Eerie ... Couldn’t shake the sense that Murakami has told this story better elsewhere, or that the novel’s obsessive focus on the narrator’s aimless woes didn’t do its characterization, world-building or psychological depth any favors. It’s as though the novel itself is a melancholic ghost, drained of experiential matter ... At the same time, my real self was delighted by the novel’s uncanny shell games, by its Murakami voice, which (in contrast to the often anhedonic characters) is so ghostbustingly alive. I was moved by his portrait of impossible loss.
This eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. But in a Murakami novel, normality won’t persist for long ... Throughout this journey, borders between internal and external reality, the conscious mind and its dream-dwelling 'shadow,' waver and blur.
Returning to such a familiar setting, along with employing the plots and themes he favors, adds a greater sense of fatigue, at least for this reader ... Perhaps those less familiar with Murakami will be as enchanted by his worlds as I once was and hope to be again in the future.
Manages to project the quiet self-assurance of the old master at the same time as it embodies — in its hamfisted gestures, overreliance on bathos, and unflagging avoidance of subtlety — all the classic foibles of the literary hack ... Underbaked ... Unnaturally somber ... A frustratingly literal book.
One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth ... A vivid cast of characters ... Meditates on the nature and value of fiction, it also feels like Murakami’s reflection on his own art.
There 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.
Meditative and melancholy, its mysteries less a matter of conspiracies than self-discovery ... Knowing that it has taken the novelist more than four decades to reach this destination only adds to the fulfillment of this final and very welcome arrival.
An inferior remix. Here is a writer in his seventies who cannot leave his younger, fresher work be. In that way there is a touch of late Wordsworth, obsessively revising his early poetry and taking out the energy, blunting its force. It is a sorry twilight.
It’s all very loose and meandering, but then with Murakami the meandering is largely the point. He glances at ideas but never stares them down ... Maddeningly evasive, adding further to the feel of a young adult novel ... What Murakami shows in The City and its Uncertain Walls, with its significant size but not much weight, is that a book can be fat and thin at the same time.
What is quietly miraculous is how the novel concretises as it builds, the dreamscape becoming the world we, and the narrator, inhabit. The smallest details remind us of the mythic nature of the universe the author creates ... The greatest books, after all, are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries.
Enveloping ... Immersive ... Did make me contemplate the borders between dreams and the everyday, the living and the dead, fiction and reality, but only to a degree that was obvious and rudimentary ... A little disappointing.
Might sound like heady, fantastical stuff. But these are just colourful touches, applied to add contrast to a minimalist story of lost love that doubles as a stress test of the porous wall between artifice and reality. The blueprint of the novel is impressive, and when Haruki Murakami does allow himself to be specific about his nameless characters, the results can be touching. But more generally the novel feels serene in the same bloodless way that life does in the imaginary town. The pages turn easily on scenes of undifferentiated dialogue that preserve the reader from intimacy, and the story advances with such overbearing authorial design that we feel estranged from any real emotional investment.
Mesmerizing ... This confident ambiguity infuses each of the three distinct yet connected sections of The City and Its Uncertain Walls, evoking an uncanny, dreamlike state. For those willing to engage the ambiguities, Murakami's latest will not disappoint.
Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
At times a meditation on romance, reality vs. fantasy, ghosts, and the power of written words, this metaphysical novel examines the questionable value of timekeeping while thoroughly exploring unconditional love, self-imposed constraints, and deaths of one’s body and soul.
