• Tag Archives Murakami
  • 1Q84, Girl With Dragon Tattoo and Dancing Horses

    Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

    Buddy Mark Odegard told me he just finished 1Q84.  Me, too.  Last night, in fact.  This is a good, maybe a great novel.  Time will tell on the evaluation.  It has a good mix of magic realism, Kafka, contemporary product placements, love story and a peak inside Japanese society at this point in the new millennium.

    It affected me in a deep way, wondering about the nature of this reality and alternatives to it.  Wondering about the origin of religious beliefs.  Wondering if the Japanese appear as similar to us as they do in reading Murakami.  1Q84 will have to set with me for a while, perhaps a long while.

    Also saw David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Long and beautiful, it recreates the mood and jarring character of Lisbeth, the mystery of Harriet Vanger and the investigative tenacity of Mikhail Bloomfield.  We were part of a small crowd of gray haired folk, a quartet of women in front of us who had one woman explaining the ending to her friends.  Over and over.

    We’ve also seen the Swedish version, a grittier piece with lower production values.  Naomi Rapace seemed to inhabit the angry side of Lisbeth better than Rooney Mara, though Mara exposed her gentle side.

    We’re off to Dancing Horses tonight, for something completely different.  The last night here with the Denver Olsons.  Tomorrow we pack up and return home.

     


  • 1Q84

    Winter                                    First Moon of the New Year

    Had to have our business meeting this morning because I was gone yesterday.  After that, a nap and I started Murakami’s 1Q84.  Just a bit of the way into it, but I’m liking it already.  It’s set in 1984 Japan and seems headed in a surrealistic or magic realism direction.

    At the moment I’m reading more literary books.  I like them, too, though my leisure reading tends more toward horror and fantasy, thriller and mystery.  Reading has raised me, given me mentors when I rejected them in the waking world.  Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Leo Tolstoy in particular helped shape the lens through which I view the world, what I have chosen as important and unimportant.

    When I read them, I read almost exclusively literary books and then only classics.  That was my 20’s and early 30’s.  Isaac Bashevis Singer, too.   These men, of northern European and Russian roots, have a somewhat bleak and hard-nosed view of life.  While a life is nothing to trifle with, it also reaches into the dimensions of the mystical, the supernatural.  How you get there may differ from others, but those realms are real, too.

    Those realms can transform this one, make it new and at least different, perhaps even better.