DELF A1 and Kafka

My morning began with a trip to Alliance Française at Lorong Gurney to sit for my French exam – more accurately, the DELF A1. I arrived at around 7.40am and saw my teacher and a few of my classmates gathering round a small table and I joined them, but when it was time to enter the exam hall, for some reason I couldn’t spot my name on the appropriate classroom door anymore (when I previously saw it when I first came in), but I was quickly ushered to the right class – there were only 4 classrooms in use in the small centre anyway.

It was rather intimidating talking to the French – I could understand roughly what the female French invigilator was saying when I first entered the wrong class, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth so I ended up mouthing English words instead.

“Vous vous appelez comment?”

I pointed towards the name on my IC instead.

The exam was alright – the listening section was a real bitch considering that my ears were still not used to listening to rapidly fast French speech, so it was all I could do to catch the few “keywords” that I could hear. Otherwise, the comprehension section and the writing section was fairly okay.

Throughout the day I immersed myself with Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami – I was reading it in the car on the way back, after lunch, after a short nap, and then continued reading through the book and finished it at about 6.20pm. It’s quite possibly the longest while I had ever read through a single book for so long like that – the last time I did this, I was backpacking in Laos and Bangkok.

Reading a Murakami, you’ll almost always notice the familiar themes that keep surfacing – different worlds that interconnect with the real world, the main character is always a male, and the sex scenes are.. shall we say, extremely descriptive.

I wasn’t very satisfied with Kafka on the Shore though – maybe because I wasn’t very comfortable with the exploration of the Oedipus complex, or the fact that far too many questions were left unanswered, but I enjoyed the ride through all the same. Apparently we have to re-read the book for a second or a third time to “get it” – but no thanks for me, as I’ve probably took like more than 3 months to actually finish reading it and am not about to start it again.

8/10 for me.

Exactly 3 weeks before I leave Malaysia – it’s probably strange to say this, but I’ve been fleeting in and out between seizing this thought in pure terror and fear, and simply diving into a pool of apathy, where in not doing any preparation I try to fool myself in believing I still have time. The past week I’ve not been turning it into a fruitful week, and I don’t anticipate the next coming ones would be not the same.