Pynchon's coffee and open-ended endings in Murakami

[John Bailey]

Quite a fine book, and much more focused than most Murakami. It's
about a man with no qualities (or so it seems - reality is quite the
opposite) who was inexplicably cut off by all his friends in his
sophomore year, and now at 36 launches a mission to find out what
terrible event caused that. The simple readerly satisfaction is amped
up beyond what Murakami usually allows, so you're constantly getting
answers to mysteries that then open up new questions, and the
narrative gets along at a cracking pace. The characters begin as flat
but develop subtle depth and the ending is both a resolution and a
void. Probably up there with Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though a *very*
different book. I'd put much of it down to the translation, which
hints at how his writing is full of layered wordplay without stupidly
trying to spell it all out (as happened in 1Q84).

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 1:12 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> About none of the reviewers/journalists/readers I've read on his new one
> have remarked that the unresolved (in a key element) ending cannot
> help but remind one of the ending of The Crying of Lot 49.....
>
> AND, there are two coffee-related remarks in COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI
>
> 1) "coffee, which separates day and night"....(night/dark/shadow
> selves pretty important in Murakami)
>
> 2) our protagonist has his culminating encounter over coffee in a
> handmade mug with an old friend who has become a potter.
> "The cream-colored mug was handmade. it was a strange shape, with a
> distorted handle, but was easy to hold, with a familiar feel to it,
> like a
> family's inside joke......My oldest daughter made that mug".........
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l