Sputnik Sweetheart

Rating:
Summary: What can you say, save for he's done it again
Review: Fitting snuggly somewhere between the surreal-realism of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the rain stained melacholia of South of the Border, Sputnik Sweetheart is totally compelling, beautifully inexact, bafflingly comprehensible study in love and heartache.

From the first sentance you can hear the music that resides in the background of all of Murakami's fiction, the quiet lullaby of a world like ours but slightly skewed, like watching the world through a tear soaked whiskey tumbler. The story of K (One of many nods to Western Fiction through the book) and his doomed affair with a girl who may possibly be gay or may be not, it follows a conventional line, a simplistic plot until things begin to divert, digressing into the bizarre in the way that Murakami does so well. People disappear, people drink beer, people talk about man eating cats, people talk at night, see magical music bands on hills and get arrested for shoplifting.It is Murakami's genius that both the mundane, and the mythical, feel as real as the chair you sit on.

To describe wht happens is to take away the delicious pleasure of Sputnik, is to somehow denigrate the sheer delight of the prose and the characters. It's like falling in love with somebody you shouldn't have fallen in love with, only to find that you should have after all. Make sense? Possibly not, but neither do life and love, a fact Murakami is comfortable exploring and the reader is happy to discover.

As essential as sunscreen in summer and log fires in winter, Sputnik Sweeteheart will hold you till the last page and make you feel you've got loving arms around you for months. Wonderful

Rating:
Summary: familiar murakami, still brilliant
Review: murakami's everyman K takes us into his lands of loss, longing and unrequited love. there's something very special about this compact novel- murakami's narrative voice is somewhat more vunerable than in his previous works, and his tightly repressed dialogue offsets a few scenes of fierce eroticism.

once again our narrator is passive; his inaction serves as a ground and sounding board for his best friend sumire, a would-be writer who he is not-so-secretly in love with. when she disappears on a business trip to an unnamed greek island things become strange, in a way wholly familiar to murakami's readers.

this feels a lot like some of the short stories, particularly "sleep" and "tv people" where you wonder what is "real". the narrator spends a lot of time asking questions, mulling over events, but nothing is ever resolved. the enjoyment is in the blurring.

don't let the simplicity of the story put you off; there's a poetic beauty to the chilly isolation these characters find themselves in. a few days after finishing this, something in it snuck up on me and i was overwhelmed by the most profound feeling of sadness.

Rating:
Summary: How love changes everything
Review: This is the second novel I have read by Haruki Murakami, and Sputnik Sweetheart has many of the key ingredients of his other works. The narrator is a benign twenty-something male. The girl he is sweet on disappears without a trace. An enigmatic older woman, with a bizarre past, helps him look for her. Greek islands, the idea of escaping into wells and several cat stories make an appearance.
But what made this book different was the real feelings of the characters. They were raw, vunerable and exposed. The three main characters made up a loose love triangle. They were each in love, concerned and anxious about it. Wondering if they should make a move. Confused about their identities and the meaning of life. Living with the thought "if only........"
This book stirred up a lot of thought in me. The discussion of themes like identity, happiness, and purpose in life was really moving. If this is your first Murakami book, you will love it. For those who are familiar with his work, you may have to simply ignore the fact that Murakami uses a character template to display his brilliant themes.

Rating:
Summary: Life is just a dream, sweetheart
Review: "Sputnik Sweetheart" was my first Murakami book, and I am fascinated. There will be more Murakami in my future.

The book reads like the few moments of unreality before settling into sleep. Like something from the comic book "The Sandman," this is a story of dreams, moons, love and cats.

With the title "Sputnik Sweetheart," I was expecting some sort of hard-metal story, where love shatters on technology or maybe something about the fast pace of modern life in Japan. I certainly wasn't expecting this gentle, silent love short story, told to the sound of Brahms and with the flavor of French wines.

Of course, the style of writing and the ideas are the forefront of the novel, with the actual plot taking a supporting role. The characters are wholly unrealized, mere glimpses of caricatures. They love, they live and they do so poetically. They have ideas, and those ideas are worked out in the medium of the written word. Minimalist seems to be thrown around, and maybe that is so, but I don't see it. The words flow, and hold together well. The plot is fleeting, an altogether unresolved, the the half-memory of a dream that made sense at the time, but seems strange in the re-telling.

An excellent book, one best read right before bedtime.

Rating:
Summary: Boy meets girl meets woman, then cue X-Files theme
Review: K (boy) is in love with Sumire (girl) who is in love with Miu (woman). Sumire tells K, always patiently loyal, about Miu then flies off to Europe on a business trip with Miu; Miu then calls K because "something" has happened to Sumire (cue X-Files theme here). When we find out a little of what happened and hints as to why, the resolutions appear melodramatic, trite, and contrived all at once. Disappointing and unsatisfying.

Leaving questions unresolved can be a fine way to end a drama. The classic "Tale of Genji", the movies "Crossing Delancy" and "The Truman Show" all leave us wondering how the story ends but they are nevertheless fully satisfying works. Life is like that. It's open ended; it doesn't follow the Aristotelian rules of composition; it doesn't have a plot. However, leaving a work >>unresolved<< is not the same thing as leaving the plot open. The latter is a device, the former is laziness. It's like painting half a canvas or like a musician leaving halfway through a performance.

