Sounds like most people don’t mind. Let’s start from next week then (26th April)
Next question - reading pace.
The book has 44 short chapters (total of ~3600 kindle marks), with chapters being about 90 kindle marks each.
My sense is that 2 chapters a week would be very manageable (I think that would roughly correspond to ~15 paperback pages, based on similar books), [22 weeks total], though I suspect we could go faster and three or even four chapters may be manageable.
Shall we start with 2 chapters and then see how that feels, speeding up if comfortable?
I’m not sure… weekly threads are a great way to keep conversation about stories/chapters neat and clean, but we’ll end up with 22 threads… that feels like a lot, and that’s a lot of work for you !
That sounds good! If we find out that we don’t discuss as much, we can have more chapters in it, but if we discuss a lot, we can split for 10 chapters each or so.
We can ask these in November during the book club event.
In a number of your stories (the poison in Pregnancy Calendar, the bees in Dormitory. The nature of the disappearances in the Memory Police), there is an unresolved ambiguity about the nature of a central element - is it real, is it in the mind of the characters. Is that ambiguity important to you? In your own mind, when you are writing, do you have a single view about these elements. Or do you too remain unsure about their nature?
Mina’s matchbox is set in Ashiya - where you currently live or have lived. How is location important in this story?
Memory appears to be a recurring theme in your books (housekeeper, the memory police). In Mina’s matchbox, memory preserves a world, protects it from change. (LP Hartley - "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”)
The suicide of Yasunari Kawabata has a profound impact on the book loving Mina. Do you remember this event from your own childhood? Did you read Kawabata’s novels at a precocious age (like Mina)? Did you seek to echo any of Kawabata’s novels or writing style in Mina’s matchbox?
