Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin & Philip Gabriel
MixedThe Washington Independent Review of BooksWith this bravura and memorable opening, Haruki Murakami’s vast, ambitious but flawed novel of everything, 1Q84, leaves the flat-earth world of conventional fiction and begins the long, sometimes thrilling and entertaining, slog to the far distant end of some 900 beautifully written and translated pages … Murakami, though, is a wizard. Using a technique familiar to his loyal readers around the world, Murakami, developing his theme of duality and reflected identities, alternates the narrative’s point of view chapter by chapter. He is convincingly inside Aomame’s head, then Tengo’s, and in Book 3 adds the dogged and froggish detective Ushikawa — only then does the novel finally achieve lift-off … And yet. The magic and promise of the opening chapter...is not sustained over the many miles in the long-distance flight of this novel ... it staggers under its own weight, never quite leaving the orbit of this flat earth.
