Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

By -
The US cover without jacket, which is how I got it
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami

I must confess that I have not had a ton of luck with Murakami in the past.  I liked After the Quake pretty well, but gave up on IQ84 after about 8 pages.  I wasn't too sure I wanted to read Colorless Tsukuru, but the cover is pretty hard to resist and I thought I'd give it a try and I could always quit if I didn't like it.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it quite a bit, and in fact I think I finished it in just one day.

Tsukuru Tazaki has never had a high opinion of himself.  He thinks of himself as lacking personality, "an empty vessel" with nothing much to offer.  In high school, he belonged to a close-knit group of 5 friends, and even then he wasn't sure he was worthy, but then they kicked him out of the group with no explanation; just "we never want to see you again."  At age 35, he looks reasonably successful but he's still drifting.  A new date encourages him to see if he can't heal his past wounds by finding out what happened.

I was really interested and enjoyed most of the book, though it got too graphic for me at times.  This being Murakami, we are left hanging a bit at the end, with less resolution than a more traditional novelist would give.  Good stuff, though.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more