Book Review | 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

There comes a time in every reader’s life when they are sorely tempted to club their favourite author on the head. With their own book, no less.

My turn came very recently with Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 which I attempted to romance over a course of 3 months. Forget that this book, desperately trying to be his “magnum opus”, is over 1300 pages long (in paperback) and that it could have done away with at least 1000 pages (the person who edited this book needs a tight slap too); 1Q84 is printed proof that Murakami is officially too full of himself (to put it mildly)!

In the year 1984, we read into a world within a world in Tokyo, Japan. This world has two moons, something the author can’t reiterate enough, Little People, a cult organisation functioning under the guise of an organic farm and two protagonists whose fates are intertwined by a series of parallel events.

1Q84 is told from two perspectives – Tengo, a Math teacher who moonlights as a writer, and Aomame, a martial arts instructor moonlighting as an assassin. It gets off to a promising start. Tengo is commissioned to rewrite a novel for an inarticulate 17-year-old with a shady past, we’re intrigued already. On the other side of town, Aomame is commissioned to kill Leader (with a capital ‘L’), head of Sakigake, the organic farm disguised as a cult. Some 500 pages in, we’re about to give up, when we realise that Tengo and Aomame have a shared moment from when they briefly went to school together. The two, in fact, are in love with each other’s 12-year-old selves. How romantic! Suddenly, the book has intrigue, mystery and a fatalistic love story that could go either way. Heck, even the two worlds, two moons and the two lives of our two protagonists gain literary momentum.

But another 300 pages in (that’s nearing 900 pages, with 400 to go) we reach, are dragged more like, to a climatic scene where Aomame finally meets this Leader, the chief antagonist of the novel whom you fear and loathe just a little less than Johnny Walker in Kafka on the Shore. A few too many pages of philosophy and un-gasp-worthy revelations in, Aomame “sends him to the other world”; simultaneously, Tengo is the subject of a really weird exchange with the 17-year-old monosyllabic writer whose work he rewrote and you suddenly realise, as a reader, you just…don’t…care…anymore!

Murakami was and still is one of my favourite authors. Kafka blew my mind, while After Dark converted me to Magic Realism. I even started off the New Year resolving to read each and every work published by Murakami!

But 1Q84 has taught me something very elementary about literature and the authors we idolise. They’re not golden geese. Every book of theirs cannot be a work of genius. I experienced this revelation for the first time with Carlos Ruiz Zaffon – loved Shadow of the Wind and The Prince of Mist, hated The Angel’s Game. But I dismissed that as the folly of a writer attempting to promise more mystery and mind blowing awesomeness than his story-telling skills could cope with. But now, with Murakami, I see this very mortal mistake at play once again.

1Q84 was destined for greatness. But it fails because of sheer volume and the author’s need to state, restate and reiterate facts, details and flashbacks he’s already tackled. It’s a waste of a story that could have blown your mind in 500 pages but instead, is stretched out to ridiculous proportions just so one man can have his giant ego printed across 1300 pages (in paperback).

The Sequel to a Prequel | The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel’s Game was written with a muddled mind as though Carlos Ruiz Zafon was at war with himself throughout the process. With characters that are neither here nor there it leaves you hanging till the end wondering which ones will be most paramount to the novel.

Divided into three ‘Books’ – City of the Damned, Lux Aeterna and The Angel’s Game – Zafon’s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, is narrated in first person. The story revolves around an orphaned writer named David Martin who writes a series of raunchy thrillers called City of the Damned. Painted with a colourful imagination and figures of speech that audible and visual at the same time, the novel starts off with great promise. Martin moves into a tower house abandoned for years that hints at a mystery after the demise of the previous owners. Here he spends his days locked away, writing, by his estimate, 6.66 pages a day to fulfill his quota of for 200 pages of the manuscript he must deliver to his slave driving publishers every month. But things go awry for young Martin when his health suffers from being over worked not to mention helping out his mentor and benefactor, Don Pedro Vidal, while facing a crisis of in executing his own novel.

Soon, worked to the bone Martin finds he has only a short while to live due to a tumor (how very Bollywood of you Mr Zafon) lodged in his brain. But the book suddenly takes a Hollywood twist when a mysterious publisher of religious texts from France gets in touch with him to write a book in exchange for 100,000 francs and a Faustian pact that will fulfill his heart’s desire. What follows is an attempt at cracking the mystery of the previous owner who, it’s hinted, has a lot more in common with Martin than he first thought.

