Auther : Haruki Murakami
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN : 0307593312
ISBN13 : 9780307593313
Pages : 944
List Price : $30.50 $13.44
Book Rating :
Book Description
“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York Times Book Review
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.
As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: The year is 1984, but not for long. Aomame bolts from the cab, walks onto the elevated Tokyo expressway, descends an emergency ladder to the street below, and enters a strange new world. In parallel, a math teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo gets an interesting offer to rewrite a mysterious 17-year-old's story for the final round of a young writer's literary prize. So begins Haruki Murakami's magnum opus, an epic of staggering proportions that folds in a deliciously intriguing cast of characters and central motifs--the moon, Janáček's Sinfonietta, George Orwell's 1984--that acquire powerful resonance as Aomame and Tengo's paths take on a conjoined life of their own, dancing with a protracted elegance that requires nearly 1,000 pages to reach its crowning denouement. 1Q84 was a runaway bestseller in its native Japan, but more importantly, it's easily the grandest work of world literature since Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and represents a monstrous literary event. Now would somebody please award Murakami his Nobel Prize? --Jason Kirk
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1Q84 Reviews
| 163 of 183 people found the following review helpful:  "Don't think too hard about this stuff. This is the magnificent world of a picaresque novel", By Shashank Singh (Lawrence, KS) - See all my reviews This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover) The above is a quote from this book, and well worth taking to heart. I take Jung's advice on dream images when reading a Murakami novel: don't try to unravel the underlying/hidden meaning, just stay with the images and let them move you and revel their meaning/feeling slowly.There are images in this novel that will stay with me for years. I'm a big fan and this is certainly one of his best novels, right there with works like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Like all those works, reading the novel felt like slowly sinking into a well of dreams, and being enveloped in a mood of curiosity and off hand beauty/absurdity. Some of the early reviews seem to be complaining about the book being repetitious, and the characters being too passive. All I can say is, this must be the first Murakami books you've read. This describes many of his books. The passivity of the characters is... Read more 92 of 107 people found the following review helpful:  Review from a long time fan, By las cosas (Ajijic-San Francisco) - See all my reviews This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover) I am rushing this review to warn other Murakami fans (fanatics?) that this one starts out surprisingly slow. It wasn't until Part 2 that the pace started approaching a typical Murakami. I am also warning those who have never read Murakami before that that is NOT the novel to start with. As always with his novels, it is of little value to attempt a plot summary. Cults and Little People and two moons? Yep, sounds like Murakami. In fact you can open the book to any section and after a few minutes know that you can be reading no author other than Murakami. It is a highly unusual voice, and comes through as distinctively in this as in his other books. There are two main characters, a man and a woman who knew each other as children. Both had typically Murakami odd lonely childhoods, and though they haven't seen each other since they were young, both continue to remember the other with a particular intensity. In alternating chapters we follow the lives of... Read more 52 of 62 people found the following review helpful:  What happened?, This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover) I have also read all of Murakami's books, including the short story collections, Pinball, and his book on running. As I read through all of his previous books, I was mesmerized, unable to put the book(s) down, often reading or re-reading them in a single day. Frequently, I have had the rather strange experience of feeling like my mind was being opened, not merely creatively, but physically, even feeling like I was losing my grip on this world - and no, that isn't a normal experience for me. However, almost immediately, as I began IQ84, I was disappointed. The beginning of the book hardly even seemed like Murakami and I had the distinct feeling that he was pushing himself to write rather than being internally driven to expression as in all of his prior books. Instead of the book flowering creatively and dynamically from some unconscious well into a new world, this one seemed crafted logically, and philosphers (Camus excepted) are rarely great fiction writers. Because... Read more |
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