1Q84

[Bekah]

Great thoughts everyone thanks! 

Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Ishikawa was interesting.  His injured soul,  motivation and determination were credible and treated with sympathy and clarity. The stalker becomes the stalked,  the unsavory intimidator  weakened and made to reveal his secrets. 

That totally slipped by me - I'm still mulling. 

, David Morris wrote:

> Hinting @ But never getting anywhere.  That's a perfect description of my experience with this author.

Yup -  I've read most of his books and that's how it is.  Rather dreamy and surrealistic and like some kinds of jazz floating around a tune - almost. 


 John Bailey wrote:

> I only finished it on Monday, and given I quite enjoy Murakami it says something that I took like two months to get through this. It's way too long and should have been cut by a third. There's so much going on that gets lost because you're just wading through the irrelevant bits.


But the book was first published in Japan as three separate novels and that might have been part of the length here when US publishers pushed it into one novel.  (I agree, it was  somewhat needlessly too long for the US version.)


John Bailey wrote:
> One thing I really did like was the ontological dilemma of the two narrators - there are really strong and overt hints that each narrative thread is just a fiction existing within the 'real' world of the other (ie Aomame's story is actually the novel Tengo's writing or Tengo's story is Aomame's projection of what happened to the young Tengo). And so all of the pairings in the novel are people writing their own experiences onto the other's life, eg Fuka-Eri is Aomame's imaginary projection of her own childhood in a cult (which she, too, left at 10)... conversely, the Leader in Aomame's story might be Tengo's sublimated notion of his own father.
> 
> But my god it's a struggle to get to that stuff.



I hadn't really gone that far but it's quite interesting to think about - it's like untangling spaghetti.   

*
I've read quite a lot of Murakami over the years and I don't think 1Q84 is anywhere near the stunner  "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is.   Where "Wind-up"  is tight and controlled (mostly),  1Q84 is a baggy thing and uncontrolled (mostly).   He's like a mix of William Gibson (the sci-fi of now) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (magical realism) with a bit of Don DeLillo (the lonely or alienated urban characters) thrown in.

Speaking of ...   The Angel Esmeralda,  DeLillo's recent, and first, collection of short stories is excellent.  I finished on Sunday (?).   It's organized chronologically with stories dating between 1979 and 2011.  I've been reading him since Underworld (and dipped back to catch up) and the themes of his oeuvre are so apparent.   It's about terror and/or personal connections  in a variety of forms. 

Bekah