Murakami to Get You
I just finished Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: what a great novel. Beautiful prose (thanks to an excellent translation), an engrossing story, and more bizarreness than you can shake a Pynchon at. Among other things, the book encompasses a great detective story, at least two unrequited-love stories, and more than one excellent (and frightfully brutal) war story. It's testament to Murakami's skill as a writer than he can muse about the metaphysics of love and connectedness as deftly as he can describe the savagery of the Japanese war in China. It's brilliant stuff, and highly recommended. As Lieutenant Mamiya indirectly tells the novel's protagonist and the reader, "Leave the imagining to someone else." Someone like Murakami.
1 Comments:
I'm a big fan of Murakami, too, and think that his translators do an amazing job.
Out of the blue, I ran across this quote in Bruce Sterling's _Holy Fire_:
"Well, there's a quality in a good translation that you can never capture with the original."
I love this quote. It's so much more profound than it seems the first time you read it.
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