Is reading really just about mind control and punishment, combining vampirism and surveillance all in one? Even worse, you learn that afterwards he will devour your brain and all its contents, including absurd information about tax collection that you’ve been forced to study. But you have a ball and chain shackled to your ankle and must sit and read in the dark, memorizing books at the old man’s command. You are a frightened boy who just wants to borrow some books and return home to the comfort of a dinner cooked by your mother. Murakami’s uses a child’s poiny of view to describe a descent into hell, a story not about books opening doors but about being a labyrinth that narrows and narrows your choices until you’re entrapped in its inmost cell underground, forced to read in a “reading room” presided over by a tyrant, a little old man behind a desk with “black spots dott his face like a swarm of flies.” And in that room all your worse fears come true. But Borges’ tale is an expansive parable about infinity-and the hubris of pedantry-told by a wry ancient sage. But it feels sharply different the twentieth century’s most famous allegory of reading, Borges’ “The Library of Babel.” Both Borges’ and Murakami’s fables are suffused with an unspeakable melancholy. This brief tale reads like an allegory of reading itself, the Library as emblematic of the world. Published 2005 but written early in his career translated into English 2014 by Ted Goosen.
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