Synopsis: Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
Sometimes I take a gamble with my reading and go off the reservation. Sometimes it’s great (The Human Stain) sometimes it’s not and this is a NOT. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is the worst book I’ve read all year. Let this be a lesson to me; I am literal and DO NOT appreciate fantastical stories so separated from reality. Next time I try out something so far off my mark I will remember the torture of this stupid book. No, I am not unimaginative, but neither do I live in a fantasy world which clearly, you need to have some familiarity with before you can enjoy this as an adult. I am ashamed to have fallen for it. Pretentious is too kind a word.
Such a nonsensical and non-cohesive plot; as if the author had a bunch of ideas and no clue how to put them together. Oh wait, I’ll try forced allegory and wrangle every last literary theme on earth into one book. Yeah. That’ll work. I’m a Certified Genius. Ugh. At least he realized that the violent and degrading war story couldn't be presented as a whole without making the reader suicidal. Still, the rest of the story is inane.
Here are my notes as I dragged myself through this story. Yes, I had a martyr complex and actually got through the whole unbelievably idiotic thing.
Why refer to the cat as IT all the time...clearly it's a male. Weird.
The radio or boombox type thing the girl has, translated as a music machine. Later she has a radio. Odd.
Why are all the female characters intensely annoying?
All these visceral gyrations from Creta are unbearably awful. Who writes this crap? It's supposed to be shocking, exposing and hedonistic, but it's just stupid. I skipped over most of it.
The Japanese habit of calling people by first and last names is at first charming, then, after a while, grates on my nerves something awful.
I know it's supposed to be all mystical and allegorical, but it just smacks of adolescent obsessions over wet dreams.
Mai writes a letter to T complaining that no one likes her and is mystified as to why. Because you're annoying, that's why.
The narrator does some distinctive voices for this, but the one for the brother in-law's minion is the love child of Gilbert Godfrey and Peter Lorre. Ugh.
I’d have given it ½ a star, but it wasn’t badly written, just a horribly juvenile and incoherent story strung together to be as “shocking” as possible. Like a little boy scribbling swear words on the living room wall so as to get his parents to pay attention to him. Pathetic.
1 comments:
This book was adapted to english. (scratch) If you read other translations of the book, then some of the puzzling parts would for instance make the twisted story slightly brighter logical.
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