Both Loe and Murakami play with the scale of the world, distorting and amplifying the mundane until it ends up rendered strange and fantastic. Super is similar to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, another one of my favourites. The protagonist plays with wooden BRIO toys and throws a ball against a wall, writes lists, plays with the fax machine, and reads the works of physicist Paul Davies. The protagonist drops all his commitments and ends up housesitting for his brother, his only job to fax any mail that arrives in the letterbox. Super is structured around a Norwegian twenty-something suffering a kind of mental collapse after losing to his brother in a game of croquet. At least, as somebody working on a book I find almost impossible to explain, I really, really hope so). If it’s possible to broadly explain a book away in a sentence or a paragraph or a page, it seems as though that’s a sign of the work’s weakness, as opposed to a strength. (As an aside before I even get started, irreducible books are probably, in my very humble opinion, the only kinds of books worth reading. It’s one of those books that’s virtually irreducible – the only way to understand what it’s about is to read it all the way through. Super for years, with relatively little success. I’ve tried to get friends reading Erlend Loe’s Naïve. This review was originally published over at Annabel Smith’s blog – she runs a series in which bookish types are asked to share their all-time favourite work of fiction and describe what it means to them.
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