SPUTNIK SWEETHEART BY HARUKI MURAKAMI REVIEW

I’d quite like to meet Haruki Murakami. He sounds like an interesting person and I really enjoyed the style of his writing. He used to run a jazz club and smoke 60 cigarettes a day until he started running. Then he lost weight, stopped smoking and found that he could think more purely about the world around him. He certainly seems to be able to highlight key issues regarding the human condition and to look at the sum of the parts in a simple but powerful way. He is going to be sixty soon and has written at least 11 novels and one non-fiction book all about the Tokyo subway gas attack. Strangely I see that although he is capable of translating the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and John Irving into Japanese, somebody else translates his books into English. I wonder why.

I have been meaning to read one of his books for ages – “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” to be precise. It’s just that (in manner of proper book reviewer), it is about 2″ thick. So instead I went for “Sputnik Sweetheart” because it is only 1/2″ thick. Having just finished it, I have absolutely no idea what it was about but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It was a very compelling (unresolved) story all about love and loss and loneliness. Essentially it was a very sad view of urban alienation and how ultimately we all remain alone:-

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails of behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness”.