1Q84: Paperback

It's hard to believe, but the paperback publication of 1Q84 is already just around the corner.  As with Murakami's other books, 1Q84's paperback publisher will be published by Vintage.  Vintage's art director has posted up the design on his website.  Here is a look:

While the set doesn't have the typical Vintage look, I rather like it.  I appreciate that they have broken it up into three volumes,just the way it was published in Japan.  Readers will get the reading experience that Murakami intended -- and it will be much more portable.

Unfortunately, according to the New York Times, readers will also get a $29.95 price tag.   Ouch. 

Related posts: 1Q84: Hardcover

1Q84: Some Further Thoughts

Todd's excellent review of 1Q84 largely captured my own reactions to the book.

I don't know if Todd felt this way as well, but 1Q84 struck me as a significant departure from Murakami's prior works.  In his other novels, such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World the bizarre things that happen seem to reflect the interior, unconscious life of the characters.  Or to put it another way, the libraries, the wells, the sheep and the unicorns all feel like pieces of the unconscious, brought forward into the tangible world. 

In 1Q84, Murakami abandons this exploration of the individual unconscious to play with concept of a social unconscious (something he appears to have been seriously interested in since Underground, his non-fiction work about the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system.)  1Q84's little people, its town of cats -- these are not expressions of Aomame's or Tengo's psyche, but rather of society. 

One senses that Murakami doesn't know quite what he wants to do with these pieces, and he never fully unravels them.   But as Murakami focuses on the social, a strange thing happens to the characters -- they become two-dimensional.  Tengo and Aomame are fun to read about, but they are not particularly interesting.  Their only purpose is to push the narrative forward.  And boy, does it move.  Frequently, I got the same feeling as I got when reading a (very well-written) comic book.  That is something I have never felt when reading Murakami before.

1Q84 has something else in common with comic books as well.  Comic books inspire the need for sequels (and prequels).  The same is true of comic-like movies -- Star Wars for example. 

And what do we know about sequels?  They are virtually never as good as the original.

Book 3 of 1Q84 is, I believe a sequel.  It was published a year after the original as a separate book, and I suspect it was conceptualized only after Books 1 and 2 (which were published together as a single volume) had been written.  The British publishers respected this development, and published the English translation of Book 3 separately.  If the American publishers had followed this scheme, I think that Book 3 could have stood on its own as a lesser, but still interesting, Murakami novel.  But to slap the sequel right at the end of the original, and pretend it is part of the same work?  It just didn't work.  The narrative arc had already been completed.

Murakami continues to allude to the fact that there may be more to follow.  "It’s hard for me to say now if I will release a Book 4 or Book 0 of the 1Q84 series,” he remarked to the Japanese media. ”What I can say now is there are stories before (Book 1) and after (Book 3).”

I'll be willing to read those stories.  But only with the recognition that they are, in fact, separate stories.

Related posts:
Book Review: Murakami's 1Q84

Book Review: Murakami's 1Q84

“…pure solitude and tranquility. That was the best thing the moon could give a person.” – 1Q84, p 528.

It's been a while since I’ve finished 1Q84. I've sat down a number of times to write my reactions, and I’m finding it difficult to do. Partly because the book was such a monster - at 925 pages, it took me almost a full month to read - and because my dislike of the ending colored the rest of the book. I wanted to be careful.

Murakami’s 1Q84 starts with a bang, or more specifically, a song and a vivid description of Aomame - a sharp dressed woman - escaping from a freeway parking jam by climbing down a multiple story fire-escape ladder – a tale that would have made a good short story in and of itself. It gets even better when we find out that Aomame is an assassin – one trained at a unique, untraceable form of killing at that! – and we’re off to the races. The novel alternates chapters between Aomame and Tengo, another of Murakami’s passive males, who gets pulled into a ghostwriting scheme. The two stories leisurely percolate along, both very entertaining in their own right; both of the characters are well fleshed out, and they both find themselves in bizarre circumstances that, like the best of Murakami's novels, could go in any direction. My only quibble is that I found Aomame to be the most masculine female character I’ve seen in a major novel - even her sexual escapades – and there are many of them, surprisingly - read like what a male would imagine (fantasize?) a female wanting. I didn't find her believable as a woman, but despite this, Aomame’s toughness and mystery made her my favorite character in the book, at least until part three.

And that’s the rub. Part three of 1Q84 was not good.  The first two sections were sprawling, obscure, with dead-end subplots and thousands of hints of something deeper beneath it all – and it was fascinating! Little by little we learn that Tengo’s ghostwriting story might not be fiction after all, but instead describe a mysterious race of “little people” that permeate and control the world - and, oh yea, it might not be our world after all, but an alternate reality of some kind, one with two moons in the sky and enough subtle differences to throw everything askew. In short, it's a riveting tale, and one beautifully written in Murakami’s singular prose. But like a poorly paced runner, Murakami runs out of gas in part three. While it may be unfair to judge the three sections as a complete whole – apparently he had finished and published parts one and two and only later decided to put out another 300 pages - I don’t understand what he was hoping to accomplish with his ending. Part three rides an unsatisfying middle road: it didn't resolve any of the important plots that kept me riveted  (who exactly are the little people anyways? What are they trying to accomplish?) or it spelled out situations in too much detail (I personally didn’t need to see Aomame and Tengo get together). This problem is exasperated by two major flaws in part three – Murakami’s continual repeating of themes and phrases  to the point of annoyance (mainly around Aomame’s taking care of “the little one”) and introducing the point-of-view of the repugnant Ushikawa whose purpose here I don’t comprehend.  The failure of part three, while not ruining the book, definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. It didn't tell me anything that parts one and two hadn’t already told me, nor did it present any new “wow” moments.

