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asylumrunner 's review for:
Pinball, 1973
by Haruki Murakami
A certified Haruki Murakami banger, and absolutely insane that this is his second ever book, because it almost feels like an apotheosis of the themes he's spent his career writing about.
Pinball is thematically focused (in a manner more explicit and intentional than anything else I've read by Murakami) on ephemerality, the weird and almost paradoxical way in which the important things in our life, up to and including our life itself, sort of drift away like dust on a breeze, as well as the way in which small, simple, ephemeral things end up imbued with a great deal of importance and significance. The way that important people can just drift in and out of your life without ceremony, the way you can know someone for years and care about them without really ever getting to know them, the amount our memory anchors to things as trivial as a song, a smell, a pinball table, it's just an absolutely magical encapsulation of the anti-drama of real life. Not everything that matters in life is given the weight of fiction, Murakami argues. Sometimes stuff just sorta... drifts in and out.
Also, while this book is definitely rife with the usual Murakami-isms about women (all of them are barely fleshed-out characters whose narrative purpose is to drift on a spectrum between Sexual and Mysterious), it is unique in being the first Murakami book, if not book, I've read where the narrator seems to want to fuck a pinball table. So, y'know. Neat!
Pinball is thematically focused (in a manner more explicit and intentional than anything else I've read by Murakami) on ephemerality, the weird and almost paradoxical way in which the important things in our life, up to and including our life itself, sort of drift away like dust on a breeze, as well as the way in which small, simple, ephemeral things end up imbued with a great deal of importance and significance. The way that important people can just drift in and out of your life without ceremony, the way you can know someone for years and care about them without really ever getting to know them, the amount our memory anchors to things as trivial as a song, a smell, a pinball table, it's just an absolutely magical encapsulation of the anti-drama of real life. Not everything that matters in life is given the weight of fiction, Murakami argues. Sometimes stuff just sorta... drifts in and out.
Also, while this book is definitely rife with the usual Murakami-isms about women (all of them are barely fleshed-out characters whose narrative purpose is to drift on a spectrum between Sexual and Mysterious), it is unique in being the first Murakami book, if not book, I've read where the narrator seems to want to fuck a pinball table. So, y'know. Neat!