Tuesday, October 25, 2011

MURAKAMI!

It's here. It's coming. It's creeping through your skin! Right Right. Not Halloween, silly, Japanese sensation Haruki Murakami's latest mega-novel 1Q84! (Knopf, 944 pgs, $24.40). If you haven't had the pleasure of reading Murakami, consider yourself invited. Murakami deals only in the strangest of worlds -- or is it the realest? -- where strange creatures, formidable beings, and that metaphysical, existential cramp you've had since college seems to unfurl through your muscles like pharmaceutical drug still in the experimental stages of chimpanzee testing. This newest novel (which I haven't read yet -- it just came out today) is apparently about this, that, and everything else. A New York Times Magazine interviewer explained it as a wildly ambitious book, "full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities...[that] makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold;" he later adds "its plot may not even be fully summarizable -- at least not in the space of a magazine article, written in human language, on this astral plane." (Check out the rest of the article here). If this description makes you at all skeptical about involving yourself with a book by this Murakami guy, I repeat, consider yourself invited. His books are at times challenging, but so often give you that rare epiphanous sense of glee and understanding that only a truly wonderful (and sometimes challenging) book can give you! Check it out! I repeat: Check it out! And check this cool picture out, too. Murakami running (it's where his creative energy comes from, he says):

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