I wrote a little piece over on a different blog about the feelings I was having about Haruki Murakami's newest novel, 1Q84. I finished it yesterday, but if the third section had maintained the momentum of the first two, I would have finished it already.
I'm happy to report that the last hundred pages were pretty damn good, and got close enough to the frenzied urgency to make the whole thing pleasant and recommendable.
So who really cares that 150 pages, give or take, of a 900 page book are some of the must sedentary, slow-mo mud crawl pages put to paper. It's those other 750 pages that make it one of his most accomplished works. That was a quote from a critic: "His most accomplished work."
To me, what Murakami does that's significantly different is in his ending. He has the courage here to let certain loose ends remain that way. The ending is satisfying enough that he needn't explain every last thing. Not that he does that anyway, but, those long blocks of fill-in exposition are gone. Maybe it wasn't right of me to go from A Wild Sheep Chase--written in the 70s and the first of his works to be published in the States--to 1Q84--his newest and possibly most advanced story, and storytelling yet.
The difference in skill level is apparent even as they are obviously the same voice.
I would certainly recommend it.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteMy reading is in such a muddle this year. It's hard to figure out when I'll get back to Murakami, because I have a stack (well, two books, actually, but the way I'm going it feels like a stack) on which I still owe reviews. This having to look for work, while actually working, really takes up a lot of my evenings and weekends, and I don't take lunch at work because I'm being paid hourly, and want to get out as early in the day as possible.
I think the best thing I've read this calendar year has been "The Pearl Diver" by Jeff Talarigo. And "Crow" by Barbara Wright is outstanding, too. That's pretty much it. If you go back twelve months, into 2011, "Wild Life" by Molly Bloom is a must-read that I was lucky enough to encounter.
Reading books that haven't been published yet is full of pitfalls. Most of the stuff just isn't as good as other stuff I could be reading. I think LibraryThing has its limits. (That's the site I use when ordering pre-pub copies of books for review.) Why would a publisher subject his title to everyday readers like me (although I am rather unusual for someone outside the orthodox literary world) when he can get better publicity from the regular professional readers? So they don't have the best new stuff over there, and I'm back to my earlier mode of reading more stuff that's already published.
Okay, Pat - and you, too, Dan. If you want to really stretch out you horizons, and your imaginations, read "Gould's Book of Fish" by Richard Flanagan. And the above-mentioned "Wild Life," which takes intriguing chances with your belief systems, while simultaneously staying very true to human nature, and in the beginning chapters manages to channel Mark Twain. So check that out!