Haruki Murakami: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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CapreseBoi
Reader
ha! ive also read those three. HBWatEotW will forever be in my fave novels list even if I don't actually remember it anymore. with these reviews you guys have said, i guess i won't be reading colorless ha! i looove murakami's short stories though and I can say off the top of my head my faves, is there a forum for that thanks
Sorry for the belated post, but I love the book. His works have always been non-semantic, in that they aim to describe seemingly indescribable feelings and emotions. In doing so, they evoke feelings that defy description. That's where he uses food and music: perfect tools to amplify the non-semantic. In keeping with this, Colorless has as its central theme "a groundless sadness called forth by a pastoral landscape." Fitting, isn't it?
Bartleby
Moderator
Just finished reading this novel. You see, Murakami is comfort food. He's not at all a bad writer, but one whose idiosyncrasies make their way into the pages of his books, for better or worse.
In this case, something simultaneously a bit off-putting and agreeable is his choice of omniscient third person narrator (with occasional thoughts from our protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki intruding the narrative); the story is told in this matter of fact way that is at the same time clumsy and intimate, feeling somewhat raw, as if Murakami was summoning the bare essentials to move this story forward, the sentences written in this direct way, with a lot of telling and little showing, gives you the impression that you're reading a thinly-concealed, and lazy, autobiographical work; the events, for the most part, are basic, the telling rudimentary (silly similes abound), with some unnecessary repetition (like when he describes his characters acting surprised because they didn't know something, only for them to say the same thing with their own words right afterwards), the dialogues stilted in places (at least in my Brazilian Portuguese translation)... and yet, as always, it has its charms.
The plot, as you may already know from reading about it, concerns this guy, Tsukuru Tazaki, in his middle 30s, looking back to a time during high school when he was part of a group of friends, 5 in total, including himself, only for them to one day, in his second year of university, without apparent reason, categorically say that they don't want to ever talk to him again. This leads to a period of deep depression, when Tsukuru feels abandoned and lonely, and can only think of dying; then he kinda gets over it, or rather his wound heals but is still hurting, so, following the advise of his girlfriend, he goes on to find these former friends of his to get to know why they'd decided to part ways with him.
It takes some time for us to get there, though, and from the description of his teenage years till the present, there are a couple of subplots, like when Tsukuru makes a friend at university, and they spend a lot of time together, listening to music and talking, until this friend disappears quite randomly as well, and it adds to the protagonist's feelings of being empty, with nothing to offer other people, being only a temporary nest where people can land for a while until they take flight and move on with their lives (oh, and yes, the title of the book comes from the fact that all his teenage friends' names have a colour in them, with the boys having red and blue, and the girls black and white; only Tsukuru's surname is not "colourful").
As you can tell, it is a novel that's deeply melancholy. It is best read in small amounts, a few chapters at a time, letting the images and emotions evoked settle, and then pick it up again; images, yes, because even though the focus here is in the telling, occasionally Murakami paints some quite precise and moving scenes of the quotidian, and it is this ordinariness that's ultimately appealing, together with the bittersweet taste coming from things lost back in time, and the feeling that life may continue running along with nothing extraordinary, more colourful, or meaningful being possible to happen... our main character can only try and cling to hope that one day his time will come... Overall I was happy I stuck to it; despite this journey being way too sparse for the story it had to tell (few writers other than Murakami can go without an editor), it is an emotional journey nonetheless, one you share with the protagonist, if only you allow yourself to empathise with his plight (or maybe his is similar to one that you already share)...
A book for the lonely and melancholy at heart.
In this case, something simultaneously a bit off-putting and agreeable is his choice of omniscient third person narrator (with occasional thoughts from our protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki intruding the narrative); the story is told in this matter of fact way that is at the same time clumsy and intimate, feeling somewhat raw, as if Murakami was summoning the bare essentials to move this story forward, the sentences written in this direct way, with a lot of telling and little showing, gives you the impression that you're reading a thinly-concealed, and lazy, autobiographical work; the events, for the most part, are basic, the telling rudimentary (silly similes abound), with some unnecessary repetition (like when he describes his characters acting surprised because they didn't know something, only for them to say the same thing with their own words right afterwards), the dialogues stilted in places (at least in my Brazilian Portuguese translation)... and yet, as always, it has its charms.
The plot, as you may already know from reading about it, concerns this guy, Tsukuru Tazaki, in his middle 30s, looking back to a time during high school when he was part of a group of friends, 5 in total, including himself, only for them to one day, in his second year of university, without apparent reason, categorically say that they don't want to ever talk to him again. This leads to a period of deep depression, when Tsukuru feels abandoned and lonely, and can only think of dying; then he kinda gets over it, or rather his wound heals but is still hurting, so, following the advise of his girlfriend, he goes on to find these former friends of his to get to know why they'd decided to part ways with him.
It takes some time for us to get there, though, and from the description of his teenage years till the present, there are a couple of subplots, like when Tsukuru makes a friend at university, and they spend a lot of time together, listening to music and talking, until this friend disappears quite randomly as well, and it adds to the protagonist's feelings of being empty, with nothing to offer other people, being only a temporary nest where people can land for a while until they take flight and move on with their lives (oh, and yes, the title of the book comes from the fact that all his teenage friends' names have a colour in them, with the boys having red and blue, and the girls black and white; only Tsukuru's surname is not "colourful").
As you can tell, it is a novel that's deeply melancholy. It is best read in small amounts, a few chapters at a time, letting the images and emotions evoked settle, and then pick it up again; images, yes, because even though the focus here is in the telling, occasionally Murakami paints some quite precise and moving scenes of the quotidian, and it is this ordinariness that's ultimately appealing, together with the bittersweet taste coming from things lost back in time, and the feeling that life may continue running along with nothing extraordinary, more colourful, or meaningful being possible to happen... our main character can only try and cling to hope that one day his time will come... Overall I was happy I stuck to it; despite this journey being way too sparse for the story it had to tell (few writers other than Murakami can go without an editor), it is an emotional journey nonetheless, one you share with the protagonist, if only you allow yourself to empathise with his plight (or maybe his is similar to one that you already share)...
A book for the lonely and melancholy at heart.