1Q84

by Haruki Murakami

Other authorsJay Rubin (Translator), Philip Gabriel

Ebook, 2013

Library's rating

Library's review

Whew! I wasn't sure I'd ever finish this doorstop of a novel. My first mistake was reading a library e-book that's over 1,000 pages long on a two-week checkout. My second mistake was waiting nearly a week to start it because I was having second thoughts about whether I would like it. Once I finally

started it, I loved the writing and the plot, but found I could only read short stretches at a time because there was so much to think about. The library sucked its e-book out of my Kobo when I had 16 chapters left (out of roughly, I don't know, a billion) and I had to put myself back on the hold list. A couple of weeks later I had it back, and this time I read it straight through to the end.

To say it's an unusual book is an understatement. First of all, it's translated from the Japanese, and I am not at all familiar with Japanese or even most Asian writing. But I found it surprisingly easy to read technically, even though the plot became increasingly complex. The chapters alternate between the point of view of Aomame, a young woman who works as a personal trainer but has a secret side job, and that of Tengo, a young man who tutors math at a cram school but writes fiction on the side. They knew each other as children, and the last part of the book is about them trying to reunite as grownups, but in between there are all sorts of mind-boggling elements such as Little People, air chrysalis, extra moons, immaculate conceptions and more. I have read reviewers who were disappointed at the ending, but I found it a satisfying if not completely resolved finish.

Bottom line: This is an impossible book to summarize, but if you like novels that play with reality like a cat with a ball of yarn, you will like 1Q84. Just make sure you set aside enough time to finish it.

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Description

An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.

Media reviews

Weekly Alibi

Murakami name-drops George Orwell's laugh-riot 1984 several times. Both books deal with the concept of manipulated realities. And while Murakami's book is more than three times as long, it's also more fun to read.

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London Review of Books

As always, the experience is a bit like watching a Hollywood-influenced Japanese movie in a version that’s been dubbed by American actors. This time, sad to say, it also reminded me of stretches of the second season of Twin Peaks: familiar characters do familiar things, with the expected measure

of weirdness, but David Lynch has squabbled with the network and left the show.

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The New York Review of Books

I finished 1Q84 feeling that its spiritual project was heroic and beautiful, that its central conflict involved a pitched battle between realism and unrealism (while being scrupulously fair to both sides), and that, in our own somewhat unreal times, younger readers, unlike me, would have no trouble

at all believing in the existence of Little People and replicants. What they may have trouble with is the novel’s absolute faith in the transformative power of love.

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The New York Times

One of the many longueurs in Haruki Murakami’s stupefying new novel, “1Q84,” sends the book’s heroine, a slender assassin named Aomame, into hiding. To sustain her through this period of isolation she is given an apartment, groceries and the entirety of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of

Things Past.” For pity’s sake, if you have that kind of spare time, follow her lead. Aomame has the chance to read a book that is long and demanding but well worth the effort. The very thought of Aomame’s situation will pain anyone stuck in the quicksand of “1Q84.” You, sucker, will wade through nearly 1,000 uneventful pages while discovering a Tokyo that has two moons and is controlled by creatures that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. These creatures are called Little People. They are supposed to be very wise, even though the smartest thing they ever say is “Ho ho.”

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The New York Times Book Review

1Q84 is psychologically unconvincing and morally unsavory, full of lacunas and loose ends, stuffed to the gills with everything but the kitchen sink and a coherent story. By every standard metric, it is gravely flawed. But, I admit, standard metrics are difficult to apply to Murakami. It's tempting

to write that out of five stars, I'd give this book two moons.

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Telegraph

Over 900 pages ..., it’s an enormously readable (if oppressively slow) novel that offers a narrative experience few other authors could achieve. But it is also a depressing, dark, morally questionable book that suggests the author has lost his way. ... And when, after 900 pages of crepuscular

sex scenes alternated with sentimental thoughts about adolescent sexuality, the novel turns out to be a shaggy dog story, it no longer seems a guilty pleasure but instead a tremendous waste of the reader’s time.

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Entertainment Weekly

Even at a daunting 932 pages, Japanese cult superstar Haruki ÂMurakami's breathlessly awaited 1Q84 is one of those books that Âdisappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don't even notice as the hours tick by and the mountain of pages quietly

shrinks.

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Salon

You could say that the units with which he builds his fiction aren’t words and sentences but emblems and actions, storytelling elements that are, if not pre-literary, then extra-literary. Sanding off the surface texture of the language only makes the lines of this underlying structure more

visible and immediate. Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.

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Los Angeles Times

"1Q84" is a big, sprawling novel, a shaggy dog story to be sure, but it achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world.

Complete Review

[The professional reviews show there is] no consensus, opinions all over the place.

The Guardian

Do Murakami's stories themselves make people feel as if their lives have some meaning? Some critics are unsure what to make of him, the prejudice being that a writer who is so popular, particularly among young people, cannot really be that good, even if he is now quoted at short odds each year to

win the Nobel prize for literature. But Murakami's success speaks to a hunger for what he is doing that is unusual. Most characters in the modern commercial genre called "literary fiction" take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships. Throughout Murakami's oeuvre, on the other hand, his characters never cease to express their bafflement about the nature of time, or change, or consciousness, or moral choice, or the simple fact of finding themselves alive, in this world or another. In this sense, Murakami's heroes and heroines are all philosophers. It is natural, then, that his work should enchant younger readers, to whom the problems of being are still fresh, as well as others who never grew out of such puzzlements – that his books should seem an outstretched hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed, without their permission, into a labyrinth.

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The Washington Post

There’s no question about the sheer enjoyability of this gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story.