South Of The Border

West of the Sun is the title of a novel by Haruki Murakami. Many consider this novel to be his finest work. I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as I would say that the novel definitely tapped into emotional wells of pus of mine that needed draining. I'm not sure they've been drained entirely, but at least I now know that they're there. 

The novel covers the life of the protagonist from adolescence to middle age. The protagonist is an only child and has a childhood sweetheart (also an only child) with whom he loses contact when his family moves during junior high and the loss of that connection has a profound impact on him. The protagonist goes on to have a high school sweetheart and his behavior has a profound impact on her - in a bad way, and the damage appears to have been irreparable. The knowledge of this fills the protagonist with an extreme amount of guilt when he discovers this. At this point he is married - to someone who is carrying her own burden of pain and hurt which resulted in her attempting suicide and was just beginning to recover when she meets the protagonist and eventually marries him. While he struggles with learning about his high school sweetheart, he reunites with his childhood sweetheart who has become an exceptionally beautiful woman and clearly has secrets of her own that we never learn - other than that she lost a child, though it can be inferred that she is a woman kept by a very powerful man. The two take a road trip to allow the sweetheart to dispose of the child's ashes - and they finally consummate their relationship physically - and in the morning, she's gone, and the protagonist never sees her again. This throws the protagonist into emotional despair and the wife is now distraught that she is going to lose him.  At the end of the novel, the husband and wife move towards embracing the idea that they are capable of hurting as well as being hurt, but the only choice is to change as best they can and move forward.

Murakami has never communicated the idea that his novels have any sort of underlying messages or morals/agendas so I'm not going to ascribe any, but a running motif seems to be that relationships fail and that that can't be recreated as much as rebuilt, from the ashes as it were. Also, the women: the childhood sweetheart, the high school sweetheart and the wife have carried emotional hurt from prior relationships, and they all responded in different ways.

Personally, I was able to look back and see that I still carry some negative emotion about failed relationships, as well as relationships that never came to be. In the cases of failed relationships due in large part to my behavior resulting in hurting my partner, I found myself wishing I could get some reassurance that the other person was doing OK, especially for the ones who never got married. And there seem to have been quite a few. Intellectually, I know that I am not responsible for another person's emotional healing, but the negative emotion I still carry has hampered me from moving forward with other opportunities that have presented themselves. I need to embrace the truth that all I can do is change myself as best I can, and to move forward from where I stand now. 

Wallender

I have this thing for detective novels. I think it started with Michael Connelly's "Bosch" series. What set these novels apart from many American detective series is that Bosch was damaged by emotional trauma, including the murder of his mother, but that damage was what made him a successful detective. But the struggle achieve closure is a vital part of the plots.  I've discovered that I prefer detective series written by non-Americans, as these authors also tend to create damaged heroes but also (intentionally or otherwise)  provide insights into their country's society. And so I read Ian Rankin's "Rebus" series set in Scotland, along with other series such as Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series set in Shanghai (and it didn't hurt that Chen was a gourmand and there were a lot of descriptions of his meals). I had high hopes for Camerilli's Inspector Montalbano series, as Montalbano is also a gourmand, but since his novels were written in Italian for an Italian audience, the dishes are mainly just listed as it was expected that Italians would know what these dishes were, and unfortunately the character hasn't changed much over the series. And then there's Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender. 

The Wallender series is a bit different, because it was Henning Mankell's intent to depict how Swedish society was changing - and not for the better - and the topic of Mankell's first novel Faceless Killers was immigration/racism in Swedish society. Mankell died about seven years ago, and the Wallender series had ended in 2009, but I recently discovered that a novella An Evening in Autumn had been written and so I acquired a copy and read it today. There's an epilogue in which Mankell described the thought process that led to the creation of the Kurt Wallender character. It began with the idea that the natural path would be to write a crime novel, as "racist acts are criminal outrages. A logical consequence of this was that I would need an investigator, a crime expert, a police officer.". He went on:

"It seemed to me that the police officer I shall describe must realize how difficult it is to be a good police officer. Crime changes in the same way that a society changes. If he is going to be able to do his work properly, he must understand what is going on in the society he lives in."

Crime changes in the same way that a society changes.

While I disagree vehemently with Mankell's politics (he was an ardent Communist) his observation on this was dead on. And it behooves us to look at the crimes that seem to outrage us the most nowadays. For many it's an increase in gun violence. But instead of looking at how the changes in society have prompted this, many have been led to believe that this will be curtailed by the banning of guns. 

It's always amused me that certain people have embraced the idea that the country of Sweden is some sort of utopia to be emulated. Some of these same people have enjoyed the Wallender series oblivious to the fact that each novel addressed different negative aspects of the result of trying to incorporate a welfare state into a democracy.  The results have also been depicted in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Perhaps people might have paid more attention if they'd used Larsson's original title: "Men Who Hate Women". Now it fills me with dismay that a lot of what was depicted in these novels describes a lot of what I see in American society today.