for the first time last year.) Its unnamed narrator remains true to Murakami form, a teacher by "a process of elimination" - he simply isn't engaged enough to try for a more demanding career. ( Norwegian Wood is a very early book published in the U.S. Sputnik Sweetheart is a slim novel in comparison with Murakami's most recent opus, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
And chances are he won't ever quite figure out what's happened to her. Chances are he's puzzled over a recent encounter with an enigmatic woman. A Murakami hero is the well-groomed guy sitting by himself at the end of the counter in an all-night coffee shop, smoking perhaps and staring off into space. His characters can be found drifting around Tokyo, checking out French new wave movies, drinking glasses of red wine, listening to Brahms on their hi-fis, reading Raymond Chandler - almost always alone. Trying to nail down the seductive, surreal melancholy of Haruki Murakami's novels is like trying to bottle fog. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved.Ī love story, a missing-person story, a detective story all enveloped in a philosophical mystery and, finally, a profound meditation on human longing.
In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakamis surreal yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor, now a teacher.
The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman.
Combining the early, straightforward seductions of Norwegian Wood and the complex mysteries of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this new novel his seventh translated into English is Haruki Murakami at his most satisfying and representative best.
0 kommentar(er)
