Do Books Change With Us?

Reflections on literature and loss

I recently wrote some rather scathing comments over on my books page about Haruki Murakami’s novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, which I would now like to revise, having finished reading the book for a second time.

I first read it in January 2004. I am able to give you the month and year because I have just checked my old lists, which I titled ‘Stuff Nick Has Read’ and dutifully recorded on Cambridge A4 lined paper. Why I made these lists is another story, possibly one without a real resolution, like most of Murakami’s work. But why I consulted it just now is much easier to say. Though, again like some of Murakami’s work, I warn you it does get quite dark.

Upon rereading A Wild Sheep Chase, I found that it got much better as it went on, and felt bad that I had unfairly dismissed it. The first part seemed too much like Murakami’s first two novels, which are genuinely poor, as even Murakami admits. But towards the middle the book does actually get going, for those earnest enough to stick with it.

It’s not unprecedented for a writer to find their voice with their third novel (see Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March), or to suddenly find it in the middle of the book (try Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles). What was surprising to me was not any of this, but how little I remembered from the last time I’d read it.

Often when rereading novels I remember certain lines verbatim, and much else besides. However, with this I remembered virtually nothing, except one particular character, and the odd inclusion of an illustration.

What surprised me even more, however—and here I have to give a major spoiler—is that I had forgotten the suicide in the novel.

Anyone who has read Murakami knows that suicide is an obsessive theme for him, occurring somewhere in virtually all of his fiction. But when I first read A Wild Sheep Chase, I didn’t know anyone who had taken this particular path out of life. Now I do. This is why I went to my old notes to check. I realised I must have read the book just before my cousin’s suicide, which happened in autumn 2004.

I will always remember getting that call from my dad. I was at York University in my halls of residence, listening to the Tom Waits album Real Gone. Strangely the track playing was ‘Sins of My Father’. I was worried as soon as I heard my dad’s voice. It was always my mum who called, passing the phone to my dad after a few minutes. So my dad making the call himself meant bad news. That’s how it works in my family. My mum does most of the communication work, but my dad gets the really hard jobs.

Nothing was ever the same after that call. I still have dreams of my cousin to this day, and he always remains seventeen years old. In the dreams I am aware that he can’t really be there, yet somehow he is.

Had I read Murakami’s novel a few months later, presumably its tragic theme would have made a significant impression on me. But I was still a few months away from experiencing this particular form of pain, so it bounced right off.

Which brings me to the question: do books change with us? I suppose I have already answered that they do.

There are, it seems, several different version of A Wild Sheep Chase. The one I first read when I was not exactly a callow youth, because two friends had already died, but certainly before I was acquainted with this form of loss. Then the one I have just read now. And yet because I had read it all those years ago but not remembered a key incident, the experience hit harder than the other Murakami novels I’ve read this year, even those that heavily feature suicide. So perhaps the very act of rereading also makes it a different book than if I’d read it now for the first time.

I don’t know why this is exactly. It may be the way the incident occurs in this particular book (which I’m being slightly vague about so as not to entirely spoil it for you) or it may be something about the fact that I had read the book before, but forgotten this part. Perhaps I was caught unawares. Though the other novels were completely new to me, so that doesn’t really make sense—like so many things to do with Murakami, and indeed with my life.

Had I not read his prior two novels first this time, I presume the experience would also have been different.

This all suggests there are infinite versions of a book, depending on who we are at the time of reading. Here I suspect I am straying dangerously close to some sort of annoying postmodern theory I’ve also managed to forget since studying English literature. Oh well, it can’t be helped.

It is relatively common, I suppose, to enjoy a book the first time and find it not as good upon rereading. This has certainly happened to me with books and films that seemed to mean a lot more when I was young. But I imagine it’s much rarer to feel a particular book is not very good, then find it much better the second time, if only because it would take a real eccentric to reread something they hated. By apparently being the kind of nutter to do just such a thing, I have chanced upon a profound or at least somewhat interesting, if painful, experience.

I have just checked my old notes again and am surprised to see that the book I read immediately before A Wild Sheep Chase was The Adventures of Augie March. Did I unconsciously know that when I mentioned it just now? I thought I was just grasping for an example of a third novel stylistic departure. Was that why I read these two books in that order in the first place? I don’t think so, as I don’t think I even knew it was Murakami’s third novel. But can I trust my memory anymore, after failing to remember so much about this book?

Again like Murakami, the questions pile up, but the answers seldom come.