Review: 1Q84

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third Murakami book I've read (after Wind-Up Bird and Kafka, both of which I loved), but I feel like the Murakami spell is starting to wear off on me now. It's still got the usual stuff you'd expect from him- cats, woman's ears, lonely people, kinky sex, and stories about the war in Manchuria- but somewhere down the line it starts to fizzle out.

The first half of the book felt fairly engaging, and there were a few chapters that really struck out to me, but by the last third of the book I was just wondering when it would end. I mean, Murakami's writing does tend to go on and on and on and- well, it's written in such a way that I don't mind it as much; you're just going along for the ride and seeing where it takes you. But even this was a bit much for me.

Technically, I guess it makes sense considering that it is longer than the former two books... but really, I think it could've been a lot stronger as a novel had it been shorter and more concise this time. There really wasn't enough going on to justify how long this book is. After a while you kinda get tired about reading about the unresolved tensions of lonely people for over a thousand pages- or maybe that's just because they've been handled better before.

That said, my favorite chapter that comes to mind right now is the one with the story about the town of cats (which can be found online as an excerpt that was printed in the New Yorker).