Samsa in Love by Haruki MurakamiMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Call me a 'Murakami maniac' but I love the way this man writes and something in me died when he didn't he get the Nobel Prize, even though feminism did a Hula-Hoop for Alice Munro!
LEAVING all that aside, Samsa in Love was a story I nicked out of someone's FB profile, and read on a night Sleep couldn't find a way to seduce me stealthily! And it touched a chord at once. Though slightly long and highly descriptive, Samsa... is a story of a cockroach that wakes up one morning to find itself transformed into a human being named Gregor Samsa and among all the things it discovers/learns about humans, like how to walk on two feet, the importance of dressing up, the GINORMOUS appetite of humans, it also discovers something it couldn't have ever come across as an insect:love!
No, I don't agree that love is an emotion unique to humans alone! I have had dogs all my life, for God's sake. And yes, I think it's presumptuous to assume that we're the only animals to harbour that feeling. (Animal cognition might be more advanced than we give it credit for. We Palaeolithic archaeologists argue about that almost everyday!)
Despite that, there's something heart-warming about this story, something that makes you want to laugh as you might at the innocence of a baby and cry as you might at something that makes you realise how complicated, how distant we humans have become from things that come into us quite naturally and how we have stopped listening to our own hearts.
Yes, that is what Samsa in Love is all about, about innocence, about sincerity of emotions and pure, honest actions arising out of feelings and not need! Funny, how much a short story can say!
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