Review: The Thief

The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Thief from Fuminori Nakamura is an existential roadtrip through the psyche of a master pickpocket as he faces his own mortality and questions his life choices in the aftermath of a job that didn't quite go as planned.

This felt a little bit like reading the love child of Richard Stark and Camus. Several very well plotted and executed "action" show off the narrator's criminal abilities, but Nakamura gives a lot more space to the narrator's emotional crisis than to his trade craft. As with any post-modern work, there are threads that never really come to a close, and many of the events of the book feel more like dream sequences or hallucinations than lived experiences, but that's clearly intentional.

Not quite my cup of tea, but a fast, engaging read all the same.

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