Siegfried reviewed Die Chroniken des Aufziehvogels by Haruki Murakami
Die Chroniken des Aufziehvogels
5 stars
Ein Genuss :-)
Epub
English language
Published Oct. 6, 1998 by Vintage International.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118727/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle-by-haruki-murakami/9780307762702
Ein Genuss :-)
This enchanting saga will have you feeling like you're at the bottom of deep well
4.5/5
the unemployed friend at 2pm on a tuesday
I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.
The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.
The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.
This book is simply incredble. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the …
I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.
The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.
The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.
This book is simply incredble. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the wonderful 'sand dunes' alongside freezing cold blue rivers the locations never disapoint to take you out of this often bland world and envelop you in Murakami's world, 'a world where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.' I don't how I would like to draw this review to an end so I'll just reiterate the point that this book is incredible and if you are reading this to discover whether it is worth your time and energy. It is.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone.
Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.
I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.
I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.
The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.
The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.
This book is simply incredible. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the …
I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.
The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.
The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.
This book is simply incredible. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the wonderful 'sand dunes' alongside freezing cold blue rivers the locations never disappoint to take you out of this often bland world and envelop you in Murakami's world, 'a world where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.' I don't how I would like to draw this review to an end so I'll just reiterate the point that this book is incredible and if you are reading this to discover whether it is worth your time and energy. It is.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone.
Beautifully written and translated book. I didn't know where the story was going, and really enjoyed the meandering journey.
Couldn't get into this book... Not sure why I bought it.
You know that old trick magicians do when they remove a tablecloth without breaking anything? Well something similar happens when you start a Murakami book, the book is the table, you are the items on the table and the tablecloth is reality. After a few pages reality gets pulled from under you and you find yourself in some crazy world that makes no sense but is mesmerising at the same time.
This story is in 3 parts. Parts 1 and 2 are brilliant, what you would expect from Murakami. Weird women, ears, random animal (Jelly fish), a cat, main character who is like an emotionless robot and gets phased by nothing, more weird women. These two parts are some of the best writing he has done. Part 3 though, he tries something new and I don't like something new! He includes letters, news stories and articles from a magazine, whilst …
You know that old trick magicians do when they remove a tablecloth without breaking anything? Well something similar happens when you start a Murakami book, the book is the table, you are the items on the table and the tablecloth is reality. After a few pages reality gets pulled from under you and you find yourself in some crazy world that makes no sense but is mesmerising at the same time.
This story is in 3 parts. Parts 1 and 2 are brilliant, what you would expect from Murakami. Weird women, ears, random animal (Jelly fish), a cat, main character who is like an emotionless robot and gets phased by nothing, more weird women. These two parts are some of the best writing he has done. Part 3 though, he tries something new and I don't like something new! He includes letters, news stories and articles from a magazine, whilst these were interesting and well written they do break up the flow of the magical story.
There is something unique with his writing that no other author I've come across can do, if he is writing about a woman's body with only a few words he can make her seem incredibly sexy....even if she does have a cats tail, up until that point she was very ordinary sounding. And when he writes a torture scene it is more gruesome and shocking than anything from American Psycho, he doesn't go into too much detail but still you're left shocked.
Fantastic book, unfortunately the damage done to the flow in book 3 knocks it down to 4 stars.
I rarely re-read books because there are so many, and so little time. I made an exception here because I read it it first in a delirious whirl of Murakami books. I was falling in love with a writer and was giddy with his peculiar mix of the banal and surreal.
For some reason I didn't see beyond the oeuvre to the exceptional nature of this work so I only gave 4 stars. I fixed that now with 5. I was so totally absorbed in each section that I didn't see how all the parts were played out as a whole.
I recently listened to Patti Smith's "M train" where she becomes enamoured with the book so I knew I had to go back and give it the time it deserved. I'm glad I did.
Confieso que soy extremadamente imparcial con Murakami, me gusta, me gusta mucho. Me engancha tanto su mundo que no quiero dejarlo, no me permito estar en otro 'estado', quiero vivir en ese mundo donde nada pasa pero todo parece cambiar inevitablemente. Quiero dejarme ir, olvidarme de la vida 'real' y vivir la 'absurda realidad' que nos ofrece. La alienación social de sus protagonistas alimenta esa peligrosa misantropía en la que todes nos vemos abocades y me encanta dejarme llevar por esa sensación.
En esta novela más que en cualquier otra de este autor veo que para mi Murakami es un 'Kafka aplicado'. Esa fina barrera que divide lo real de la fantástico pero con una diferencia: Murakami parece querer dar explicación a aquello que Kafka ofrece sin titubear: el 'absurdo'. Lo que me magnetiza del escritor japonés es esa esperanza de que todo va a tener sentido, ese jugar con …
Confieso que soy extremadamente imparcial con Murakami, me gusta, me gusta mucho. Me engancha tanto su mundo que no quiero dejarlo, no me permito estar en otro 'estado', quiero vivir en ese mundo donde nada pasa pero todo parece cambiar inevitablemente. Quiero dejarme ir, olvidarme de la vida 'real' y vivir la 'absurda realidad' que nos ofrece. La alienación social de sus protagonistas alimenta esa peligrosa misantropía en la que todes nos vemos abocades y me encanta dejarme llevar por esa sensación.
En esta novela más que en cualquier otra de este autor veo que para mi Murakami es un 'Kafka aplicado'. Esa fina barrera que divide lo real de la fantástico pero con una diferencia: Murakami parece querer dar explicación a aquello que Kafka ofrece sin titubear: el 'absurdo'. Lo que me magnetiza del escritor japonés es esa esperanza de que todo va a tener sentido, ese jugar con nuestro raciocinio y en definitiva, poner en juego al determinismo, hacernos dudar del realismo. Para un escéptico como yo es una constante lucha entre convicciones y dudas que disfruto enormemente pongan contra las cuerdas.
De mis novelas favoritas de este escritor.
Good.
All loose ends, all confusion. Just couldn't get into it. Plowed through anyway.
A wild ride. Mysteries piled upon mysteries, but without the luxury of having any of them explained to you at the end. Reportedly, the English translation was heavily abridged - the original was published in three volumes. On one hand, the full text might have made more sense. But on the other hand, I barely managed to finish the book as it is.
Toru, the protagonist, is a cipher. A passive, passionless man who drifts through life, doing nothing of his own volition. (In the real world, anyway. In an alternate reality somewhere in his own mind he manages to have an affair and to kill a man.) He has no stories of his own, but absorbs the stories of those that he meets. And boy, are they doozies. Spies getting flayed alive in WWII in Manchuria, surviving (or not) the Siberian gulag.
I listened to an audio version, where …
A wild ride. Mysteries piled upon mysteries, but without the luxury of having any of them explained to you at the end. Reportedly, the English translation was heavily abridged - the original was published in three volumes. On one hand, the full text might have made more sense. But on the other hand, I barely managed to finish the book as it is.
Toru, the protagonist, is a cipher. A passive, passionless man who drifts through life, doing nothing of his own volition. (In the real world, anyway. In an alternate reality somewhere in his own mind he manages to have an affair and to kill a man.) He has no stories of his own, but absorbs the stories of those that he meets. And boy, are they doozies. Spies getting flayed alive in WWII in Manchuria, surviving (or not) the Siberian gulag.
I listened to an audio version, where the speaker did different voices for each character. And God did I hate the one he used for May Kasahara. All brassy Valley Girl. I winced when she had dialog. Or worse, when she wrote an entire letter.
All I know is we are on a life's journey and sometimes we will fall down a well in search of the point to it all and to the people places and events we will encounter along the way.