Pynchon's coffee and open-ended endings in Murakami

[Becky Lindroos]

This sounds like typical theme for Murakami - alienation taken to an extreme,  messing with “reality." And his work often (usually?)  has a “dreamy” quality to it.  I love it -  he’s great at short stories, too,  fwiw.   I’ll be getting to Colorless Tsukuru later this month I hope - so many new ones which sound excellent - Powers’ Orfeo,  Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Galgut’s Arctic Summer.  

I read In the Light of What We Know a couple months ago - excellent.  Also The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt.  Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Pikkety is wonderful if you’re interested in historical economics (and the future).  

Right now I’m reading the third volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Trilogy,  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.  (This is marvelous but read the first two books first.)  

Bekah
back from ND  


On Sep 2, 2014, at 4:23 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l