I used to play a drinking game. I don’t know if I can call it a drinking game since it wasn’t alcohol I drank, but it went something like this: Every time someone wonders why they couldn’t just fly somewhere far away, I take a sip. Every time a shiver runs down someone’s spine, I take a sip. Every time there is a witty but irrelevant epigraph at the start, I take a sip. Connections are fun. Being able to recognize the rhythms,certain structures of a particular story more so.
I’ve read of children who pretend to have twins or body doubles or clones. I don’t know if they actually do, since I’ve never encountered any professing to do so. I never did. I’ve known two sets of twins and one set of triplets in my life. I’ve met them all in school. Of the triplets, two of them attend my school and they are so nice I want to kiss them. They’re different from each other, they claim. But both never fail to ask me how I am doing whenever they see me. Both feel some sorta untoward need to “help” me with my school work, listen to my ramblings on love, loneliness and connections as if what I’m saying has some profound meaning and they can’t possibly miss out on that. In Murakami’s Pinball, 1973 the narrator seems really perplexed with the set of twins who one day just starts living with him. He could not distinguish them apart. They were “alike in every respect” from expressions to hair styles to the things they ate or the times they slept. They even had their periods at the same time. When the girls found out he couldn’t tell them apart, they were furious. “We’re total opposites!” they shout, which shuts him up so he shrugs.
I feel as if twins have this “fear” of being seen as a copy. Each claims to be the original document, accusing the other of being carbon. When their likes and dislikes and behavior end up being similar, they find themselves shocked and want to deliberately steer away from committing those “acts”. With me, someone who does not have a twin, it’s something else. I never suspected I had a secret twin, but I always dreamt of what it’d be like to have one. Because I for one had enough of being myself and wanted to be the forgotten among the two, I wanted to be the smart one of the two, the “planner” while my other version would be the “doer”. And I’d be a hotshot writer of autofiction and he’d illustrate my book covers with postmodern designs.
Remember you once linked me a Lithub article Murakami wrote on how he started writing? There was this line, I don’t remember much about it, where he said he didn’t worry about having beautiful phrases or try having a “pull” as some sentences have for effects. He didn’t need those. Unnecessarily chopping down sentences do not create depth. Hemingway’s stilted way of writing, a cheap imitation of Stephen Crane, is annoying. Naturalistic styles of narratives are more interesting.
Twins in stories are so fun to read, I don’t even know what I expect of them, but I love reading about them. I do not like reading twin stories where the kids are hilariously opposites of each other. Something TV has done already on too many occasions to maybe illustrate some stupid adage only they’d get. There’s nothing wrong with being alike.
The triplets told me this story during recess once. When they were kids, some aunt came by the house and taught them this game where they’d pretend to be each otherfor long stretches of time. One time they were doing that their mother called them for dinner and they forgot to formally end the game as they had done on previous occasions and happily sat down at the table. They laugh now at this. “So there’s a possibility, however slim, you three have led one of the other’s lives,” I say. They shrug. (Funnily enough, something similar happens in Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Connections, lol.)
I like this chapter a lot, it’s neat, the narrative’s leaner yet has “juice”, the whole plane scene was lovely, the santaclaus bit was nice—I don’t think I had anything interesting to say about this chp. I had to bullshit my way through the whole review so that I could get full points. Sorry about that.
Points: 1053
Reviews: 133
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