The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Last weekend I was prompted by another blogger to finally pick up one of the many unread Haruki Murakami books I have here at home. The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of short stories and it had its strengths and weaknesses. I liked about half of the stories and was really weirded out when the first one seemed incredibly familiar. (How many cats named Noboru Watanabe can there be?) It turns out that it became the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle!

The main weakness of the collection was that too many of the stories were written about the same essential guy -- early thirties, smokes constantly, drinks almost as much, and likes to bed college students/twenty-somethings. The plots varied but this guy kept showing up and, well, I didn't find him very interesting. However, sometimes he still ended up in a story I enjoyed so who knows. The bottom line is that the mind of Murakami is sometimes predictable, sometimes special, but almost always worth a visit.

Shortly,
K

"Early one morning at the end of April there was a pounding on the door to Eric Bear and Emma Rabbit's apartment on brick-red Uxbridge Street."

It's always exciting to discover a new-in-translation author, enjoy your first reading of one of their novels and then find that you have a small stack of their work ahead of you.  The novels of Tim Davys (a pseudonym for a mysterious Swedish author) appear to have only been translated in the last year but now we have three books in this loose series to enjoy.  I just finished the first, Amberville, and can't wait to move on to the others!

Amberville is one of the four districts of Mollisan Town, an isolated place of colorful buildings and streets that is populated by stuffed animals.  Yes, you read that right -- stuffed animals.  Everyone in the town is a walking, talking animal with cotton for guts.  They have religion, organized crime, business and art.  The main character is Eric Bear, an advertising executive (and a teddy bear) who has a somewhat seedy past.  He is approached by mobster Nicholas Dove who has a proposition for him.  If Eric is unsuccessful, Dove will have his wife, Emma Rabbit, killed.  So he gathers together some other animals he used to work with--a crow, a snake and a gazelle--to help him in the task.  They must journey through all of the districts of the town and even some of the fringes looking for something that may not even exist.

I've seen this series compared to Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series but, based on this first novel, I don't really see anything in common between the two besides a gritty representation of things that are normally children's topics.  Fforde's books are based on existing literary characters and imagining their little quirks and foibles and, while dealing with crime, are on the lighter side.  Davys' city and characters are completely new and much darker, participating in sado-masochistic relations, drink, drugs, torture and more.  This is a crime novel in a fantasy setting.  I wasn't sure I would enjoy it once I got a sense of the tone but, in fact, I got caught up in the story and had a good time with this book.  The second in the series, Lanceheim, is out in translation already and the third, Tourquai, will be released next month.  They are all set in Mollisan Town but feature entirely different characters.  I will be interested to see if they are the same type of stories or not.

Closing the lid on the toy box,
K


Support our site and buy Amberville on Amazon or find it at your local library.  We received a copy for review from the publisher.