January 02, 2007
Front matter, Page 9
Closing In On The Sheep
Haruki Murakami
Chapter 1
November 25, 1970
A Wednesday Afternoon Picnic
A friend stumbled across her death in the newspaper and called to tell me. He read the one-paragraph article slowly into the phone. It was a lousy article. It read like some kid reporter, fresh out of college, had been made to write it as practice. On some month and day, at some street corner, someone driving a truck ran someone over. There was an investigation for negligent manslaughter. It sounded like the short poems printed on the covers of literary magazines.
"Where do you think they'll have the funeral?" I asked.
"Not sure," he said. "Anyway, she didn't have much you could call a home, did she?"
Of course she had a home.
[Notes: Alfred Birnbaum is some kind of genius or something. He plays with the order of sentences, provides cultural context for things (the lit magazines), and keeps the terse feeling of the original. Whoo.]
Posted by tim at January 2, 2007 11:59 PM
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