Splendid, with notable film potential.
Another absorbing and poignant first novel (after Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng, 2000) about the life journey of the first Siamese twins in recorded history.
Slouka (stories: Lost Lake, 1998, etc.) begins his tale in Civil War North Carolina with Chang, the point-of-view character here, reflecting on a life spent bonded to his brother Eng. The fresh images and fascinating allusions in his narrative bring to vivid life Siam, Paris, London, New York City, and the American South during the first half of the 19th century. Chang first contemplates the day over fifty years before when he and his brother, joined at the shoulders by “a small, fleshy bridge,” horrified midwives in Siam. With scant attention to the ways the boys accommodate each other, Chang remembers their warm childhood. When a typhoon takes their father’s life, the maturing twins are forced to accept an entrepreneur’s offer to become a traveling theatrical attraction in Europe. Parisians regard them as beautiful, a special gift of God. Chang falls rapturously in love with one of them, Sophia Marchant, while Eng patiently reads on at Chang’s side. Then a friend suggests to Chang that Marchant’s attraction springs from a fetish with the abnormal. The devastating news follows that the twins are destitute, their managers having vanished. Fleeing to the fetid streets of London, the two grub for coins by allowing passers-by to touch their attachment. An agent for P.T. Barnum rescues them, offering work in New York City. Here, Eng’s growing preoccupation with religion threatens the brothers’ bond, as does the oncoming Civil War. The conflict between them over bringing slaves into their homes escalates into a physical quarrel that leaves both of them nearly dead. Yet when Eng ultimately comforts Chang, bereft from the disappearance of his beloved son in the war, their brotherly bond survives.
Splendid, with notable film potential.Pub Date: May 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40216-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0375415351
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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