The writing in The City And Its Uncertain Walls is so overwrought, the prose so purple, I half expected Prince to come back from the dead to sing about it.
, the gleefully madcap debut that shot him to instant stardom, Haruki Murakami published a novella in a Japanese literary magazine. It went mostly unnoticed and has been the subject of little discussion in the 40-plus years since.
If you can step over the “delicate silvery fish” and tune out the “cries of the invisible night birds”, though, there is much to like in this youthful stab at magical realism. An unnamed narrator recalls his first love. He is 17, his crush a year younger. As their feelings grow, she lets him in on a secret. The girl he has fallen for is, in fact, but a shadow.
The writing is so overwrought, the prose so purple, that I half expected Prince to come back from the dead to sing about it.was a book deeply at odds with itself, unsure of what it wanted to be. There’s an awkward tilt at pandemic lit. And an Idiot’s Guide to Jazz. More than anything, it struck me as a hodgepodge of the literary titans who informed Murakami’s early sensibilities and the cultural trends that have bubbled up around him over the last four decades.
I suspect that in some parallel, magical universe, a relatively unknown Murakami has just published a delightful novella about a town with impregnable, shape-shifting walls, and a man who arrives there to become the resident dream-reader. Alas, here all we get is its bloated, if occasionally charming, shadow.
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