response to complaints about the cramped typography of the “Great Books”, the “Gateway Volumes” were single-column with larger, more readable type. Many of the same criticisms leveled at the “Great Books” can be made of the “Gateway Set”. The books concentrated heavily on Western European and American literature and included few selections by women or minority authors.

"The Set is now out of print".

Contents

Volume 1: Introduction; Syntopical Guide:

A letter to the reader

Introduction

Syntopical guide

Appendices

A plan of graded reading

Recommended novels

Recommended anthologies of poetry

Volume 2: Imaginative Literature I:

Daniel Defoe, Excerpts from Robinson Crusoe

Rudyard Kipling, “Mowgli’s Brothers” from The Jungle Book

Victor Hugo, “The Battle with the Cannon” from Ninety-Three

Guy de Maupassant, “Two Friends”

Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” from Men Without Women

Sir Walter Scott, “The Two Drovers” from Chronicles of the Canongate

Joseph Conrad, “Youth”

Voltaire, Micromegas

Oscar Wilde, “The Happy Prince” from The Happy Prince and Other Tales

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

Charles Dickens, “A Full and Faithful Report of the Memorable Trial of Bardell against Pickwick” from The Pickwick Papers

Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”

Samuel Butler, “Customs and Opinions of the Erewhonians” from Erewhon

Sherwood Anderson, “I'm a Fool”

Anonymous, Aucassin and Nicolette

Volume 3: Imaginative Literature II:

Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

Herman Melville, "Billy Budd"

Ivan Bunin, "The Gentleman from San Francisco"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter"

George Eliot, "The Lifted Veil"

Lucius Apuleius, "Cupid and Psyche" from The Golden Ass

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "White Nights"

John Galsworthy, "The Apple-Tree"

Gustave Flaubert, "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"

Honoré de Balzac, "A Passion in the Desert"

Anton Chekhov, "The Darling"

Isaac Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street"

Alexander Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades"

D. H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Henry James, "The Pupil"

Thomas Mann, "Mario and the Magician"

Isak Dinesen, "Sorrow-Acre"

Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch", "The Three Hermits", "What Men Live By"

Volume 4: Imaginative Literature III:

Molière, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself

Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny

John Synge, Riders to the Sea

Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones

Volume 5: Critical Essays:

Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?"

Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry", "Sweetness and Light"

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "What Is a Classic?", "Montaigne"

Francis Bacon, "Of Beauty", "Of Discourse", "Of Studies"

David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste"

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Style", "On Some Forms of Literature", "On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art"

Friedrich Schiller, "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

William Hazlitt, "My First Acquaintance with Poets", "On Swift", "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen"

Charles Lamb, "My First Play", "Dream Children, a Reverie", "Sanity of True Genius"

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Thomas de Quincey, Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power", "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth"

T. S. Eliot, "Dante", "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Volume 6: Man and Society I:

John Stuart Mill, "Childhood and Youth" from Autobiography

Mark Twain, "Learning the River" from Life on the Mississippi

Jean de la Bruyere, "Characters" from A Book of Characters

Thomas Carlyle, 'The Hero as King" from On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoreau"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Sketch of Abraham Lincoln"

Walt Whitman, "Death of Abraham Lincoln"

Virginia Woolf, "The Art of Biography"

Xenophon, "The March to the Sea" from The Persian Expedition, "The Character of Socrates" from Memorabilia

William H. Prescott, "The Land of Montezuma" from The Conquest of Mexico

Haniel Long, "The Power within Us"

Pliny the Younger, "The Eruption of Vesuvius"

Tacitus, "The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola"

Francois Guizot, "Civilization" from History of Civilization in Europe

Henry Adams, "The United States in 1800" from History of the United States of America

John Bagnell Bury, "Herodotus" from The Ancient Greek Historians

Lucian, "The Way to Write History"

Great Documents

The English Bill of Rights

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

The Declaration of Independence

Charter of the United Nations

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Thomas Paine, "A Call to Patriots - December 23, 1776"

George Washington, "Circular Letter to the Governors of All the States on Disbanding the Army", "The Farewell Address"

Thomas Jefferson, "The Virginia Constitution" from Notes on Virginia, "First Inaugural Address", "Biographical Sketches"

Benjamin Franklin, "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America", "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania"

Jean de Crevecoeur, "The Making of Americans" from Letters from an American Farmer

Alexis de Tocqueville, "Observations on American Life and Government" from Democracy in America

Henry David Thoreau,"Civil Disobedience", "A Plea for Captain John Brown"

Abraham Lincoln, "Address at Cooper Institute", "First Inaugural Address", "Letter to Horace Greeley", "Meditation on the Divine Will", "The Gettysburg Address", "Second Inaugural Address", "Last Public Address".

