Haruki Murakami

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MY REAl-TIME REVIEW OF KILLING COMMENDATORE IS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/12/25/killing-commendatore-haruki-murakami/


My thoughts will appear in the comment stream below….

28 responses to “Haruki Murakami”

  1. nullimmortalis
    January 18, 2020 at 8:45 pm

    34 & 35

    “As if the drawings of Mariye somehow meant more to him than Mariye herself.”

    Mariye, the young sitter’s name, and we begin interactions here between the various parties, e.g. aunt, narrator-portraitist, Mariye and the previous sitter, random as well as deliberate interactions, that they are. Dare not be more specific for fear of spoilers. I wonder if the ‘absurdity’ I mentioned earlier hasn’t turned up recently because he is a sort of unwelcome spoiler in himself? Meanwhile, more about a near obsession with car makes by certain parties, and distances and sights and properties across the valley discussed, flirtations with truth if not necessarily with future seductions. And the light in eyes. And the young 13 year old sitter knowing the local area like the back of her hand, as she wanders at night. Herself a spoiler? I wonder. Anyway the two references to air pressure in car tyres has made even me wonder if I should check my own car’s! And just noticed that the word narrator (as I call him, through whom we see everything, or THINK we see everything), narrator as a word not a person, has an assonance (if inexact) with the two words portrait and painter as blended into one.

    “The slightest facial movement radically transforms the whole atmosphere. When I paint her portrait, I have to get past those superficial differences to grasp the essence of her personality. Otherwise, I’d be conveying part of the whole.”

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  2. nullimmortalis
    January 19, 2020 at 3:46 pm

    36 & 37

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    Please excuse the lengthy quote. Seems it made me think that this was the bit Mariya’s aunt must have just read, too, in her fat covered paperback! The narrator, when later sketching this pit (under the mound of stones), imagines seeing, via pareidolia in this drawing, a body-part that prefigures the next meeting with his girl friend!… Later he meets up with his landlord, the son of the famous, now nonagenarian painter, and they discuss the latter and how he did his artistic work in the house. Does such a long-term inhabitant of a property leave his soul, aesthetics and ethos to seep into that property? I have lived in my chalet-bungalow so far for the last 25 years, wherein I have intensely thought things and written my material of fiction and of gestalt real-time reviewing, and I have often wondered about such a phenomenon, too. They also discuss the nonagenarian’s history in Vienna during the Second World War and his brother who was involved in the massacre of Nanjing. I bet all that info-dump history bored Mariya’s aunt more than it did me. 😐

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  3. nullimmortalis
    January 20, 2020 at 8:52 am

    38 & 39

    “Dolphins have the power to put the right or left half of their brain to sleep.””

    Begs the question, I wonder, whether the sleeping half can dream. Well, there is talk here of ‘coincidence’, ‘triangulation’ and ‘intentions’ (just noticed by autocorrect that ‘intentions’ is only one letter different from ‘inventions’), plus the mutual synergy between a sitter and a portraitist (as there is between a book and its reader?) and such synergy, too, in the formation of Ideas by Idea-makers, the dolphins and Commendatores notwithstanding. Much talk, too, about ‘boredom’ and how it is needed to spur one on to things so as to disperse that boredom. Significant that I already mentioned being bored in the previous entry above. And indeed there are some more near-boring or attritional info-dumps in these two chapters. Finally, today, how stupid could I be! It has only just occurred to me that having a paper cover on this fat paperback would not hide the the red splatter on its pages’ edges, vis à vis the equally fat paperback that the aunt is still reading (!) — while the narrator does the portrait together with the often sullen Mariya (well, 13 year olds are ever thus, I guess). Octopi trying to survive by eating their own legs and Strauss’ Der Rosenklavier, notwithstanding. Not forgetting the dolphins again.

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  4. nullimmortalis
    January 21, 2020 at 8:44 am

    40 & 41

    “There in the dark, in the middle of the night, we were frozen, like two statues.”

    Two relatively short chapters. This book seems automatically to adjust the size of its chapters to match the current day’s availability of time in the constraints of my normal life to deal with it.
    I dare not of course tell you here what sounded like an earthquake in the middle of the night and what or who the narrator tells us he found Kafkaesquely staring at the eponymous painting from the narrator’s borrowed painting-stool. Not a cat chasing its tale.

    “I followed those fragmented, meandering thoughts. Like a kitten chasing its tail.”

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  5. nullimmortalis
    January 22, 2020 at 10:29 am

    42 & 43

    “Quietly, so as not to wake Yuzu, I descended from the ceiling to stand at the foot of the bed.”

    The narrator remembers a dream where he descends from the ceiling and proceeds very erotically to rape his then estranged wife. His wife had left him for another man as I think I disclosed earlier in this review. But now with the memory of this dream having coming back to him, it seems to raise a question of the timing of that dream and his now ex-wife’s forthcoming baby! Reality has got a screw loose, as it says a bit later, in a different innocent context, in these chapters! And earlier the narrator talked to his landlord (innocent catalyst for his wife having met that other man in the first place, it now transpires) about the future prospect of visiting the landlord’s father, the famous nonagenarian, who is so senile he can’t tell his own balls from two eggs. DC811DAA-6BA4-47F0-A57D-407253CE1E75 Later, the narrator fries two eggs for breakfast, but I don’t think that connection was intended! Anyway, I have now broken my rule of reviewing discretion by issuing a possible spoiler above in the shape of the narrator raping his ex-wife in a dream. A dream described here in raunchy detail. I have done this as I find it amazingly connective, at least obliquely, with my concurrently reading ‘The Man on the Ceiling’ by a married couple in prior collaboration, viz. Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem, here. A connection that seems to make #GestaltRealTimeReviewing even more illuminating than even I once believed! Potentially illuminating, as I do not know how such connections work nor how they might point to truths or illusions.
    Herman Melville’s sardines instead of whales, notwithstanding.

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  6. nullimmortalis
    January 23, 2020 at 9:12 am

    44 & 45

    “I was painting Mariye’s portrait, yet I could sense elements of my dead sister Komi and my former wife Yuzu creeping into the work. This wasn’t intentional—“

    As with this book, and my reviews of this and other books, something often seems to take me over. Later this happens with his on-going painting of the pit of stones, earlier likened to a body part (although I may have imagined such a likening by the book), now contiguous with a trompe l’oeil. The latter concept and a felt premonition represent a severe cliffhanger in the plot at the end of these chapters. One that irresistibly urges me to read on in the book straightaway! But I shall resist.
    As an aside I intend to make a coffee reference link to my reading yesterday here of ‘The Dead Man’s Coffee’ and of today’s Guardian article about coffee and mathematics!

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  7. nullimmortalis
    January 23, 2020 at 3:29 pm

    46 & 47

    To transcend stone walls, or to listen to Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto? I have indeed chosen the latter and also to succumb to read more of this book today. Talking of walls, Berlin’s or the pit’s, seems strange when this worrying cliffhanger is still unresolved. Just a cheap Penguin pendant to go on, so far. And a boundary of rules involving time, space and probability. And the ‘absurdity’ visits the narrator again and, under pressure from the narrator to break the rules, it advises that the narrator will get a phone call tomorrow that he must not decline — but at what cost, that advice? Tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, I guess.

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  8. nullimmortalis
    January 24, 2020 at 2:30 pm

    48 & 49

    “That the right and left sides of a woman’s face don’t match up. Did you know that?”

    Meanwhile, outside of the prevailing suspense of the cliffhanger… is a woman’s face like the right and left sides of a dolphin’s brain? Rhetorical question. I have many rhetoricals in this review but I need to make reference to them in case there is a preternatural pattern being built up here, unknown even to the author and his translators themselves. Like the Spanish Armada. Using a particular car because music cassettes can be used in it instead of CDs. Meanwhile, outside of the prevailing suspense of the cliffhanger (as I say), the narrator now visits the senile nonagenarian in his care home, visits him along with his son. Many sensible things half-sensed? Like the narrator’s reference to the attic and its horned owl. And the attic’s storage capabilities. This book itself as a storage for things until we can use them properly? Like the fateful chances of meeting other characters from far back in the book, and now, at the end of these chapters, there is the arrival in the nonagenarian’s room of something or someone that starts a new cliffhanger… Meanwhile, can a tourist bus be used to figure in a plot scene simply so as to blot something else out in the car park? Each scene in this book is a wayward painting or a series of wayward paintings, in different stages of being painted, till not being wayward at all? It’s just us onlookers who are wayward. ALL of us.

    “It’s dumb, I know, but I’ve never really gotten comfortable with phones taking pictures. I’m even less cool with cameras making phone calls.”

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  9. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 10:11 am

    2D0E5DBB-5F32-483E-8710-AFC597FD99DF 50 & 51

    “Everything was connected somewhere.”
    And I stab this book (hence the red splatter on its page edges?), in the same way as an IDEA within it invites its Narrator to do so to it, with the intention of transcending the torrent of history. I have already glimpsed ahead and seen the next chapter as a man in an orange cone hat as its title. Am I, as gestalt reader of this book, representative of Long Face tentatively lifting the manhole of this book from within it!? Only the unique truth of fiction can have such IDEAS, I guess.

