1Q84
Mother-in-law is here from Japan, and she brought the third volume of IQ84 I asked for. I’m going to read it because I read the first two volumes last year, but not because I enjoyed them. Murakami’s literary career has been an almost completely downward trajectory. How many other writers in the world have gone from being very good to laughably bad?
What’s strange about Murakami, though, is that on the level of simple writing skills, he’s still very good. What he writes is very, very readable. The language, the words, the way it flows together. He’s a master of the unexpected simile.
It’s just the content of what he’s writing that is so preposterous: hot lesbian assassins into orgies and men who (hey what a coincidence) look like Haruki Murakami, endless descriptions of this one teenage girl’s breasts, a sensitive gay bodyguard to an eccentric rich lady who is a secret vigilante, hiring hot lesbian assassins to kill men who abuse their wives, etc., etc.
Where’s the moody, almost noire-ish realismo mágico of his early novels? Where is the revealing introspection of his early characters? Where’s the plain-spoken otherworldliness of his early imagination?
I miss it.
