Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Sputnik Sweetheart
Book Review: Dissociated even for a Murakami.
Summary: 2 Stars
If you're looking for a novel that hinges on the unbridgeable spaces between people, that encompasses different types of isolation and loneliness then this is definitely worth a try.However for me the idea of it being a "love" story is definitely misleading. K, the main narrator, is a mildly interesting voice at his best when dwelling on his unrequited feelings and observations of Samire at the start of the book. And yet the overwhelming impression through 90% of the novel is not of love but more an idealised sexual obsession.
This is definitely how I came to view the relationship between Samire and her object of desire, the mysterious Miu. And that's where it all went a bit muddled. Once Samire meets Miu and starts to obsess over her she seems to lose dimension as a character. In fact, both Samire and Miu appear to become very one dimensional the more time they spend in each other's company. Whether this is a deliberate effect of implying how a lover can become so single-minded that they willingly submerge and tailor their personality, or just an outbreak of some rather dull writing is down to an individual's view.
Samire, Miu and K are all rather coldly isolated characters for different reasons but they just didn't inspire interest or empathy to draw me into their self-contained existences. A melange of ideas and recognisable traits run through the novel but in comparison to his other books this just doesn't have enough to it to be truly memorable.
Book Review: Strange and wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
Once again, marvellous Murakami fare. The story resonates with the different universes each of us carries inside ourselves and how they relate, if at all, to the real world around us. The prose is rich and poetic, even in the descriptions of everyday life, and the characters are deeply drawn.A wonderful book and everyone should read it!
Book Review: Slap-dash Murakami at his most engaging
Summary: 4 Stars
This seems to be a less considered Murakami novel - it has a bit of a slap-dash feeling to it. But the prose is as readable as ever, and the story almost as engaging. As usual with Murakami novels, it will probably prove fruitless to try and pin down a meaning, or attempt to understand what actually happens, but it feels even less necessary to do so in this book than the others, and I think there is even less chance of such an endeavour proving successful. The key moment in the book is Miu's experience on the Swiss ferris wheel. Oh, and Murakami repeats his 'mysterious woman who goes unexplainably missing' trick here.Book Review: Perhaps Murakami's best work
Summary: 5 Stars
A beautiful, tortuous novel about love and desire, yearning and dreaming, reality and the other worlds in which the beauty of human emotion can be contained. Sumire, an aspiring writer, falls in love for the first time; only it is with a woman twenty years her senior with a tragic past. As Sumire comes to question all the things she once considered so certain, the barriers at the edge of her world begin to crumble and into the abyss floats a sublime melody which calls her to achieve the composite reality of her literary and emotional dreams.Book Review: Satellite book
Summary: 5 Stars
If a book deserved a starred review - it's this one. The plot is not too thick or heavy and the book flows, as is Murakami's style, easily. This of course, as perhaps those who have read his other work, would know, is deceptive, for at some point in most of his fiction, a take off into the cryptic occurs and a more philosophical slant enters the mundane routine of his characters.
This book is beautiful because while maintaining simplicity, the story is laden with symbols and signs (something distinctly separate as the books characters will have you know).... Life for its three central characters is not what the reader is lead to believe. It all moves at satellite speed in this short novel at the end of which you come out with a profound sense of loneliness. An all-pervasive feeling which affects the human condition at every stage of living.
Murakami is a great observer of this condition and its intricacies, as he is of the concept of time and parallel worlds. All of which collide to bring together this sweet, sad, deeply dis-satisfactory yet touchingly sincere book.