Tuesday, 22 October 2019

Birthday Girl


Details of the Book
No. of Pages   : 48 pages
ISBN-10          : 1787301257
ISBN-13          : 978-1787301252
Language         : English

From the book blurb
She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress’s uneventful twentieth birthday takes a strange and fateful turn when she’s asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant’s reclusive owner. Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami’s 70th birthday.
  
Author
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

 What I think
Murakami’s Birthday Girl is a short story about a girl’s magical, surreal rather, encounter on her twentieth birthday. With just 42 pages, the story has parallel narrative which seems to be between present and past. When a writer could convey a thought provoking story with less words, it is a success in itself. The book would need just ten minutes of your time. But, it would make you ponder. It would tickle your creative brain. It would make you think and maybe compel you to reread too.

Short stories are always difficult to write; more so is the choice to leave it open ended. We readers always prefer to be spoon fed with as much details as possible (at least, I do). But when they turn out to be something as interesting as this, the element of surprise overtakes. And this book is highly recommended because it is a perfect example of stellar story telling.

Unfortunately, if I talk more about this book, then I may have to give a spoiler alert. I really don’t want to do that. So I stop here and request you to read this book. It’s very cheap and definitely doesn’t take too much of your time.  After all, it is high on imagination quotient with a philosophical twist.

So, please let me know of your interpretation of the book. I would be delighted to hear!
You could buy here.

Rating
3.5/5

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