Volume 7: Man and Society II:

Francis Bacon, "Of Youth and Age", "Of Parents and Children", "Of Marriage and Single Life", "Of Great Place", "Of Seditions and Troubles", "Of Custom and Education", "Of Followers and Friends", "Of Usury", "Of Riches"

Jonathan Swift, "Resolutions when I Come to Be Old", "An Essay on Modern Education", "A Meditation upon a Broomstick", "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country"

David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts", "Of Money", "Of the Balance of Trade", "Of Taxes", "Of the Study of History"

Plutarch, "Of Bashfulness"

Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Lantern-Bearers" from Across the Plains

John Ruskin, "An Idealist's Arraignment of the Age" from Four Clavigera

William James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings", "The Energies of Men", "Great Men and Their Environment"

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Education"

Michael Faraday, "Observations on Mental Education"

Edmund Burke, "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol"

John Calhoun, "The Concurrent Majority"

Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Machiavelli"

Voltaire, "English Men and Ideas" from Letters on the English

Dante, "On World Government" from De Monarchia

Jean Jacques Rousseau, "A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe"

Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace"

Karl von Clausewitz, "What Is War?" from On War

Thomas Robert Malthus, "The Principle of Population" from Population: The First Essay

Volume 8: Natural Science:

Francis Bacon, "The Sphinx"

John Tyndall, "Michael Faraday" from Faraday as a Discoverer

Eve Curie, "The Discovery of Radium" from Madame Curie

Charles Darwin, "Autobiography"

Jean Henri Fabre, "A Laboratory of the Open Fields", "The Sacred Beetle"

Loren Eiseley, "On Time"

Rachel Carson, "The Sunless Sea" from The Sea Around Us

J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" from Possible Worlds

Thomas Henry Huxley, "On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals", "On a Piece of Chalk"

Francis Galton, "The Classification of Human Ability" from Hereditary Genius

Claude Bernard, "Experimental Considerations Common to Living Things and Inorganic Bodies"

Ivan Pavlov, "Scientific Study of the So-called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals"

Friedrich Wohler, "On the Artificial Production of Urea"

Charles Lyell, "Geological Evolution" from The Principles of Geology

Galileo, "The Starry Messenger"

Tommaso Campanella, "Arguments for and against Galileo" from The Defense of Galileo

Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle

Dmitri Mendeleev, "The Genesis of a Law of Nature" from The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements

Hermann von Helmholtz, "On the Conservation of Force"

Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, "The Rise and Decline of Classical Physics" from The Evolution of Physics

Arthur Eddington, "The Running-Down of the Universe" from Nature and the Physical World

James Jeans, "Beginnings and Endings" from The Universe Around Us

Kees Boeke, "Cosmic View"

Volume 9: Mathematics:

Lancelot Hogben, "Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization" from Mathematics for the Million

Andrew Russell Forsyth, "Mathematics, in Life and Thought"

Alfred North Whitehead, "On Mathematical Method", "On the Nature of a Calculus"

Bertrand Russell, "The Study of Mathematics", "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians", "Definition of Number"

Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, "New Names for Old", "Beyond the Googol"

Tobias Dantzig, "Fingerprints", "The Empty Column"

Leonhard Euler, "The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg"

Norman Robert Campbell, "Measurement", "Numerical Laws and the Use of Mathematics in Science"

William Clifford, "The Postulates of the Science of Space" from The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences

Henri Poincare, "Space", "Mathematical Creation", "Chance"

Pierre Simon de Laplace, "Probability" from A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Red and the Black"

Volume 10: Philosophical Essays:

John Erskine, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent"

William Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief"

William James, "The Will to Believe", "The Sentiment of Rationality"

John Dewey, "The Process of Thought" from How We Think

Epicurus, "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoeceus"

