Goodreads Review: A Wild Sheep Chase
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
My review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
The first couple chapters of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase are beautifully written and very effective–they slowly start to weave a story about a man’s unsuccessful romantic relationships. These initial chapters are told with an intense attention to detail, both physical, visceral details and emotional details.
But then the book gets “weird” and takes a nose-dive.
I say “weird” in quotation marks because nothing in the first two hundred and fifty pages (of a 350-page book) is really that surreal or fantastic. What’s more, the plot–briefly, the story of the narrator searching for a sheep in a photograph taken by a friend–is developed at a snail’s pace. The “wild” in the title seems to me to be a terrific misnomer.
Instead of developing the story naturally, through action, Murakami relies on dialog to hash out the novel’s more surreal elements. The conversations that the characters have are painful, unbelievable, and unnatural. Such as:
“To return to the cyst, what I mean to say is that the period in which the cyst appeared coincided precisely with the period in which he underwent a miraculous self-transformation.”
“In your hypothesis,” I said, “there was no casual relationship between the cyst and the self-transformation; instead, the two were governed in parallel by some mysterious overriding factor.”
“You catch on quickly,” said the man. “Precise and to the point.”
Well, I don’t catch on quickly, apparently, because I just didn’t understand the vast majority of whatever it is they’re talking about. And who talks like this, anyway, even in translation?
Based on the strength of the first chapters, I won’t hesitate to pick up Murakami’s realistic fiction, but I think I’ll stay far away from his overwrought “fantasy.”
Phoebe
Phoebe is a 20-something writer who lives in New York State with her husband and cat. She is a dork, not a geek or a nerd.
Her debut novel, Starglass, will be released from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.
4 comments
Never Let Me Go is actually pretty good. It's a quiet read without a lot of sci-fi elements, but it still has a lot of fantastic elements.
I liked Never Let Me Go…but wasn't that Ishiguro, not Murakami?!
I've been offline for a while, so I just read this. Murakami is one of my favorite living non-genre authors, but I will admit that some of his stories are a bit opaque. I haven't read Wild Sheep Chase, but you might try After Dark or The Wind-up Bird Chronicles. WUBC is the one that almost every Murakami reader I've spoken with likes.
Omg, I had an episode again. Lol's, sorry Phoebe, that *is* Ishiguro.