Mistakes in Novels

When a character in a novel makes a simple mistake, you want to stop and think to make sure you understand whether the mistake is the character's or the author's. Here are a couple of examples--the first from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.

Believe me, income has dropped by twenty percent and prices have gone up twenty percent, that's a total of forty percent!

--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Part III
(p. 729 in volume II of the Viking Paperback ed.)

So one of the "driblets of the general conversation around him" that Ulrich hears as his train rolls into the station. Strictly speaking, (1.2/.8)-1=0.5=50 percent, not 40 percent. This may seem a fine point but it wouldn't have been lost on Musil the engineer, and the stance is in keeping with his general negative opinion on the masses. So, character, not author.

Compare Toro Okada, the narrator of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles as he undertakes to cook dinner. I can't find the page reference but I am intrigued to learn that Toro starts by browning the onion and the garlic. Now, any decent cook knows that if you brown the garlic it tastes like overshoes. You can roast it or (as here) you can add the other ingredients and then throw in the garlic to stew.

Whose error? Toro is not a conspicuously great cook, but he is a careful and somewhat fastidious man, and he likes to prepare food with care. I suspect he knows that you don't brown the garlic. So, author, not character.