Epictetus, The Enchiridion

Walter Pater, "The Art of Life" from The Renaissance

Plutarch, "Contentment"

Cicero, "On Friendship", "On Old Age"

Francis Bacon, "Of Truth", "Of Death", "Of Adversity", "Of Love", "Of Friendship", "Of Anger"

George Santayana, "Lucretius", "Goethe's Faust"

Henry Adams, "St. Thomas Aquinas" from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Voltaire, "The Philosophy of Common Sense"

John Stuart Mill, "Nature"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature", "Self-Reliance", "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic"

William Hazlitt, "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth"

Thomas Browne, "Immortality" from Urn-Burial

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE / Orhan Pamuk

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE / Orhan Pamuk

Translated by Maureen Freely / Alfred A. Knopf / 2009 / 328 pp

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Nobel laureate Pamuk's latest novel is a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love. During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Fusun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shop-girl and poor distant relation, Fusun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a very special, very charming, very lovely girl. Though levelheaded Sibel provides Kemal compassionate relief from their social strata's rising tensions, it is the fleeting moments with fiery, childlike Fusun that grant conflicted Kemal his deepest peace. The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his museum provides a closeness with Fusun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work.

“MY NAME IS RED” / Orhan Pamuk

“MY NAME IS RED” / Orhan Pamuk

Harper-One | 2002 | 450 pages | Translated from the Turkish by
Erda M. Goknar

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At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, “My Name Is Red” is a transporting tale set amid the splendour and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers / The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore must not know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery – or crime? – lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, “My Name is Red” is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power. ~ Translated from the Turkish by Erda M. Goknar.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

Vintage Books / Translated by: Jay Rubin / 1997 / 364 pp

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Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. If it were possible to isolate one theme in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", that theme would be "responsibility". The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture, and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding-up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.

ULYSSES ~ James Joyce

ULYSSES ~ James Joyce

Planet PDF; 1305 pages

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One of the most important works of Modernist literature, it has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Ulysses totals about 265,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into 18 "episodes". Since publication, the book attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars." Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose — full of puns, parodies, and allusions — as well as its rich characterizations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

“THE STRANGER” ~ Albert Camus

“THE STRANGER” ~ Albert Camus

Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert
VINTAGE BOOKS - A Division of Random House, NEW YORK

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"The Stranger" is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt - all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of "The Stranger", however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities - that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral, are two ostensibly damning facts - so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable. Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end - dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it.

“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

Vintage Books; 2002; 240 pp

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(1) “Sputnik Sweetheart” finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping ‘Wind-up Bird Chronicle’, less playfully bizarre than ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’, the author’s seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. “There was nothing solid we could depend on,” the reader is told. “We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another.”

The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer’s block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears “like smoke.” The school teacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire’s lover.

“Sputnik Sweetheart” is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing - where doppelgangers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing.

(2) Murakami’s seventh novel to be translated into English is a short, enigmatic chronicle of unrequited desire, involving three acquaintances - the narrator, a 24-year-old Tokyo school-teacher; his friend Sumire, an erratic, dreamy writer who idolizes Jack Kerouac; and Miu, a beautiful married businesswoman with a secret in her past so harrowing it has turned her hair snowy white. When Sumire abandons her writing for life as an assistant to Miu and later disappears while the two are vacationing on a Greek island, the narrator/ teacher travels across the world to help find her. Once on the island, he discovers Sumire has written two stories: One explaining the extent of her longing for Miu; the second revealing the secret from Miu’s past that bleached her hair and prevents her from getting close to anyone. All of the characters suffer from bouts of existential despair, and in the end, back in Tokyo, having lost both of his potential saviours and deciding to end a loveless affair with a student’s mother, the narrator laments his loneliness. Though the story is almost stark in its simplicity more like Murakami’s romantic ‘Norwegian Wood’, than his surreal ‘Wind-Up Bird Chronicles’, the careful intimacy of the protagonists’ conversation and their tightly controlled passion for each other make this book worthwhile. Like a Zen Koan, Murakami’s tale of the search for human connection asks only questions, offers no answers and must be meditated upon to provide meaning.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

Translated from the Japanese by: Jay Rubin; Harvill Secker Publishers;
2007; 210 pp

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Haruki Murakami’s After Dark takes place over the course of seven hours during an autumn night in Tokyo. From midnight to dawn we follow five lost souls: a woman in a quasi-comatose state; a jazz musician at an all-night practice session; a prostitute assaulted at a “love hotel”; a salary man working late on a software project; and a 19-year-old girl looking to escape from the tension of her strained home life. Before the sun rises, each of these stories will intersect with the others.

