…Haruki Murakami’s “The Strange Library.” Adele (and her friend Marilyn), who read things psychoanalytically, had interesting things about it, interpreting it as a dream which followed the event with which Murakami actually concludes his book. I, who does not, didn’t.

This was the third Murakami novel I had read. It came to me that his process entails grouping together letters into arrangements that, say, spell “sheep” or “moon” or “girl,” which cast up responses within readers’ minds, but are used by him more like cut-outs of colored paper, which he slides around within the confines of his book’s covers, governed by the laws of a universe which, while offering some restraints, were not the laws of my own and that, then, what happens to your mind, happens to your mind.

Of course, this could be said of any writer. But it was with Murakami that I first saw it, so he gets the credit.

And I join Adele and Marily in wishing that, now that he’s got this out of the way, he’ll get back
to “IQ84.”