dance dance dance

damnit, this is what i get for not bringing my book along.

i wanted to blog about certain quotes from the book but i can’t remember them in verbatim and i left my copy at home. the funny thing is that i stared at the book for a good ten seconds this morning contemplating if i should bring it or not before i decided to just leave it on the floor in my room.

"i wouldn’t have time to read it anyway. i’d be working most of the time (yeah right); and even if i wasn’t, it wouldn’t exactly be polite to my officemates to be reading a novel during workhours. then after work, i’d be with mau. i really can’t read books when i’m not alone so i wouldn’t be able to read then either. so i just won’t bring the book."

… way to go, Reason!

i’ll try to blog it anyway from memory and try not to get anything lost in translation.

right now, i’m around 1/3 into my second Haruki Murakami book: "Dance Dance Dance". what it’s about can easily be researched in wikipedia; so if you’re interested, you can go on and just do that (ang sungit ko no? ^_^). on the other hand, the feel of the book is something you’d really have to experience for yourself. it’s surreal and it’s absurd. it’s thrilling and slightly eerie. think a less kiddie Alice In Wonderland but set in modern urban Japan.

what i’m liking about the novel the most right now though is that i’ve seen a couple of similarities already between myself and the main protagonist. that’s one of the better bonuses when i read a novel (like when I read "High Fidelity"). when i read about a character that’s somehow a mirror of me, i get more enthusiastic about the book. it’s like this story (or a different version of it) could be my story. i like doing that… daydreaming about an alternate existence and imagining myself in different situations… call it escapism if you want. that’s probably what it is anyway. it also helps that the main character remains unnamed. it’s easier to put myself in his shoes that way. easier to imagine.

anyway… ah, similarities… right…

somewhere in the beginning of the story, the protagonist has this short chat with an older man about the state of the world. as he describes to the older guy how he sees things, the older man says that he could never understand these complex workings that the protagonist describes. at this, our protagonist thinks to himself that actually, he doesn’t really understand things also. he just recognizes things for what they are. and there’s a decisive difference between those two propositions. that was the first thing about the main character that really stuck to my head.

sometimes, there really are no deeper complexities to the things that happen around us. sometimes, maybe much more often than we think, things are just what they are and they have to be recognized as such. i must admit that this isn’t always the case though. the world is full of ulterior motives, hidden intentions and deeper meanings. but i also think that people have made life much more complex that it should be, and that has affected our perception of things to the point that we try to read too much into a lot of stuff. the sad thing about it is that when you start reading into what shouldn’t be read into, things might start to get ugly.

another thing about him that struck me (although to a lesser extent) was what he said that sometimes, people can’t tell if he’s kidding any more that when he’s serious.  suppose that struck me only because it somehow touches on how i often get misunderstood or misinterpreted. that’s all there is to that, really.

well that’s that. hopefully by next week i’ll be finished with DDD. it’s interesting how the protagonist’s story progresses "down the rabbit hole" and it’s equally interesting to see if there are any more similarities i’ll be able to see between the two of us. after that, i can move on the other books wasting away on the shelves.