Sleep (narration)

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Sleep ( Japanese 眠 り Nemuri ) is a book by Haruki Murakami that was first published in 2009 by DuMont Buchverlag . The eponymous story first appeared in Japanese in 1989 and in German in 1995 in the anthology Der Elefant disappears from Berlin-Verlag.

content

The first-person narrator is a 30-year-old Japanese woman. At first she suffers from chronic fatigue, then she cannot sleep for seventeen days and nights. To avoid insomnia, she reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and does other activities such as swimming. The narrator is married to a dentist and has a son with him. When she notices that her son's features are similar to his father's, her love for him wanes. The narrator is also very proud of her own car, an old Honda City . The story ends with the narrator sitting in this car and trying in vain to start the engine while unknown characters approach the car.

Illustrations

The illustrations come from Kat Menschik and take up individual excerpts from the story.

Reviews

“Is the story of sleep, the absent, one of death? Murakami writes a simple, rhythmic prose whose tone becomes more urgent the longer the narrator's insomnia persists. And with the urgency comes a great discomfort in this text, which then ends abruptly. "

- Verena Luken in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 14th. 2009

"Why are we actually sleeping? To this day, sleep is a veritable gap in the cartography of knowledge of life. […] The book gives no answer, but it asks - this, too, is Murakami principle - disturbing questions out of the seemingly simple cover. The latent tension that emanates from Murakami's texts is largely due to his language, his calm grammar and his strangely aseptic, sparse metaphorics for Western readers. "

- Katrin Schumacher in: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , October 2, 2009

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buchmesse-2009/buecher/haruki-murakami-schlaf-fuer-immer-wach-1866182.html
  2. ↑ https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/der-lös-der-muedigkeit.950.de.html?dram:article_id=137933