I am about set to try my first Murakami book, thanks to a review by Kathryn Shulz. She hits on all my concerns about Murakami, that he doesn't really deliver a story and that he just throws up a lot of wild concoctions, but she notes that he is able to get away with it, because his concoctions have some real power to them. I think I got to find out on my own. I'll regard "1Q84" ( a title, incidentally, based on Orwell's "1984") as less of a novel and more of an acid trip of a poem, and see if I enjoy that.
Though, this will still be some time off, because I feel committed to tackling "The Exorcist" for my next novel.
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Is that offensive, unrealistic or just insane? The same question could be asked of the entire book. “1Q84” is psychologically unconvincing and morally unsavory, full of lacunas and loose ends, stuffed to the gills with everything but the kitchen sink and a coherent story. By every standard metric, it is gravely flawed. But, I admit, standard metrics are difficult to apply to Murakami. It’s tempting to write that out of five stars, I’d give this book two moons. In fact, though, I’d give it back what it gave me: an entire universe, all of it far out, some of it dazzling, whole swaths of it just empty space and dark matter.
In the end, Tengo puts it best. “You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to,” he acknowledges. And yet, “after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression — it gets to you.” He’s describing “Air Chrysalis,” but the same could be said of this book. It’s a credit to Murakami’s mammoth talent that “1Q84,” for all its flaws, got to me more than most decent books I’ve read this year, and lingered with me far longer: a paper moon, yes, but by a real star.
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Kathryn Shulz at The New York Times![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