Murakami has long been admired for his depiction of the isolation and loneliness of modern Japanese life. Some have lauded him as the J.D. Salinger of Japan. Murakami has even translated The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese, and his breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood captured some of the spirit of that coming-of-age classic. Norwegian Wood sold four million copies, and struck a resonant chord with a younger generation of Japanese readers. After Dark focuses on a similar theme of Japanese youth struggling to reconcile their ideals with the stultifying conformity of the surrounding culture.

Murakami focuses, in his words, on “the secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light,” a time when “no one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.” Much of the power of his stories comes from the paradoxical quality of their settings, which at one moment seem intensely realistic, but the next instant have veered off into a mysterious alternative universe.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / KAFKA ON THE SHORE

HARUKI MURAKAMI / KAFKA ON THE SHORE

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''Beyond the edge of the world, there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard." This haunting passage comes close to the end of Haruki Murakami's ''Kafka on the Shore," but it might just as well have served as the preface, marking the entrance to the fabulous trail through identity, mythology, philosophy, and dreams that is this book / For Kafka Tamura, ''Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step."

HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

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In "THE ELEPHANT VANISHES", Murakami intermingles reality with fantasy, memory with illusion, and the physical world with metaphysical contemplation. Murakami’s characters are homemakers, store clerks, para-professionals, business people, and college students. Many of them suffer from the modern syndrome of angst, ennui, emptiness, and loneliness. These characters’ ontological relationship with reality, therefore, appears to be defined by their ability to create unreality. In “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” for instance, the unemployed narrator’s search for a cat leads him to a meeting with a high school girl whose soothing voice puts the narrator to “sleep”; the meeting is as real as imaginary. “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” examines the paradoxical relationship between fiction and memory. The narrator wants to shape his memory the same way he mows lawns, for he knows both involve deliberate and highly subjective choices. In “The Kangaroo Communique,” the narrator is a bored store clerk. He finds in the theory of the Nobility of Imperfection both an answer to a customer’s complaint and an excuse to console himself. Murakami’s use of surrealism in "THE ELEPHANT VANISHES" is very effective. It bridges the parallel worlds of the visible and the invisible. By making comprehensible what otherwise seems incongruous, Murakami is able to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Murakami’s stories are also enlivened with humour and his characters’ professed candor and innocence.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / DANCE DANCE DANCE

HARUKI MURAKAMI / DANCE DANCE DANCE

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High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes "Dance Dance Dance". It is an assault on the sense, part murder mystery, part metaphysical speculation; a fable for our times, as catchy as a rock song blasting from the window of a sports car.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

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In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, Lilith, the tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / PINBALL, 1973

HARUKI MURAKAMI / PINBALL, 1973

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Despite being an early work, "Pinball, 1973" shares many elements with Murakami's later novels. It describes itself in the text as "a novel about pinball," but also explores themes of loneliness and companionship, purposelessness, and destiny. As with the other books in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series, three of the characters include the protagonist, a nameless first-person narrator, his friend The Rat, and J, the owner of the bar where they often spend time. The plot centers on the narrator's brief but intense obsession with pinball, his life as a freelance translator, and his later efforts to reunite with the old pinball machine that he used to play. Many familiar elements from Murakami's later novels are present. Wells, which are mentioned often in Murakami's novels and play a prominent role in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", occur several times in Pinball. There is also a brief discussion of the abuse of a cat, a plot element which recurs elsewhere in Murakami's fiction, especially "Kafka on the Shore" and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (in which the search for a missing cat is an important plot line). Rain and the Sea are also prominent motifs.

“LIFE of Pi” / Yann Martel

“LIFE of Pi” / Yann Martel

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Yann Martel’s imaginative and unforgettable “Life of Pi” is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of story-telling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting “religions the way a dog attracts fleas.” Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (“His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth”). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don’t burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and fighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat’s sole passengers, drifting for 228 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: “It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.”