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Murakami renders a world in which an aura of surrealism pervades everyday
life: cause and effect change place, memory and illusion change the shape
of the present moment, the most ordinary thoughts and actions result in
the most unexpected revelations and events. And so it is in these seventeen
spare, mesmerizing, serenely funny stones. |
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The narrator of the title story - obsessed with the unaccountable disappearance
of an elephant from the local elephant house - thinks he may have glimpsed
what only seems impossible . . . the protagonist of another story knows
that she has taken part in an impossible reality when she telepathically
slays a small green monster who has just proposed marriage to her . . .
a store clerk's reply to a letter of complaint reveals the vast clutter
of his own thoughts, at the center of which hangs his theory of "The
Nobility of Imperfection". . sleeplessness becomes a foretaste of death
for a young mother. . . a man's life is invaded by TV People who may be
illusory but nonetheless have a surer sense of what's really going on than
he does. . . a young man invited into the carefully preserved room of a
stranger's absent daughter begins to sense the armature of fiction beneath
the malleable surface of recollection. |
The Elephant Vanishes invites us to see what might otherwise remain hidden:
the sure existence of the inexplicable - both chaotic and comic - in the
demure dailiness of life. It is a continually surprising, altogether remarkable
collection of stories. |
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