Stephen M's Reviews > 1Q84

** spoiler alert ** A mere 29 days have passed since its release, but I have conquered the behemoth. I believe mp owes me 20 dollars for finishing first. Well, since no monetary guidelines were stipulated, I will also accept 3 cats and 2 metaphors that don't make any sense.


Before

As I eagerly await to tackle this tome
I am utterly afraid for the books that I own
Especially the texts populating my desk
My patience for "Brit-Lit" will be put to the test
But my grades will be of little concern
When these 900 pages will begin to burn
A hole of delight to last for the ages
And I won't care about homework while in his pages

Because it isn't grades that last but literary heaven
Then I'll always say, "I remember Murakami and 1984 in 2011"

After

As you might be able to deduce from my little poem and the rating, I was a bit disappointed by this book. I think the main reason was the unwarranted length. I wouldn't mind reading a 900+ page novel if it meant that the book was going to really take me places. From what I've heard about Infinite Jest, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and others like it, they are quite the journey. Where you begin and where the book leads, makes for such a arc of character, theme and plot so as to incur upon the reader the impression a fully fleshed out world. I find that exciting. I like to experience whole life-times within one novel. It is the complete escape from this world, when you feel as though you've lived inside another for so long. I felt no such experience with 1Q84. Instead, was 922 pages of repetitious prose. When it boils down to it, there is not much exposition in here. All it is is the same arc of a character moving from the world they are used to, then into the "Q" world and finding everything weird. That happens to three different characters. And we have to be told the same-sounding impressions followed by similar realizations. I think that underneath it all, there is a lot to be said about this book. But I honestly do not feel as compelled to want to do so, since everything was repeated so often and so frequently.

Occasionally, the book would break out of its redundancy and work the usual Murakami magic. But those moments were so far and few between, that any momentum gained would be slowed down by 50 pages of nothingness. Murakami loves to say every passing detail, significant or not, that goes through a character's head. He might write something like "Aomame went into the kitchen. She walked up to the refrigerator. She looked at the refrigerator. Then she thought I want to eat something because I know that I should. But I'm not hungry. I haven't been hungry in a long time, not since I parted with my one true love Tengo. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. She closed the door after deciding that nothing looked appetizing. She thought about her one true love, Tengo. And the fact that she hadn't seen him since she was a child."

I think he used a similar technique with other novels, Wind-Up Bird for example. I don't remember it bothering me at all. In fact reading this has made me want to go back and re-read Wind-Up to see how it compares. Because I hate to say it, but this book may have ruined my patience for that type of writing, which I thought worked so well in Wind-Up. Another similarity between the two was the simplicity of the writing. Both books feature straight-forward prose and a plethora of telling. I remember it working very well in Wind-Up, another claim I'd like to re-read for, but in 1Q84, it falls flat on its face. In the kind of the book that this is, it needs something to convince the reader of the unreal elements. I'm not sure what the formula for that is, of course there's no exact way of doing this, but there has to be better ways of writing a convincing magical-realist story than lines like this:

"Aomame wondered if Fuka-Eri's dohta had been able to survive for long without her maza. The Little people had said that it was virtually impossible for a dohta to go on living without her maza. And what about a maza? What was it like for her to live after having lost the shadow of her heart and mind?"

That could easily be straight out of a YA, fantasy novel.

Then there were other lines that were just cheesy:

"Ushikawa had a sharp sense of smell, and something smelled fishy"

That last line may be due to translation, which I'm always willing to admit as a possibility. But I have faith in the translators, given that Jay Rubin has translated a majority of Murakami's works and the other novels were dissimilar in this regard to this book.

There was also some of the ideas, not flaws of translation, that I didn't agree with. A thematic thread that runs throughout, is a zen-like balancing between opposing forces, usually represented in pairs. Murakami reiterates the idea that whenever an imbalance occurs, nature steps in to stabilize itself. This might be cute to find inside of a fortune cookie or on a license plate, but when taken to real life situations or the events of this book, it becomes an unsettling bit of moral relativism. This is especially apparent in a scene where Aomame kills a child rapist. I was somewhat intrigued by this idea at first. I tend to be a fan of stories about vigilante justice. But when Aomame arrives, the rapist explains how he was powerless against the forces that made him to do it. This is when it started to get weird. Because after Aomame kills the man, the next scene is of Tengo having sex with a girl under 18, without him able to control it. When reading that in context of lines like "nature abhors a vacuum", it's pretty weird. It's a dangerous notion to consider something as terrible as child rape in the context of yin-and-yang and everything in harmony.

The other thing I disagreed with was the premise by which the entire book hangs. The two main characters are supposed to have held hands once, as ten year olds, and have been desperately in love for all the years that have followed. I didn't really buy that at all. There are many things that can pass off as unreal in a Murakami novel, but absolute, undying love because of a single encounter in elementary school is not one of them. Call me a cynic, but I don't believe that ever happens. This idea comes from a short story called "On Meeting the 100% Perfect Girl" that Murakami had written. Quite the opposite of 1Q84, it runs for only a couple pages. I think I can handle undying love at first sight when condensed down into a few pages. But when repeated over and over and over through 700 pages, it loses me completely.

Of course, not everything is bad about this book, hence the 3 stars. As mentioned there are more than a few Murakami magic moments. He was still able to make me shudder, make me stare off into space for minutes at a time in quiet fascination. But I hope for his next book, his editor is given a little more power than he had here.