Killing Commendatore is a 2017 novel written by world famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The book was originally split into two volumes in Japan but was combined into one release for North America. Many people have various opinions about this novel so I'll also add mine to the fray.
An artist moves into the house of a retired famous painter after separating from his wife. Weird events start to occur around the man after he discovers a painting in the house's upstair's attic....Then he has a white haired neighbor that's just as hard to figure out as all the strange events happening around him.
Killing Commendatore has many different subplots going on in it's pages. What starts off as a family inspired drama turned fantasy thrill starts to fall toward the ground quickly when too much content gets stuck into a story that isn't stable enough to support various ideas. There's a vibrant cast of characters on top of the various ideas in this world that are as abstract as a painting you see in an art museum. The painting has all the details about the character you're looking at however, the painting is too complexed to make out those details clearly. This caused me to not care about anyone I was reading about. No matter how much the characters tried to become normalized by establishing human relationships with each others. Other times, the novel creates an interesting atmosphere full to the brim with mystery, thrills, and fantasy until the coming pages ruin it by preaching historical facts at the reader. There's many times when certain characters would appear just to discuss history from World War II, forcing me to flip over to the book's cover multiple times to check if I was reading the same book. At least readers go through all of this to get a conclusion that wraps up everything nicely. Killing Commendatore isn't a novel that I could see myself reading a second time. While Murakami is known for writings that create new rules in the Fiction genre good and bad, I've still managed to come across novels he's written that speak to me as a reader. Sadly, Killing Commendatore isn't one of them.
I won't state that this novel can't be a good read for someone. Give it a go if you like many different ideas raging in a story about characters just as complexed as those ideas presented. I recommend reading his older novels such as After Dark, Norwegian Wood, or Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
No comments:
Post a Comment