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  10. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 11:01 am

    52 & 53

    I may have just stabbed this book because of its potentially growing or perceived ludicrousness. Perhaps I am its so-called ‘Double Metaphor’?… yet, like Long Face, “I am enjoined to verify and record these events. I do only what I am told to do. You have my word.” My logos.

    “…subject to the principle of connectivity.” “I stepped down into the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor.” “One absurdity after another sauntered through my mind as I pushed down the endless slope.” This book told me earlier that Kafka was fascinated by slopes? Grilled cheese and Richard Strauss. The river at “the conjunction of phenomena and expression.” Don’t go there!

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  11. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 1:42 pm

    1B565CFE-4630-455A-A729-90A7BFC4701554 & 55

    “But the head lacked a face. Where a face should have been was blank.”

    But, as I say, perhaps I am one of the Double Metaphors myself or, if not, these Double Metaphors “fatten” me as well as themselves. Or I fatten myself (or my and others’ books?) upon THIS book, ironically with my having already stabbed it to death!

    Meanwhile, how can one paint a portrait of a blank face? Reading it in the way I read this book is tantamount to shaping a portrait of it, following an instinctive path, one that here involves a ferry, towards crawling into a narrowing version of Alice’s tunnel, a place beset with giant Lilliputian miniatures… but of course, if you have been paying attention, you will perhaps guess where the tunnel really ends up….a journey that takes your breath away.

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  12. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 2:32 pm

    56 & 57

    “An Idea never felt hunger, while I did.”

    The tipping-point careering me down the slope of this book’s endgame? Things are now panning out more expectedly, I fancy. Explanations to be given, a vanishing reconciled for others’ quandaries. How had his chin stayed smooth over three days? Of course, in portraits, I say, chins shown smooth stay smooth. A sketched omelet, too. The claustrophobia of the erstwhile tunnel merely to make two girls one? Sitter and Sister. The narrator’s married girl friend’s daughter, too? The girl friend whose own ‘pit’ he had sketched several times…

    “Against being hauled from the dark into the light.”

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  13. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 4:48 pm

    58, 59 & 60

    “Like there are these fragments floating around, and I can’t figure out how to piece them together.”

    Each reader with his own personal fragments. Like “the beautiful canals of Mars. Where Martians row gondolas with golden oars.” Now with the corona of each virus, in today’s real-time, and Corpo Celeste. And Mars evokes 13 year old Mariye’s name and, as in these chapters, reprises her obsessions with her own signs of developing breasts. Or the obsessions with her flat chest of anyone (like the narrator) who recasts or reshapes these thoughts of a girl just past puberty in a lengthy reported speech as a sort of info dump as seen directly through Mariye’s eyes, as she intrudes into the white house opposite, an empty house where she finds specialist binoculars positioned looking back across the valley directly at her own bedroom window with orange curtains. A requiem of a person standing behind a portrait’s paint, as a separate fragment. Epiphany with an attic’s horned owl. Fashionable clothes in mothballs. CDs too linear without the necessary tipping-over of the vinyl, midway. The percentages of truth.

    “The slope behind the house had been turned into a large Japanese-style garden.”

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  14. nullimmortalis
    January 25, 2020 at 7:37 pm

    61, 62, 63 & 64

    “‘Affirmative. Beware of those hornets. They are the most virulent creatures,’…”

    Virulent is an interesting word. I had never seen the word virus hidden in it till now. Just as Mariye – before her breasts started growing – was hidden inside a room of mothballed clothes while reading man-sweaty National Geographical magazines. An earthquake proof room, and the narrator is now able to look back at a major earthquake and tsunami that was then in the future – involving a nuclear power station. At least in this case it was the world that did it, unlike with Chernobyl earlier. Still the world is mankind’s world, handled like a penguin pendant, the responsibility of those of us who wear it. Mozart knew of such labyrinthine concepts, at a very young age. In many ways an unsatisfactory denouement with parenthetical timeline adjustments or clarifications between the narrator’s tunnel journey and the duration of Mariye’s intrusion into the white house. But in many ways that makes this the perfect denouement. It is a story that evolved organically beyond the control of the author, if not the narrator. But that makes it seem real. “, so real, I feel as though I could reach out and touch them.” To touch each character. Even to touch the ‘absurditiies’ who could talk. And the people we knew in the book who were strong enough to withstand the major earthquake and tsunami by being in this book. And the narrator’s sperm that was transmitted by dream. This is not fiction as mere Magic Realism, but it is fiction to the nth power of its own Magic Fiction. Idea and Metaphor extrapolated by the exponential synergy of human sweat and spirit.

    end

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