Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Sputnik Sweetheart
Book Review: Life is just a dream, sweetheart
Summary: 5 Stars
"Sputnik Sweetheart" was my first Murakami book, and I am fascinated. There will be more Murakami in my future.The book reads like the few moments of unreality before settling into sleep. Like something from the comic book "The Sandman," this is a story of dreams, moons, love and cats.
With the title "Sputnik Sweetheart," I was expecting some sort of hard-metal story, where love shatters on technology or maybe something about the fast pace of modern life in Japan. I certainly wasn't expecting this gentle, silent love short story, told to the sound of Brahms and with the flavor of French wines.
Of course, the style of writing and the ideas are the forefront of the novel, with the actual plot taking a supporting role. The characters are wholly unrealized, mere glimpses of caricatures. They love, they live and they do so poetically. They have ideas, and those ideas are worked out in the medium of the written word. Minimalist seems to be thrown around, and maybe that is so, but I don't see it. The words flow, and hold together well. The plot is fleeting, an altogether unresolved, the the half-memory of a dream that made sense at the time, but seems strange in the re-telling.
An excellent book, one best read right before bedtime.
Book Review: mysteriously engaging, peculiar character
Summary: 5 Stars
a love story? well kind of. to me, a book about romance makes me say yuck, for lack of better terminology. this book did have romance, but the genius of Murakami made it anything bu t. Mystery, philosophical, riveting, sombre, page-turning. This story is of Sumire, a college drop out whom lives to write. she is misplaced in the world, a beatnik of sorts who dances to her own rhythm. the main character, a teacher, loves her and they are best friends. Sumire meets an enigmatic elderly woman whom she falls in love with. i dont think Sumire is homosexual, it just happened that she fell in love....witn a woman. they escape together to a secluded greek island. Sumire discovers secrets behind the enigmatic woman. murakami spins a supernatural element into the tale, reminiscient of his book dance,dance,dance. Sumire acts weird one night and dissapears. the teacher is summoned to trace what steps she didnt leave trace of.Book Review: Elegant writing doesn't salvage incredible shrinking plot
Summary: 2 Stars
The first-person narrator, a young primary school teacher, is enamored of a brash young woman named Sumire, who is completely devoted to the idea of becoming a novelist. Although she is pleased to have him as a friend, she is not attracted to him romantically, and instead falls head over heels for Miu, a sophisticated older woman with a mysterious secret in her past that prevents her from consummating this, or any relationship. That doesn't stop Sumire from going to work for Miu as a personal secretary, or from embarking with her on an extended business trip through Europe, but it does keep Sumire too busy to keep up with her old friend, or continue the writing that once meant so much to her. Our hero listlessly tries to get on with his life, until he receives word that Sumire is missing - vanished without a trace from a small island in Greece. Unfortunately, about halfway through the novel, we become aware that the rules of reality have shifted on us, and we're suddenly in a world where anything's possible - a change that sadly undercuts the fairly prosaic, modern-day love story that we thought we were reading. After reading about frigidity, platonic love, and lesbianism, we're suddenly dealing with doppelgangers and alternate universes. Perhaps Murakami is trying to study the nature of life-changing experiences, but by making his examples so other-worldly, this reviewer finds it difficult to empathize with characters whose problems are so plainly impossible. To put it another way, if a good friend of yours had a near-death experience in a car crash, or on the operating table, you would likely be far more sympathetic than if he told you he'd been abducted by aliens from another planet. Instead, you'd be sorely tempted to assume he was off his nut, and if he didn't get over it, you'd probably find yourself distancing yourself from him, and that's basically what happened to this reviewer and this book. The temptation is very strong to say, "Come off it. Nobody's going to believe that, so either tell us what really happened or else forget the whole thing".
Murakami is clearly a talented writer, but this book doesn't know what it's doing and never goes anywhere. Surely no one will buy this book as science fiction or horror - 95% of the story is as everyday as Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. But the outlandish scenes totally upstage the rest of the story, effectively rendering the rest of the book irrelevant. Perhaps Murakami had a short novel about a lesbian romance and didn't know how to end it, so he took a story fragment about an out-of-body experience and used that for his Second Act, after which the story stumbles aimlessly along for another 50 tedious pages before fizzling out altogether. In any case, the resultant hybrid simply isn't fair to the reader, who enters the novel in good faith expecting a real world resolution, and instead finds no resolution at all.
Book Review: a mellow and surreal story; one of Murakami's best
Summary: 5 Stars
I am most decidely a fan of Haruki Murakami even though he has produced some not-so-interesting material over the years. 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', a surreal materpiece, remains his best. However I found his most famous 'Norwegian Wood' to be too sentimental for its own good. Thankfully with 'Sputnik Sweetheart' the author has found the right blend of the surreal and the romantic. I loved it.'Sputnik Sweetheart' is about an odd love triangle where the love is either platonic or something a bit stronger yet unfulfilled; there is no sex in this book. Murakami, with no doubt significant credit to the translator, excels in expressing each of the unique character's loneliness without being too depressing. Cerebral without taking itself too seriously. And as for the surreal element ... it works very nicely (no spoilers here!).
Bottom line: a elegant piece of modern literature. Read it.
Book Review: Murakami hits new depths
Summary: 5 Stars
I know many-a Murakami fan will disagree with me here, but I find this to be the most complex of all his works. Maybe complex isn't the right word. Enigmatic is better. I can talk for hours on all the other novels, but with this one...frankly I'm stumped. It deals with love and loss, that's clear, but I'm just entirely sure what he's trying to say about it in the end. It seems as if he's almost contradicting him self in a few places. Like the Sumire, Miu, "K" triangle. For a long time I thought that "K" and Miu were supposed to represent the two aspects of Sumire's personality that she was trying to reconcile...but the ending by no means supports it. And I'm still trying to figure out what exactly Carrot's place is in the whole scheme of things. A child version of "K"? Or of Sumire? Or a combination of both? Or something completely different, the result of misplaced love, maybe? This isn't all to say that I didn't like this novel. Quite the contrary in fact. It's great. There are moments of sheer brillance, and the writing, which is (like South of the Border, West of the Sun) completely minced to heck by the HORRENDOUS tranlsation job by Philip Gabriel, has moments that transcend the cliches and colloquilism that Gabriel unskillfully inserts in to the prose, moments that well have you stop dead in your reading, and just gaze at that one sentance over and over again. I really can't stress it enough, READ MURAKAMI! He is, in my opinion, the most important living novelist in the world. It's a shame that the international community doesn't recogize this. Murakami is more then a simple Japanese novelist, or post-modern experimenter. He's creating a whole new ficiton that every literate person can relate too.