"Sit and squeeze your brain until it hurts," says our Martin to his apprentice Isabella about the art of writing. It would seem that Mr Zafon has done the same – perhaps adding conversations he was having inside his own head to the dialogue between the characters. Unfortunately, the book has too many plot lines running through it to do any one justice. It could have made a good mystery that our professional-writer-turned-amateur-detective must crack. It could have also been a focused thesis on the process of writing and deriving inspiration by, as it mentions, squeezing your brain until it hurts. At points it borders dangerously on being a novel about the root of religious beliefs and their influence on society through the ages. But by no means is it one complete book that serves its purpose of being a satisfying read by an author with the power to chill you to the bone.

When we put Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the spotlight on his blog around a year ago, I had mentioned only that it had disappointed me immensely. But I recently decided to force myself to attempt it again because a sequel to the sequel written before the prequel is scheduled to release in English. And while I’m still looking forward to The Prisoner of Heaven (due to release sometime in July), I wish Zafon would have taken his own advice and sat his ass down to concentrate on one good book instead of creating a confluence of dreams, inspiration and, can’t grudge him this as an aspiring writer, the process of writing a novel.

You can’t always create a masterpiece. But when you’ve got a potential bestseller on your hands, I do believe that you have a duty to your loyalists. But with critical acclaim comes pressure. And with pressure comes a work like The Angel’s Game, that finds its talented and imaginative author trying hard to repeat with greater magnitude what he did with The Shadow of the Wind with disastrous results.

A Magic Realist | Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sorry for going MIA last week. I'm grateful to Reshma for holding the fort around here while I was off reading press releases on tiny-ass stools I had to share with three big bums (mine included). But since I'm back to the grind now, I can't put this off any longer lest my blogging buddy devours my liver for dinner tonight. So here goes...

I didn't discover Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He was sort of bestowed upon me one cold snowy Christmas a few years ago. Little did I know, after reading the synopsis of The Shadow of the Wind, that this Spanish Magic Realist in translation would become one of my favourite authors of all time.

Set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, The Shadow of the Wind is a book within the book written by one Julián Carax. The story captivates the imagination of a young man named Daniel Sempere making him want to find more titles by the author. But this quest turns to dust almost instantly when he finds out that all the titles written by Carax were bought and burned by a mysterious man calling himself Lain Coubert, a character in Carax's novel who is the devil. Not one to give up easily, he uses the priviledge of having a lot of spare time and solves the mystery of Carax's missing books, his untimely death and a sinister secret buried deep in the darkest crevices of Barcelona.

The Shadow of the Wind is Zafon's best novel yet. With great story-telling and plot lines that make it impossible to put down, I recall finishing the book and then starting it again almost instantly. A great first sign. But not for long.

The thing is all of Zafon's books follow a similar pattern - the protagonists are young men, neither too rich nor poor, who come across a cloaked stranger giving them the heebie-jeebies. Throw in some strong and appealing female characters and a mystery that keeps you hooked until the end only because no one is willing to tell the whole truth without resorting to lying, and you have a plot that's not predictable, but not entirely original either.

The Angel's Game, a book I swept through shelves to find, disappointed me beyond belief. The Prince of Mist, managed to give me a sleepless night of watching the cupboard, but riddled itself with flaws in the end (in it's defense, it is a "horror young adult" novel). A preview of The Midnight Palace, another young adult novel most recently translated, was delivered to me via a Kindle. The monotony, quite like his previous works, almost killed me.

But Zafon is still my favourite writer. You have to admit - he has style and he has imagination, two very important traits of any good story-teller. What's more is that of all the authors of magic realism, he's the easiest to breeze through.

His prose is lyrical, almost poetic with something fatalistic about it. "He would always remember..." "... the first sparks of an electric storm crackled across the sky like a string of bright lights."

Unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his stories don't ride into numerous decades, introducing a wide variety of characters you have trouble remembering. Unlike Rushdie, he uses shorter sentences. And unlike Murakami, his stories don't sound like adventures on acid. Zafon keeps it simple by limiting the number of primary characters and exploring a form of magic that's as familiar, yet unnerving as a carnival of characters.

He isn't the best in the genre though, considering he's dabbling in a form of story-telling where imagination is the limit. But he's my go-to guy. A sort of comforter I revisit every time I'm ill or sad. His prose makes for good friend to turn to when you want to forget, if only for just a minute.

I lost The Shadow of the Wind (my greatest regret to date). The Angel's Game and The Prince of Mist are up for grabs though, so feel free to get in touch.