thoughts on 1Q84

Don’t read on if you don’t want spoilers. But quite frankly, I don’t recommend the book at all.

I’ve been struggling for the past week, wondering how to address my feelings about 1Q84. My copy has a reader’s guide at the end with discussion questions, and the first two struck me as particularly good places to start.

Q: 1Q84 is a vast and intricate novel. What are the pleasures of reading such a long work, of staying with the same characters over such a long period of time?
A: This novel is absolutely too long. The story does not warrant such length, and I say this as someone who enjoys long books. I say this as someone who read Harry Potter books 4-7 within 24 hours of their midnight releases, and as someone who has studied Ulysses in depth. I love exhaustively long novels that have reasons to be that way. 1Q84 is long because it is overly repetitive and pays too much attention to unnecessary detail.
As for establishing a relationship with the characters over the course of such a long work? I began to hate them all very early on. They are all too special, in the special snowflake syndrome kind of way. You can’t make cauliflower ears or small breasts someone’s only character flaw. In the end, I liked Tamaru, and no one else. I wish there had been a cat. I would’ve liked a cat.

Q: Murakami has said he is a fan of the mystery writer Elmore Leonard. What elements of the mystery genre does 1Q84 employ? How does Murakami keep readers guessing about what will happen next? What are some of the book’s most surprising moments?
A: First of all, no. Second, no. And third, no. Don’t drag Elmore Leonard into this. But more importantly, don’t pretend for even a moment that 1Q84 employs any elements of the mystery genre. Mysteries have points and endings and clues and red herrings and people who are actually evil and in the end, either you find out what the bad guys were after or they at least die a very satisfying death. Meanwhile, 1Q84 throws excessive information at the reader at random, and the reader assumes that some semblance of a plot will eventually arrange itself. In the end, the plot is a love story and everything else fades away because it is irrelevant to their truuuuuue loooooove. When the hand-holding moment was first introduced, I groaned and thought to myself, really? a love story, that’s what this GIGANTIC book is supposed to be? Yes, really.
The book’s most surprising moment is that it ends and you wonder why the hell it was so long in the first place if none of the actually interesting plots get resolved whatsoever.

And after all that ranting, all that’s left is a question of my own: How are maza and dohta translated in other languages? Is it as obvious a transliteration in other language versions as it is in the English?

As much as I could rant about this book, it’s not bad. I am not mad that I spent so much time reading it, though I will never do so again and I would not recommend it to others. The writing style doesn’t sing—I kept looking for passages to highlight, to save in my head because I found the words beautiful, and I found very little to satisfy me in that way. Because there was no real poetic art to it and no profound philosophy I could find, I was disappointed. It’s not a bad book. It just has no business being that long.

So I’m kind of REALLY hating 1Q84…

I’m a little over a quarter of the way through it now, and last night I had to read until I got to a place I actually liked because I knew that if I “stopped for the night” while hating it that intensely, I’d never pick it up again. I’m hoping things will improve, though. At this point my hypothesis is that it’s a case of “this author is so famous, the editors don’t bother to try and say ‘no’ anymore.”

On the bright side, it has me listening to The Well-Tempered Clavier again, which hasn’t happened in ages, and I’d missed it.