Killing Commendatore

The best novel I’ve read so far this year; engrossing and enveloping, or immersive, so much so that I found myself dreaming about the work. To enjoy (any) Murakami, you have to be “endowed with the capacity to believe”, as the narrator says of his own fantastic journey in this work on its final page. Maybe to refine this assertion, it is necessary to have a willing suspension of disbelief when reading Murakami. It doesn't work for everyone (or indeed all critics), but Murakami willfully combines the banal (shopping, preparing meals) with the bizarre and/or supernatural (talking characters appearing out of paintings, for example). There is, however, a clear purpose to all this: to derive meaning from an often inexplicable world and to highlight the duality of humankind — the present and the absent, good and evil, light and darkness, and so on. Each reader (I believe; and certainly myself) sees elements of their own personalities in Murakami's narrators — we are all searching for understanding. Many of the themes discussed in this work also have universality: the mysteries of romantic love, the weight of history (World War II here), and the transcendence of art, not at all too long at 700 pages, and his best work since 1Q84. 10/10.

By Haruki Murakami