Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

“Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.”

I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev’s old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. Not that Dostoyevsky’s characters don’t generate pathos, but they’re flawed in ways that don’t come across as faults. And while I’m on the subject, Tolstoy’s characters’ faults are so epic and out of scale, they’re as static as backdrops.

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels.