The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
In 1980, when Haruki Murakami was just starting out as a writer, he published an odd and obscure little novella. Titled The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, it dealt with an isolated and otherworldly city where no one had a shadow and librarians learned to read dreams. That novella formed the seed of Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but over time, Murakami writes in the afterword to his latest book, he started to think that there was still more he could do with the concept of the original novella.
The new The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a full novel, and it is nearly as odd and obscure as its source. Our unnamed narrator is middle-aged when the novel begins, but when he was 17, he fell in love with a girl who told him that she was only the shadow of a real person. Her real self, the girl explained, lived in a faraway city surrounded by a wall. Now as an adult, the narrator has found his way to that isolated city. He has ripped away his own shadow and wounded his eyes in order to enter it. He spends his days enraptured by his lost love. Still, he begins to fear that in losing his shadow, he might have lost more than be bargained for.
Murakami is playing with some of his most beloved motifs here (cats, libraries, ear stuff, precocious teens, magic). At 75 years old, he’s not reinventing the wheel, and this novel doesn’t summon the shock of encountering something wholly new that Murakami at his best can provide. Still, he works with a marshmallow touch that leaves this book feeling dreamy as a featherbed. What’s more evocative and transporting than Haruki Murakami describing a magical city with unicorns outside the gates and a whole library full of lost dreams inside?
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
There is something eerie, something subtly off about the narrator of The Empusium, the latest book from Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. Most of the book is in a limited third person, describing the thoughts of the timid and sickly Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a young Polish man trying to treat his tuberculosis at a mountain health resort in 1913. Yet every so often, the narrator slips out of Wojnicz’s head and into a slick, creepy first person, elucidating on its opinions with satisfaction.
“We are witnesses,” the narrator reports as Wojnicz dresses himself. “People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.”
The Empusium is a riff on The Magic Mountain, written by Tokarczuk’s fellow Nobelist Thomas Mann in 1924, on the other side of World War I from where Wojnicz’s story begins. In The Magic Mountain, Mann’s tubercular hero meets a string of interesting thinkers with whom he talks at length about the questions that animated that postwar world: What defines a nation? What system of government and economy is the best? In The Empusium, Wojnicz, too, meets a string of men who have strong opinions about politics and philosophy — but somehow, their conversation always seems to end up devolving into strings of vicious misogyny. Meanwhile, he notices that the women of the town seem to be downtrodden and sad, and some of them have met violent ends.
If reading a book about how misogyny poisons political philosophy does not appeal to you just now, take heart. The Empusium is named after the witchy Greek shapeshifter Empusa, thought to feed on men. That self-satisfied narrator might just have something to say about what it’s witnessing.
The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire
Melancholy and gently understated, The Café with No Name is the story of the 10-year life of a café in midcentury Vienna. Our protagonist Robert Simon grew up a war orphan, neglected and alone, but in 1966, he decides to create a community. He opens a café in Vienna’s dingy, workaday Carmelite market square, serving beer and wine and raspberry soda and gherkins and bread and drippings (with or without onions) and hot punch in the winter. There, he creates an entire world.
Seethaler, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, wends his way through the cast of characters who visit Robert’s café. Mila the barmaid is a country girl determined to make her way in the city, a project set back significantly when she falls for the aging wrestling star René Wurm. Johannes Berg is the butcher who becomes Robert’s best friend, ever fretting over his ailing father and his frequently pregnant wife. Arnie Stjanko is a handyman who requests his payment in beer, “and a couple of gherkins on top, alright?”
Through their eyes, we watch as Vienna begins to climb its way out of the long grim period of postwar poverty and into something that looks, by the end of the novel, like the beginning of modernity — for better or for worse. This is a sweet book, but it never cloys.
