Killing Commendatore (4 stars) There were parts of this book that brought me back to my favorite parts of 1Q84, but this book doesn’t equal that one in terms of quality, spirit, or impact. Which doesn’t make this a bad book – by any measure – but I don’t think it’s amongst Murakami’s greatest works. The protagonist of this book is unnamed. He’s an artist who’s fallen into portrait painting to make a living. His wife abruptly tells him that she wants a divorce, and […]
She said no more about painting. She might have lost interest.
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 […]