Like all or most Haruki Murakami books, this is a strange novel. It has his characters’ weird obsessions with food, sex, breast size, and a slightly off-balance orientation to the world. And like all his novels, or most of his novels, it has simple language describing interesting or complex ideas, and a struggle to make dialogue seem to represent real people and their conversations. (This exact idea will be the opposite in a future review of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, coming soon). This is a relatively […]
Show Me the Essence of Being Lonely
Haruki Murakami’s Men without Women is a series of seven short stories, each written in rather different ways, but all focused on similar stories. All talk about men and their relationship with women. The title is a bit of a misnomer in that way in that there is a female character that is featured in each of the stories. But each male character, in some way or another, is or has been without some ‘woman’ in his life. One thing that stood out to me in […]
If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation
CBR10Bingo – White Whale White Whale! I listened to the first disk of this walking around a new town I moved to about 6 years ago and I remember this event so well that the first two or three chapters of this book were incredibly familiar to me. I stopped listening because at 38 disks ripped off of a library copy of the audiobook, there was bound to be a few errors and there were. So this time, I went ahead and just read the […]
“In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.”
Since it’s my Year of Murakami, I’m reading both the man’s fiction and his non-fiction. A decade or so ago, Murakami wrote a book about running. Unbeknownst to me, when not listening to jazz records or drinking whisky or thinking about women just out of reach, the author runs marathons. In fact, he runs one a year or so, and also likes triathlons. This book isn’t really a how-to or a straight memoir so much as a man recording his wandering thoughts. For a fan […]
“Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?”
My year of Murakami continues with Sputnik Sweetheart, a brooding and disturbing book about connection and isolation, what kind of pants people are wearing, and writing. While it’s not my favorite Murakami work, it’s still more gripping and provocative than most of the fifty-something books I’ve read this year. All of his books either change my worldview or spur me towards my own creative pursuits. That’s good art. Sputnik‘s protagonist is the typical Murakamian narrator. Male. Enjoys alcohol and thinking, does ok with the ladies, interested […]
“The heart apparently doesn’t stop that easily.”
If you want to know how cool author Haruki Murakami is, just know that Patti Smith decided to write a review of this book in the New York Times. That is how cool he is. The novel centers on Tsukuru Tazaki. He’s a train station designer in his mid-30s. Tsukuru lives alone in Tokyo, although he was raised in Nagoya. He has a quiet life that, by objective standards, is going quite well. He got into a difficult engineering program (mission accomplished). He is fulfilling […]
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