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laskinline 's review for:
1Q84
by Haruki Murakami
This is a strange book. Murakami has a strange imagination, but also his writing here feels very deliberate. The pace of the plot was glacial at first, but I didn't really mind it in the beginning. It felt like he was taking time to let the characters settle in, to get everything in place, all very carefully. Once things got moving (and to be honest, that wasn't until the end of Book 1) I did get a tad frustrated and thought that things could have been tightened up here and there. Certain things were emphasized over and over again that I felt were needlessly repetitive. Still I was intrigued, and at certain points, disturbed. I think calling this novel (or series of novels) a dystopia does it a disservice. It set up certain expectations due to that genre that really aren't at all present here. But the main characters are transported to a world just like ours, but where things are slightly off, and a little bit of magic can exist and shape that reality. I still have so many questions. And I'm not exactly sure how to describe the plot. There is a line in the book towards the end where a character says something like "It's difficult to logically explain the illogical" (pretty sure I got that slightly wrong, but that's the gist) and I feel like that one line sums up the book perfectly. I was very taken in by the characters and absorbed in the world. Not a bad way to spend a few hours! (Or many, many hours, to be more accurate. Heh.)