Ok, resolution and a conclusion is asking a lot from an author these days. But this is Haruki Murakami. If anyone can bend a convention until its toes meet its scalp, he can. But this is Haruki Murakami. He's allergic to resolution.
The benefit of having to wait for the translation(s) was that we could read all three together. Like Game of Thrones which I read consecutively. All five and some halves of consecutive.
At 1300 pages, we're talking slightly more than 400 words per book. (I worked that out in my head.) That's a decent length, unless you're a new author and the publisher isn't prepared to waste reams of paper on your mad skills. Then you get 200 pages and really big font. It's a decent length in which to resolve the "something extraordinary", I'm thinking like an amateur allergic reaction.
Kafka on the Shore is my favourite of his books (all three and a bit that I have read). That book has a conclusion. Of sorts. The conclusion being that we make meanings out of symbols we happen to latch on to, like a spiderweb in that willow tree. This has a twin benefit: you can write anything you want and call it literature, and you don't have to commit to anything afterward. Luckily for us readers, Murakami is not anyone and his books are not anything. But still, it's annoying.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is more contradictory. There are episodes that are so symbolic they shine, but apparently no one else can see them. Just to make sure we know no one can see them and that the symbols are actually dull and ugly, more shiny symbols show up, like rival gangs in West Side Story. Only one can survive. Or neither, but that's another book.
As usual, I'm being facetious, because that is so much more fun than simply liking something. This way, my resolution and conclusion are more surprising, as if I had jumped out from behind your bathroom door first thing in the morning. (This depends on you being there, in both cases.) My readings are imposed, which is the point of all of Murakami's writings, after being entertaining.
I started 1Q84 about a month ago. Today I am 204 pages in. (That's part of Book One, just fyi.) I knew, but still only just remembered, how overwhelming every scene is. Every scene shines, whether the radioactivity spills from people's hands, the material they are wearing, the appliances in the kitchen and their purposes, or a family in a car in traffic. You can't tell whether you are supposed to notice them, you notice them because of your particular neuroses or you are being paranoid. Your neck muscles lock in defence, but you can't be sure you aren't imagining that too.
I haven't quite reached this point in the book, but forewarned is forearmed, and paranoia is a kind of arm.
Another kind of arm is to read other books between chapters. Not Neil Gaiman because I have made the mistake of parading Gaiman (whose plots and characters are so consistent he could write Mills & Boon novels. Maybe he does) in front of Murakami. Murakami wasn't mean, which made it all worse. He was like a Buddhist faced with the pacing and ranting of a fundamentalist. He listened and smiled, and went on adventures in his mind.
Terry Pratchett has survived scrutiny well so far. Maybe because he's so far off in his own direction that he caught up with the Buddhist in his mind. (Which is not to compare them directly, no. But the metaphor ran away with me.) I have read one new Pratchett and reread an old one. Which I realise is probably double what I have read from 1Q84. So it's more like I am reading Terry Pratchett, with some Murakami on the side. Murakami would listen to this and smile, and skip stones across the Amazon River until an alligator came by to debate vegetarianism.
I am trying to describe what I have read so far and what shines and what it shines on and whether perhaps I am imagining it. There are events that stick out, but honestly I would sound crazy if I wrote them here and told you they are a legitimate part of a legitimate novel. There's this and the fact that I am less than one-sixth of the way through the novel, which hopefully is the start and not something else but I cannot guarantee it. I cannot guarantee that page 867 doesn't tell me to go back to the beginning or that it begins to repeat on page 292 and then again on page 1287.
You guessed it, this "part 1 of many" cheat is a device meant to keep you reading. But I could be setting myself up for failure here if I give up just like I did Ulysses (which is not to say I have given up - I am just making a point). James Joyce also swanned around, making faces at meaning, but he also made faces at sentences and the English language. Murakami may have written in Japanese, but this novel (so far) is still easier to read.
No comments:
Post a Comment