Last year on the Italian version of this blog I wrote an enthusiastic review of
Haruki Murakami's 1Q84
. I found it very interesting and I was eager to read the
third volume
.
Finally I've got some free time to read those 600 pages.
How's that? Probably the worst book series I ever read in my life!
The last time I saw a such banal ending I was in middle school: I was writing a short story for an homework, I reached the fourth page, it was three hours that I was writing and I decided to close my story with "Sarah woke up: it was just a bad dream... or not?".
In an homework wrote by a 12 years old boy this can be tolerated, but on a massive 1800 pages book isn't possible!
Basically, the story is this:
- 100 pages on Mark useless thoughts
- 100 pages on Juliettenne and how she feels unconfortable with such a name
- 200 pages of wonderful, intriguing action
- 500 useless pages about a parallel universe with thousands of questions that will never be answered
- 500 pages about a private investigator that follows Mark and Juliettenne, repeating again and again the same known facts, not only, telling them from three points of view. What some authors can tell in 25-40 pages, here are told in 500 pages
- 100 useless pages about the TV subscription/tax in Japan and how collectors will try to get money from all house
- 100 pages on the bad guys and why get Juliettenne is so important
- 30 pages about a mysterious event that happens on a corpse, without any explanation about the reason
- 10 pages that end the book with an "and then they woke up... or not?"
I really advise you to don't read the third book, unless you like to waste your time by reading 600 pages with the rambling adventures of a failed detective that's so ugly that everyone recognizes him from an half mile.
(I censored the spoilers, to read them select the text with the mouse)
Since the ending is so plain (they come back in their world, leaving everything behind... or not), why, in one of the last chapters, describing in every finest detail how those little people come out from the mouth of Ushikawa's corpse they form a circle and start to sew an air chrysalid??? In the ending do you plan to explain who are those fucking little people? Do you plan to explain about what is the purpose that fucking air chrysalid? Do you plan to explain why they make sure to finish it before the body get cremated? So, why you write a fucking chapter about it?!?!? You are a bastard, you write so many details, you thicken the plot, and then get away with a rushed final chapter that doesn't solve ANYTHING!
Finally after 20 years they get together: I always loved you, but now we have to run, also I am pregnant, it's your child. And the other immediately understands it "ah, yes four months ago I had sex with another girl that said don't worry I can't get pregnant, for some reason you got pregnant instead... well, anyway I had many sex deams with you, it's fine anyway right?" and, climbing a ladder, they come back to the normal world (or not)
And what about Ushikawa? He hadn't get through the dimensional passage, so why he also was shocked to see two moons in the night sky? And those little people? They made a dog die by making it exploding and then? Over? Just for fun? Who are them? What's their purpose? Wow, they killed a dog without a reason, so we must be afraid of them. Why the leader, was forced to had sex with underage girls? Why? Fukaeri writes that book and then? Goes home after three months of exile and over? Just disappears? Did she talk with crows? Or they were just spying her for that little people? Why the docter, just after Fukaeri comes back home, asks clearly if she had sex with Tengo? It's because she's a famous ninphomaniac? She got pregnant? It's not normal to clearly ask to a thirty years old man if he had sex with the underage girl that was living in his house, right?
Tengo's father really autoinduced his come and his soul was wandering in Tokyo? How could he do that? WIth so many things a soul can do in Tokyo, he really has to knock doors asking to pay the TV subscription????? And then why he knocks the door only to main characters??? How he got the address?? And why?? What's the purpose of air chrysalids? Tengo sees one of them, with a girl inside, but then it suddenly disappears, then he tries to see it again without success by smoking pot: should he use heavier drugs?
What about Tengo's sex buddy? From what her husband said, it looks like she got violently tortured and killed, but he doesn't care. Really? Why Tengo's mother looks like his (now dead?) sex buddy? Why Tengo has sex dreams with his mother?
Those are just a few of the hundreds of unanswered questions that the book series give.
My opinion about it, if I wasn't clear enough: the first two books are a masterpiece, the third it's a disaster.
Making an analogy, the first two books are a wonderful flower that's about to bloom, everyone is anxious to see it, and then a garbage truck dumps its load on it...