In addition to the navel-gazing, Murakami often repeats information, which tends to slow down the pace. As my friend Alexander Doenau observed on finishing 1Q84, there’s a lot of navel-gazing going on in various apartments. It’s also certainly the case that the plot moves slowly. It’s certainly true that Murakami writes in a peculiar manner about sex and that he doesn’t mind leaving a few loose ends here and there. It’s probably true, for instance, that the novel is too long.
In fact, it’s a very good book (well, a very good three books) despite the fact that some criticisms of it may well be true.
I say this because the novel isn’t that weak. I don’t think anyone is having to engage in apologetic acrobatics to justify the worth of 1Q84. Maslin even goes so far as to say that the novel ‘has even his most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles.’ Similarly, Allen Barra in The Atlantic says that ‘ne gets the feeling that critics who until recently were Murakami’s cheerleaders are now, with 1Q84, becoming apologists.’ Janet Maslin in The New York Times describes some of the eroticism in 1Q84 as being ‘more than a little peculiar’ and derides Murakami for rejecting ‘such petty obligations’ as those which customarily require a writer ‘to explain unanswered questions and tie up loose ends’. Nathan Heller at Slate points out that obvious things are overexplained and declares that ‘ 1Q84 reads, paragraph-to-paragraph, as some of Murakami’s weakest writing in years’. )ĭespite the generally positive reception, there have been some common criticisms of 1Q84, including that the novel - at 925 pages long - is repetitive and could have done with more editing. ( Update: 1Q84 didn’t make the short list, though The Lake, by Murakami’s compatriot Banana Yoshimoto, did. The novel is now on the long list for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, with the short list to be announced on 10 January. Happily, critical reception of 1Q84 has largely been positive, with some reviewers pronouncing it a masterpiece. So I was one of the fans eagerly counting down the days to the November 2011 release of the English translation of 1Q84 in Australia, a book anticipated to be Murakami’s magnum opus. In the past few years, I’ve read more books by him than by any other author and his work has had a strong influence on my own fiction writing.
This was always going to be a biased review.
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