SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

Name: SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
Author: Haruki Murakami
ISBN: 0-375-41169-0

by Haruki Murakami & translated by Philip Gabriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2001

Reminiscent of both Antonioni's classic film L'Avventura and Murakami's own Norwegian Wood (2000): an irresistibly plaintive...

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This latest from the acclaimed Japanese author of A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) is an equally deft and affecting dramatization of recent postwar alienation and anomie.

Narrated by an unnamed student and schoolteacher, it chronicles his frustrating relationship with Sumire, a headstrong young woman devoted to Jack Kerouac and the Beats and determined to make her way as a novelist. Their story is set in 1957, as Russia's satellite Sputnik travels through space—an image explicitly connected to Sumire's partially unrequited love for Miu, the (older, married) Korean woman who becomes her employer, mentor, and traveling companion. An urgent phone message summons the narrator to an island off the coast of Greece, whence Sumire has inexplicably disappeared—and to extended conversations with the bereft Miu, whose disclosures only intensify the narrator's resigned realization that people who attempt, then neglect or fail to achieve, intimacy are themselves "in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits." The mystery of Sumire resists solution, despite partial explanations suggested by Miu's haunting story of being trapped in a Ferris-wheel car at a Swiss amusement park, evidence contained in disks found in Sumire's computer (which indicate that she has moved on, to "the other side" of her personality, and possibility), and a teasing climactic episode in which the narrator involves himself in the fate of his married lover's young son (who's also his student), when the latter is caught shoplifting. Nothing is spelled out, but worlds of implication exfoliate from this stunning, beautifully structured novel: a moving depiction of the mystery of other people, ever capable of "disappearing" into "places" where we cannot, try as we may, follow them.

Reminiscent of both Antonioni's classic film L'Avventura and Murakami's own Norwegian Wood (2000): an irresistibly plaintive dramatization of the differences and distances that preclude and frustrate the human need for connection.

Pub Date: April 30, 2001

ISBN: 0-375-41169-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel

- BOOK REVIEW
NOVELIST AS A VOCATION
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen

- BOOK REVIEW
MURAKAMI T
by Haruki Murakami ; translated by Philip Gabriel

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.