The actual story is about the brokenness of childhood as seen by an adult, and how you can't really ever be the people that your childhood self thought you were going to be when you would one day become a grown-up. This is the story of a man whose future was stolen, who became a detective not to solve his own mystery but because he could not return to the person that he was supposed to be before he lost his childhood and his two best friends, and then proceeds to destroy his present for himself.
Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans traces very similar themes in a very different way. I don't know that you'd enjoy it but they might be interesting to compare.
Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore also deals with forest in the same sort of Jungian way -- simultaneously shelter and trap, with its own mysterious agency. A lot of his books do, actually, come to think of it (Norwegian Wood too maybe) but I think it's most fully developed there.
- tim, who apparently likes authors with japanese names
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branchandroot
things that this made me think of
Date: 2010-02-22 05:49 am (UTC)The actual story is about the brokenness of childhood as seen by an adult, and how you can't really ever be the people that your childhood self thought you were going to be when you would one day become a grown-up. This is the story of a man whose future was stolen, who became a detective not to solve his own mystery but because he could not return to the person that he was supposed to be before he lost his childhood and his two best friends, and then proceeds to destroy his present for himself.
Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans traces very similar themes in a very different way. I don't know that you'd enjoy it but they might be interesting to compare.
Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore also deals with forest in the same sort of Jungian way -- simultaneously shelter and trap, with its own mysterious agency. A lot of his books do, actually, come to think of it (Norwegian Wood too maybe) but I think it's most fully developed there.
- tim, who apparently likes authors with japanese names