Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Mostly I like the book. Weird and fast-paced, not sticking with a group or story for too long. However, I think it could’ve been trimmed in some places and expanded in others. I wanted more from some ideas and could’ve gone without others. I can see why it was shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize though. An interesting and thought-provoking read.

Surprised this made the International Booker longlist (update: SHORTLIST!). An interesting premise that was broken up into too many veering vignettes to tie together a complete whole. Did it introduce some new insights into the structures of our possible futures? An optimistic and human-sympathetic AI is as close as we get. Speculative. Disjointed.

While originally written in 2016 by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami, Under the Eye of the Big Bird hit western shelves in 2024. But despite that, the book feels almost like it was written for 2024, in a time when climate change is causing real-time changes, fascism is on the rise, and humanity is still recovering from a global pandemic.

While the book doesn't speak on these issues specifically, it focuses on the thing we fear most as a result of them:

“What happens when we go extinct?”

Told over the course of 14 interconnected stories about humans on the verge of extinction, I found myself a little confused and skeptical in the first 2–3 stories as I was thrown into a world set hundreds of years from now. But as more was revealed to me, confusion was replaced with a very specific sadness that is summed up perfectly in the penultimate story, through the eyes of an AI character:

“You often talk about feeling lonely. I'm unable to experience that emotion, but I do have the ability to internally simulate an analogous response. For some reason, that is the response that arises whenever I tell your story. It's not something I can explain. It never happens when I talk about other things.”

But this book is more than just an act of doomscrolling in book form, and that's what makes it so refreshing.

Instead, the final chapter caught me by surprise, leaving me in tears as our tale ends not on a note of despair, but one of hope. Kawakami ends her book with a brave tale of how, even at the lowest point of human history, there is still the possibility to face the abyss and ask:
“Is this really the end?”

I'm not best with words. While reading I was enjoying the vision of humanity revolving by the progress in the book. Just closer to the end I finally got a grasp how it was jumping through the timeline and although a bit confusing while it was happening it made a sense to me at the end. I'm not sure I'd agree with some major sentences that showed up here and there but in the end I'm very satisfied with my internal discussion with them and the book. So I was thinking about 4 out of 5, as I was thinking that 5 would be reserved for something that somehow “amazes” me. But in the end I find this book very peaceful and its vision of humanity invites nice discussion. After all the highest grade seems fitting although it doesn't align with prior “requirement” of mine. Great things don't need to be flashy and amazing. Not sure what I can add. I'm deeply satisfied after finishing this lecture.