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A review by steveatwaywords
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
I am always a fan of stepping into Murakami's surreal worlds and I admire his minimalist approach to weaving together many threads of expectation and surprise. All of this is here--a disturbing psycho/supernatural realm, a lone artist wrestling with meaning, music and ancient folk tales, some expected traditional-Murakami archetypes--but I cannot rate the novel as one of his better works for several reasons.
Several other reviews have touches upon these, and I will echo them:
1) The novel is quite long for its ambition. I love longer novels for the extended stays. Wind-Up Bird, for instance, remains his masterpiece for me. But there are long cycles of detail and mundane events which add no movement to the work's ideas; and the novel does not set its sights as high as some of his earlier works. This is a (itself very interesting) reverie on the act of painting and (perhaps) on family, but it steps away from more than this. Contrast it to WUBC which encompasses capitalism, political corruption, WW2 guilt, pain, and a host of other themes. In short, Murakami has done much more than this in novels half the length (contrast, for instance, to Hard-Boiled Wonderland, After Dark, or even Dance, Dance, Dance.)
2) The closing hundred or so pages "close the circle" of storylines in a singularly unsatisfying expositional way. This thick description of what actually happened and even what it means struck me as lazy writing, and it is difficult to say this of Murakami, despite his eccentric writing methods. Questions are answered, I guess, but none resonate in a way which satisfy thematically: we capture nothing new, for instance, of the act of art creation, of the realm of Idea, of how our emotional commitments have consequence. Instead, we're drawn a plot-level map of where everyone went.
3) Many have already mentioned what appears an increasingly common fetishizing of women's breasts. More than this, I am increasingly disappointed in his handling of woman characters entirely. In this work, it is the existence and non-existence of women which propel men's actions, and here that seems mostly all they do. With little agency or reason, the women perform their roles for the men to puzzle over. They are objects--quite literally--for voyeurism, both by characters and, regrettably, by author.
Finally, there is much written in the promotional materials of this work of its homage to Fitzgerald's Gatsby. In the sense that a character of mysterious wealth pines for a woman he cannot have, I guess, but this is where the similarity ends. Our narrator is hardly the "objective" and later judgmental Nick; and there is little to nothing of the lifestyles of those he pursues which requires critique. Fitzgerald offers us a novel highly critical of the unsympathetic power of wealth and of the end of Romantic idealism, right down to the rug-pulling moment of osculation/incarnation. Killing Commendatore does not approach the ambition of Fitzgerald remotely in this regard, and Gatsby's story pulled it all off in a scant 150 pages.
And still, with all of this, I still enjoyed the visit to his worlds and will certainly visit again. Buried amidst all of these criticisms are real scenes of power and satisfaction: one of the act of painting itself truly fascinating; passages on the haunting of memories secreted and lost compelling; and also a question left on our ability to normalize just about anything, even an intentional surrendering of personal privacy.
New to Murakami? Start with a short work, even his short stories. Save this one once you are firmly committed to Murakami's methods. Or set it aside and choose a dozen or more of his more successful books.
Several other reviews have touches upon these, and I will echo them:
1) The novel is quite long for its ambition. I love longer novels for the extended stays. Wind-Up Bird, for instance, remains his masterpiece for me. But there are long cycles of detail and mundane events which add no movement to the work's ideas; and the novel does not set its sights as high as some of his earlier works. This is a (itself very interesting) reverie on the act of painting and (perhaps) on family, but it steps away from more than this. Contrast it to WUBC which encompasses capitalism, political corruption, WW2 guilt, pain, and a host of other themes. In short, Murakami has done much more than this in novels half the length (contrast, for instance, to Hard-Boiled Wonderland, After Dark, or even Dance, Dance, Dance.)
2) The closing hundred or so pages "close the circle" of storylines in a singularly unsatisfying expositional way. This thick description of what actually happened and even what it means struck me as lazy writing, and it is difficult to say this of Murakami, despite his eccentric writing methods. Questions are answered, I guess, but none resonate in a way which satisfy thematically: we capture nothing new, for instance, of the act of art creation, of the realm of Idea, of how our emotional commitments have consequence. Instead, we're drawn a plot-level map of where everyone went.
3) Many have already mentioned what appears an increasingly common fetishizing of women's breasts. More than this, I am increasingly disappointed in his handling of woman characters entirely. In this work, it is the existence and non-existence of women which propel men's actions, and here that seems mostly all they do. With little agency or reason, the women perform their roles for the men to puzzle over. They are objects--quite literally--for voyeurism, both by characters and, regrettably, by author.
Finally, there is much written in the promotional materials of this work of its homage to Fitzgerald's Gatsby. In the sense that a character of mysterious wealth pines for a woman he cannot have, I guess, but this is where the similarity ends. Our narrator is hardly the "objective" and later judgmental Nick; and there is little to nothing of the lifestyles of those he pursues which requires critique. Fitzgerald offers us a novel highly critical of the unsympathetic power of wealth and of the end of Romantic idealism, right down to the rug-pulling moment of osculation/incarnation. Killing Commendatore does not approach the ambition of Fitzgerald remotely in this regard, and Gatsby's story pulled it all off in a scant 150 pages.
And still, with all of this, I still enjoyed the visit to his worlds and will certainly visit again. Buried amidst all of these criticisms are real scenes of power and satisfaction: one of the act of painting itself truly fascinating; passages on the haunting of memories secreted and lost compelling; and also a question left on our ability to normalize just about anything, even an intentional surrendering of personal privacy.
New to Murakami? Start with a short work, even his short stories. Save this one once you are firmly committed to Murakami's methods. Or set it aside and choose a dozen or more of his more successful books.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Death of parent, Pregnancy, Stalking, Infidelity, Grief, and Sexism
All of these content warnings are integrated fairly naturally into the plotting of the book. However, the author's personal fetishizing of women's bodies--especially of a young girl's developing breasts--will be disturbing to many readers.