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Loading... Sputnik Sweetheart (1999)by Haruki Murakami
 KristySP | Apr 21, 2013 |  Apparently a great writer. I was all gripped and thrilled and happy reading Sputnik Sweetheart until the end happened and it was so - what? whatever! - I was made all grumpy and sad. The end it makes no sense, but the rest of the book was lovely. (  ) veracite | Apr 5, 2013 | Probabilmente il libro di Murakami che mi �� piaciuto di meno: nonostante ci�� ho comunque apprezzato leggere un altro libro di questo autore ( ) david-e | Apr 1, 2013 | I read this for the first time before 1Q84 was released and found it very easily going to the top of the list for favorite Murakami novels. The theme of other selves is very prominent as is other worlds but this is, to my knowledge, the only time Murakami has really explored the erotic love of one woman for another. His books tend to focus on heterosexuals so I found this very interesting. This is a shorter novel and the ending is somewhat open and enigmatic....I also really love the sense of space and loneliness. Favorite Quotes pg. 16 "A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side." pg. 21 "Miu hardly ever touched novels. I never can get it out of my mind that it's all made up, she explained, so I just can't feel any empathy for the characters." pg. 27 "The time of day when the roosters haven't even started crowing. When this pitiful moon is hanging there in the corner of the eastern sky like a used up kidney." pg. 64 "Her voice was like a line from an old black and white Jean Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness." pg. 67 "There's a great line by Groucho Marx, 'She's so in love with me she doesn't know anything. That's why she's in love with me.'" pg. 98 "Do you know what 'Sputnik' means in Russian? 'Traveling Companion.' I looked it up in a dictionary not long ago. Kind of a strange coincidence if you think about it. I wonder why the Russians gave their satellite that strange name. It's just a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the earth'" pg. 117 "Ant it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in he end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment, In the next instant we;d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing." pg. 133 "Consigning my fate to the clouds." pg. 136 "I conceive a dream, a sightless fetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and , up till now at least, never reach a proper conclusion." pg. 143 "Every story has a time to be told, I convinced her. Otherwise, you'll forever be a prisoner to the secret inside you." pg. 193 "You know what I'd really like to do the most right now? Climb up to the top of some high place like the pyramids. The highest place I can find. Where you can see forever. Stand on the very top, look all around the world, see all the scenery, and see with my own eyes what's been lost from the world. I don't know...Maybe I really don't want to see that. Maybe I don't want to see anything anymore." pg. 207 "Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly lost. Or at least there exists a place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover-drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each-what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting. (  ) kirstiecat | Mar 31, 2013 | have ebook version velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 |
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375726055, Paperback)Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover. Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake (retrieved from Amazon Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:17:23 -0400) The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments--until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor, now a teacher. In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan--and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved.… (more) |
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I thought this one was extra melancholy. I liked it alright, but I didn't like the main character at all. He gave me the creeps. Maybe you were supposed to dislike him, but I'm not entirely sure....
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