OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile
A struggling portrait artist who is trying to change his career direction is the focus of this new audiobook from acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Narrator Kirby Heyborne employees a measured tone and pace as the story weaves a fantastic tale featuring an imaginary character and a nod to the theme of capitalism explored in THE GREAT GATSBY. Heyborne handles the more fantastic incidents with the authority and assuredness needed for the listener to accept the imaginary twists and turns. Expect the unexpected from the author of IQ84 and KAFKA ON THE SHORE in this extraordinary work of scope and imagination. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
08/13/2018
Murakami’s latest (following Men Without Women) is a meticulous yet gripping novel whose escalating surreal tone complements the author’s tight focus on the domestic and the mundane. The unnamed narrator, a talented but unambitious portrait-painter in Tokyo, discovers his wife is having an affair, quits painting, and embarks on a meandering road trip. The narrator’s friend offers to let him stay in the home of his father, Tomohiko Amada, a famous, now-senile painter whose difficult secret from 1930s Vienna unfurls over the course of the book. Once situated on the quiet, mysterious mountainside outside Odawara, the narrator begins teaching painting classes and finds a hidden, violent painting of Amada’s in the attic called Killing Commendatore, an allegorical adaptation of Don Giovanni. He begins two affairs—one with an older woman who sparks the novel whenever she appears—and is commissioned by the enigmatic Mr. Menshiki to paint his portrait. Menshiki is preoccupied with a 13-year-old girl named Mariye—an intriguing character, but one whom the book has an unfortunate tendency to sexualize. At night, the narrator is haunted by a ringing bell coming from a covered pit near his house. This eventually leads him to a magical realm that includes impish physical manifestations of ideas and metaphors. His discovery provokes a pivotal, satisfying moment in his artistic development on the way to a protracted, mystic denouement. The story never rushes, relishing digressions into Bruce Springsteen, the simple pleasures of freshly cooked fish, and the way artists sketch. As the narrator uncovers his talents, the reading experience becomes more propulsive. Murakami’s sense of humor helps balance the otherworldly and the prosaic, making this a consistently rewarding novel. 250,000-copy announced first printing. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
A Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Library Journal, LitHub, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
“Exhilarating ... magical.” —The Washington Post
“Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it.” —The Wall Street Journal
“[Murakami] is as masterful as ever.” —Houston Chronicle
“A spellbinding parable of art, history, and human loneliness.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“The product of a singular imagination.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Expansive and intricate.” —The New York Times
“Beguiling. . . . Murakami is brilliant.” —The Guardian
“Dazzling. . . . [Murakami] reveals how an artist sees the world.” —Entertainment Weekly
“[A] sprawling, uncanny epic. . . . A time-traveling tale of loss, longing, and the creation of art—with an ample dash of Murakami’s trademark deadpan humor.” —Vanity Fair
“A perfect balance of tradition and individual talent. . . . Murakami dancing along ‘the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then up the walls and onto the ceiling.” —The Spectator
“A surreal, world-altering epic punctuated by art, literature and history.” —Time
“[Murakami] once more explicates the seemingly impossible with such thorough, exacting conviction to make believers of us all.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. . . . Just as [Murakami] straddles barriers dividing high art from mass entertainment, so he suspends borders between east and west.” —Financial Times
“[Killing Commendatore] marks the return of a master.” —Esquire
“The complex landscape that Murakami assembles in Killing Commendatore is a word portrait of the artist’s inner life.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Fascinating. . . . Drawing on Buddhist spiritualism, metaphysics and magical realism—not to mention Lewis Carroll—Killing Commendatore finds its narrator enmeshed in a singular philosophic adventure.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Enthralling.” —Forward
“Murakami beautifully captures the evanescence of inspiration.” —Vulture
“Its size, beauty, and concerns with lust and war bring us back to the vividness and scale of [Murakami’s] 1997 epic, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.’’ —The Boston Globe
“Lovely and strange.” —Bustle
“Wild, thrilling. . . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked. . . . What makes his voice so distinctive, and so captivating, is the mix of precise observation, clarity and deadpan humour.” —The Sunday Times (London)
OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile
A struggling portrait artist who is trying to change his career direction is the focus of this new audiobook from acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Narrator Kirby Heyborne employees a measured tone and pace as the story weaves a fantastic tale featuring an imaginary character and a nod to the theme of capitalism explored in THE GREAT GATSBY. Heyborne handles the more fantastic incidents with the authority and assuredness needed for the listener to accept the imaginary twists and turns. Expect the unexpected from the author of IQ84 and KAFKA ON THE SHORE in this extraordinary work of scope and imagination. R.O. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine