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A review by bittersweet_symphony
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
4.0
My favorite Murakami novel to date. It's refreshing to spend time with a first-person narrator who is an amiable and inoffensive character. (A recent spree of T.C. Boyle novels and short stories has worn out my tolerance for unlikable, crass, or insensitive characters.)
Norwegian Wood has an oddly innocent or wholesome quality, despite how much sexual
themes and content fill the novel's pages. No doubt it deals primarily with loss, as well. Still, I was mostly happy to spend time with the characters, regardless of what happened. The cast contained mostly decent people dealing with the burdens of existence (excusing some of their fraught sexual decisions).
In brief moments, the comical nature of certain scenes, especially those involving Midori, felt reminiscent of John Irving. And given the amount of attention given to sexuality, it wasn't far afield from the great New England novelist either.
Norwegian Wood has an oddly innocent or wholesome quality, despite how much sexual
themes and content fill the novel's pages. No doubt it deals primarily with loss, as well. Still, I was mostly happy to spend time with the characters, regardless of what happened. The cast contained mostly decent people dealing with the burdens of existence (excusing some of their fraught sexual decisions).
In brief moments, the comical nature of certain scenes, especially those involving Midori, felt reminiscent of John Irving. And given the amount of attention given to sexuality, it wasn't far afield from the great New England novelist either.