Read Yes
Length 925
Quick Review Long but worth it. It’s a surreal, mystery, dystopian, fantastical love story. Technically it’s three books, but I read it in a volume of one.
Haruki Murakami wrote 1Q84 in three separately published books; however, the translated version appeared as a single volume with subsequent publications separating them again. I read it as one, and my only complaint is it’s awkward to finagle that large of a paperback.
1Q84 is a woven narrative of two characters finding their way through a world they happen into towards one another. The characters are rounded, real, and tangible to anyone who has feelings. Though the storyline is dystopian and the plot full of things no one on earth will ever experience, the characters are reachable. Their overwhelming sense of loneliness uniquely captures an aspect of humanity everyone feels in varying degrees of severity.
Murakami explores themes like religion, cult, politics, love, fate, and ultimately humanity by stepping away from the world we live in into a dystopian universe with two moons.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t read any of Murakami’s other works. If this is the standard, I need to read more. Though, I’m sad it’s only available to me in translation. Books always lose things in translation. Since I have experience in the field, I always read translations wondering what was changed, what was lost, are their cultural things I’m not getting, etc., and I am left to wonder how fabulous the original happens to be.
It’s odd. Less than 200 pages from the end of the third book, the narration style changes briefly. Throughout the book, up until this point, the narrative focuses on the perspective of one character per chapter. Here, the narration includes the happenings of the other significant characters implying the convergence of the storylines. Normally, the narrator is third person from whatever character is the action of the chapter. In this minor section, the narrator is different. The narrator becomes omniscient for the blippest of a moment. Though subtle, it stands out because it veers so drastically from the 976 pages of previously dominating narrative. Just as quickly, the new style evaporates into the original. As far as the last 50 pages, the narration style is thrown into the air as everything comes together.
Memorable Quotes
“If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”
“Feelings like that don’t give you any choice, do they?” Aomame said. “They come at you whenever they want to.”
“‘Massacre?’ ‘The ones who did it can always rationalize their action and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away.’”
“But people can never fully divorce themselves from the images implanted during early childhood”
“There is always just a thin line separating deep faith from intolerance.”
“Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.”
Author: Haruki Murakami
Translated By: Jay Rubin (Book 1 & 2) and Philip Gabriel (Book 3)
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Copyright: 2011
