I’m devouring Murakami books nowadays-amazing writer that he is.
Finally finished ‘Kafka by the Shore’ with all it’s amazing twists and turns, dangerous sexual liaisons and bizarre, magical wisdom. Plunged through ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’, snacked on his short stories in ‘After the Quake’ and now ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ is thrilling and chilling me through the moon-lapped night…
Such thoughtful, funny, poetic writing but at the same time disturbing as hell, raw, often horribly violent and even grotesque as it lurches about awkwardly, painfully, beautifully-just like life. Murakami has a tender way of making heroes out of stinky, ordinary people and always brings up way more questions than he ever, ever meanders and slithers his way around to answering.
‘What I’m getting at is that people have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don’t know to live together in peace. And that strategy-yep, you’ve got it-is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we’re on an awful collision course.‘
and this, I love this one(such self-revealing words spilling from the floppy disk of his character, a young woman writer who has vanished mysteriously-as his women so often do):
‘Did you ever see someone shot by a gun without bleeding?
Which explains my own stance as a writer. I think-in a very ordinary way-and reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless fetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and, up until now at least, never reach a proper conclusion. The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.’
Both excerpts are from ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’. I can’t wait to find out how it ends… May end up staying up all night reading.
Goddamn I wish I could discuss them with my own vanished sweetheart. He understands only too well the sum of our misunderstandings.
Brilliance, sheer brilliance. I’m so glad he’s a prolific writer-though I fear he’s outmatched by my voracious appetite.