In the end, though, a flawed Murakami book is still better than 99% of the books out there. I still remember the feeling of anticipation I held onto all day long as I waited to get back to the book at night. 1Q84 holds a place of honor on my bookshelf, because I'll definitely be reading this book again – only this time, I’ll stop after section two.

Related Posts:
1Q84 Hardcover
Murakami's Boundaries
Do You Know What I'm Saying?

The Economist's Books of the Year (2011)

The Economist's "Books of the Year" appears beginning on page 91 of the December 10th-16th issue.

I won't go over the many non-fiction books, which are sorted into various categories such as "Politics and Current Affairs" and "Science and Technology."  However, here's the fiction list:

• 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami
• Other People's Money, by Justin Cartwright
• Open City, by Teju Cole
• The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
• The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
• The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje
• The Afrika Reich, by Guy Seville

I've reviewed Open City on this blog, and 1Q84 reviews should soon be on their way.  And of course, we've talked a good bit about Michael Ondaatje.

If you're keeping track of books that appear on multiple lists, here is the score from the lists we've blogged about so far:

The Tiger's Wife (3)

1Q84 (2)

The Art of Fielding (2)

No other novels have gotten more than one mention.

What other lists are out there that you think accurately reflect 2011's crop of books?

Related posts:

N.Y. Times Book Review: 10 Best Books of 2011

Michiko Kakutani's Top 10 for 2011

Review: Open City (Teju Cole)

1Q84: Bad Sex Award

This year, 1Q84 was shortlisted for a dubious honor: The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award. 

Now, there's plenty of sex in 1Q84, but it was one particular scene that got the Review's attention.  To avoid spoilers, I won't say which characters it involved, but it included such lines as:

A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, [he] thought. Both appeared to be turned outward, trying to listen closely to something – something like a distant bell.

Of course, the overall weirdness of this scene was certainly intentional.  But it does come across as rather unfortunate when taken out of context.  (And I'm sure the same might be said for the other nominees as well.)

In any case, Murakami need not worry about picking up the trophy.  The ultimate winner was David Guterson, for Ed King and its re-telling of the ultimate bad sex experience, Oedipus Rex.

Gilded Covers

In a front page article, the New York Times describes how publishers have been putting more and more effort into the design of a hardcover books, to help them compete with e-books.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't dive into the economics, and I'm not sure if this approach makes sense for publishers.  In general, the same publisher will hold both the hardcover rights and the electronic rights to a new release. Once production costs are taken into account, it may well be more profitable for publishers to push readers toward the e-book format.

In any case, the efforts to keep printed book alive are working, for now.  According to the article, the English translation of Murakami's 1Q84 has sold 95,000 copies in hardcover, compared to 28,000 in e-book.  Other recent books featured in the article include:

• 11/22/63 (Stephen King)
• Decoded (Jay-Z)
• The Sense of An Ending (Julian Barnes)

Although the article doesn't mention it, I suspect that many hardcover books are given as gifts.  While many people buy e-books for their own consumption, they are unlikely to give e-books as gifts.  And of course, a beautiful book makes a better gift.

Are there books that you are planning to give -- or that you want -- this holiday season?

Related posts:
1Q84: Hardcover

The Underground Man

That is the title of this week's New York Times Magazine cover story, profiling Haruki Murakami.  If you are looking forward to 1Q84, you owe it to yourself to read this.

I won't totally spoil it for you, but, for starters, the piece doesn't contain any 1Q84 spoilers: it is about the novelist, not about the book.  And while it treads some territory that has been widely covered in the past -- his jazz bar, how he wrote his first novel, the New York marathon -- there is a lot here that is new.  It is, by far, the best piece I have read about what he is like now, as a successful novelist.

Some highlights:

• Murakami wakes up at 4 AM every day and goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing.
• His house has a vast office overlooking the mountains, and which also contains his collection of over 10,000 records.
• He has an office in downtown Tokyo, where multiple stylish young women work as his assistants.
• He loves ironing.
• He doesn't remember his dreams, except for a single, recurring nightmare, which is described in the piece.
• Murakami tourism has exploded: it is now possible, for example, to join a "Kafka on the Shore" tour group.
• Murakami and the writer go running together, during which Murakami is portrayed as a particularly genial running companion.

Along the way, the writer muses about the "addictive weirdness" of Murakami's body of work, and the various metaphysical boundaries it describes.  

A perfect find in my Sunday morning paper.  

Related posts:
Pointless Acts

Murakami's Boundaries

What Makes Murakami Addicting?