PanAV ClubThere are long chunks of The City And Its Uncertain Walls that speak to Murakami’s considerable gifts as a writer ... The narrative turns into a drawn-out, increasingly repetitive ghost story with a side of amateur detective work, with more and more pages taken up with the narrator interviewing other characters ... As in many of his novels, including the great ones, it all ends up teetering on the edge of incoherence. (The shorter third part, which feels like a tacked-on epilogue, doesn’t help matters). The truth is that the experience of reading a good Murakami novel is not altogether different from the experience of reading an underwhelming one like The City And Its Uncertain Walls ... Stagnant.
Donald Antrim
PositiveAV ClubOne Friday In April could, in some ways, be read as a companion piece [to The Afterlife], similarly sleepless, non-chronological, and ruminative. But the language here is starker, less evocative, sometimes even clinical ... Antrim doesn’t present his story as unique, or even as much of a story, and he’s probably right to do so. The trade-off is that, despite its brevity...One Friday In Apriloccasionally makes for monotonous reading, a succession of failed relationships and doctors, nurses, and therapists ... Paragraph-long micro-essays (i.e., the most writerly portions) are the best parts of One Friday In April.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
RaveThe AV ClubEven when their names are withheld, that first-person 'I' burns in a way that numbers can’t. But one would be mistaken to read this as pure journalism. In fact, it’s pure literary technique. Alexievich assembles her works of documentary literature like a composer, orchestrating material from thousands of hours of tape-recorded interviews; her sense of structure is idiosyncratic, lyrical, flowing, extremely readable. Every chapter is a movement, every interviewee an instrument ... It’s a vision of war as an engine of countless individual tragedies and traumas, its survivors haunted by what they saw and did, and obsessed by what could have been. Perhaps just as importantly, it’s a vision that refuses to abide by the internalized logic of war—to think in tactics, statistics, and outcomes, or to draw a conclusion that dehumanizes and justifies the means.
Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa
PositiveThe AV ClubLike What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, it shows Murakami’s gift for writing about a subject unpretentiously, but in detail, betraying its enthusiasm only through the act of writing ... Absolutely On Music makes for a useful guide to the nitty-gritty of concert music for the uninitiated ... it is also, on a subtler level, about the way the concert hall’s values of composition and rhythm can apply to any kind of creative life.
