Orwellian dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop novels)—all blend in this dreamlike, strange and...
“Things are not what they seem.” If Murakami’s (After Dark, 2008, etc.) ambitious, sprawling and thoroughly stunning new novel had a tagline, that would be it.
Things are not what they seem, indeed. A cab driver tells a protagonist named Aomame—her name means “green beans”—as much, instructing her on doing something that she has never done before and would perhaps never dream of doing, even if she had known the particulars of how to do it: namely, to descend from an endless traffic jam on an elevated expressway by means of a partially hidden service staircase. Aomame is game: She’s tough, with strong legs, and she doesn’t mind if the assembled motorists of Tokyo catch a glimpse of what’s under her skirt as she drops into the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, there’s the case of Tengo, a math teacher who, like Aomame, is 30 years old in 1984; dulled even as Japan thrives in its go-go years, he would seem to have almost no ambition, glad to serve as the ghostwriter for a teenage girl’s torrid novel that will soon become a bestseller—and just as soon disappear. The alternate-universe Tokyo in which Aomame reappears (her first tipoff that it’s not the “real” Tokyo the fact that the cops are carrying different guns and wearing slightly different uniforms), which she comes to call 1Q84, the q for question mark, proves fertile ground for all manner of crimes, major and minor, in which she involves herself. Can she ever click her heels and get back home? Perhaps not, for, as she grimly concludes at one point in her quest, “The door to this world only opened in one direction.” It’s only a matter of time before Aomame’s story becomes entangled in Tengo’s—in this strange universe, everyone sleeps with everyone—and she becomes the object of his own hero quest; as he says, “Before the world’s rules loosen up too much…and all logic is lost, I have to find Aomame.” Will he? Stay tuned.
Orwellian dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop novels)—all blend in this dreamlike, strange and wholly unforgettable epic.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59331-3
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.
Berg’s debut is set in an age when telephones were novel.
If you want to make a phone call in 1952, you’ll lift the receiver and hear an operator say “Number, please.” And if you live in Wooster, Ohio, that operator might well be Vivian Dalton. She’ll listen in on your conversation even though she knows she shouldn’t, always hoping to hear “something scandalous.” Her Pawpy had advised “Just don’t get caught,” but her dead granny’s advice (ignored) was better: “Be careful what you wish for.” Vivian wishes for gossip about rich Betty Miller, whose “life was always perfectly in place,” but Betty has a delicious secret about Edward Dalton that’s sure to ruin Vivian’s life. Vivian never finished high school and frets that her bright teenage daughter, Charlotte, will exceed her in life. The narrative is sprinkled with dictionary definitions of fancy words Vivian doesn’t know, like “privy” and “myriad.” She thinks the school has assigned pornography to Charlotte when she sees The Myth of Sisyphus and thinks it’s about syphilis. Meanwhile, Betty is ever so full of herself because her father owns a bank and the ladies of Wooster always accept her written invitations. She briefly considers calling her Christmas party “Savior’s Celebratory Soirée.” Then she hosts a special afternoon tea to reveal the news about Vivian’s husband to a group of ladies “well versed in the art of displaying false concern.” Berg’s storytelling is warm, sympathetic, and witty—Vivian's "fear had eaten her common sense like it was a casserole,” and her “rage had melted and cooled a little into a hardened shell of shame and humiliation.” Vivian hires a private investigator to look into her husband’s past and consequently deletes chocolate from all her recipes. (Well, it makes sense to her.)
There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297894-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
