At once beguiling and disquieting—in short, trademark Murakami—a fast read that sticks in the mind.
“I’m going to slice you up nice and fine and feed you to the centipedes.” Another off-kilter yarn from master storyteller Murakami: allegorical, shadowy and not at all nice.
Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.) loves two things among many: Franz Kafka (think Kafka on the Shore) and secret places (think 1Q84). This latest, brief and terse, combines those two passions in the frightening vision of a hapless young man who, returning two books—How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd—to the library, is sent to Room 107, deep in a basement he didn’t know existed. Confronted by an apparently friendly but nevertheless no-nonsense old man, the youngster allows that he’s interested in “how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire.” And who wouldn’t be? Well, that’s enough to send our young fellow into a nightmare world featuring a blandly mysterious young woman, a sheep man, the ever present threat of danger and the nagging worry that his mom is going to be upset when he doesn’t show up for supper. Even so, our young man has the presence of mind to ask the right questions: How, given strapped municipal budgets and library cuts, could “our city library have such an enormous labyrinth in its basement?” And why is he being imprisoned—for the answer comes back positive to his question of the Sheep Man, “Is this by any chance a jail cell?” It would take a Terry Gilliam, or perhaps a Kurosawa, to film Murakami’s nightmare properly, and if the reader may well be puzzled over what the story, published in Japan in 2005, means at heart, then the prospect of the young man’s being freed only if he passes rigorous questioning over, yes, taxation in the Ottoman Empire will ignite the fear-of-a-long-ago-final-exam syndrome in all of us.
At once beguiling and disquieting—in short, trademark Murakami—a fast read that sticks in the mind.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35430-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.
The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.
In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han (The Vegetarian, 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