This would be a one star novel except for a few scenes and characters. For instance, soon after returning from Greece, K is called by his married girlfriend because her eight year old son was caught shoplifting and the security guard wants to talk to the boy's teacher. In another scene, Murakami breaks a stereotype by having Sumire's stepmother support her decision of quitting college when the father strongly opposed it.

While these scenes aren't enough to save the novel, they do show that Murakami can economically create lifelike characters. Better to read his "Underground : The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche" where he interviews victims of the 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway. You'll learn more about life in general and the Japanese in particular, and be less subjected to mediocre flights of fancy.


Rating:
Summary: eccentric romance involved in a gloomy atmosphere
Review: This is my 2nd book of Murakami's novels, this time around he decides to drive the story in a more romantic yet undescribable type of sadness which establishes a characters vivid but gloomy understanding of his feelings for his friend and her utterly unstable manner of thinking and not thinking, with the comprehensive tone of dreaming. Comparison to his other novels, Murakami still maintains his original composure of narrarating a story with deep and inspiring scenarios.

I truly enjoyed this story and recommend it to people that have a taste in unique story lines such as this, though it fairly does require a lot of deep knowledge in order to divulge the perspective of the author's grasp.

Rating:
Summary: quote:
Review: "'Don't you just love it?' she said.'Every day you stand on top of a mountain, make a 360-degree sweep...And that's it. You're done for the day. The rest of the time you can read, write, whatever you want... That's the life! Compared with that, studying literature in college is like chomping down on the bitter end of a cucumber.' 'OK,'I said,'but someday you'll have to come down off the mountain.' As usual, my practical, humdrum opinions didn't faze her."
"'Sexual desire's not something you understand,'I said, giving my usual middle-of-the-road opinion. 'It's just there.' She scrutinized me for a while, like I was some machine run by a heretofore unheard-of-power source. Losing interest, she stared up at the ceiling, and the conversation petered out. No use talking to him about that, she must have decided."

I really like Murakami for his description of the chemistry between people; how they seem not to understand each other but on a deeper level they are closely linked. What a nice counterposition to everyday-life, where we so often believe to understand but in reality we are lightyears away from each other. He describes honest and deep feelings which otherwise seem impossible in this cold world.
It's not his best book (Wind-Up-bird-chronicle is the one), but still it's better by far than 99% of what is being produced by all the rest these days.
BTW:the book-cover of the vintage-edition is horribly stupid... but it's the cheapest...

Rating:
Summary: Murakami Style but Missing an Ending
Review: I have read almost all of Murakami's work and truly enjoyed it. The twists and turns of his cutting edge plots are unusually engaging and thought provoking. I was disappointed with Sputnik Sweetheart simply because the ending lacked the spice and creativity of many of his other works.

Rating:
Summary: ?You?re a lot weirder than you look.?
Review: Don't get me wrong - I love Haruki Murakami. I have noticed, however, in reading his works, that the style and tone and themes are often too much alike, and this grows slightly tiresome after a while. How many books can a person write about people disappearing without a trace? In short, the narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart, a schoolteacher, is in love with a strange girl called Sumire who only desire to be a writer. Sumire realizes early on that she has fallen in love with a sophisticated older businesswoman, Miu. Miu gives Sumire a job, and that is where the changes and complications ensue.

Interesting ideas in this book include Murakami's brief exploration of the idea of being "attentive". When the main character/narrator had an affair with an older woman earlier in his life, he was "instructed" in how to go about being with a woman when the woman used the analogy of being a good driver versus an attentive driver. The woman insists that being a good driver does not matter as long as the driver is "attentive" and alert. The narrator began to see the connection to his sexual being... being alert and attentive to the things around him. "Not prejudging things, listening to what's going on, keeping your ears, heart and mind open."

Another interesting idea is the idea of your existence being split into two parts. One of the main characters, Miu, felt herself split in half one night... one side had all her sexual desire, her youth. The part the character in the book was left with was a woman with no sexual desire, who held everyone at arm's length and whose hair had turned white overnight. The narrator explores the idea of what is on "the other side"... can people cross over between these two existences?

Finally, Murakami writes, "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, 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 the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often, adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."

I have given these ideas a great deal of thought. No matter the impression we have left nor how intense the experiences we shared with someone, when circumstances change, you lives are separate and you go on like nothing has happened. This is a theme that re-emerges in life multiple times.

Rating:
Summary: Murakami's "Sputnik Sweetheart"
Review: Haruki Murakami's "Sputnik Sweetheart" (2001) is a novel with themes of rejection, frustration, and lack of self-knowledge. There are three primary characters, a nameless young man who is the narrator, Sumire, a young woman who aspires to be a writer, much taken with Kerouac and the beats, and Miu, an apparently successful and polished career woman in her late 30's. The novel involves a romantic triangle between these three characters. The narrator is in love with Sumire, but Sumire is romantically uninterested in him or in any man. Sumire instead finds herself deeply attracted to Miu, whom she meets at a party. The plot of the novel consists of the working out of the triangle between Sumire, Miu, and the narrator.

The slender,spare story of this novel is greatly enhanced by the many ways in which Murakami uses musical themes. Sumire was named after a song by Mozart with a text by Goethe which her mother heard on a recording by Elizabeth Scwartzkopf and Walter Giesking. This song, I found, is Mozart's "Das Veilichen", K. 475 (the violet) the only song Mozart set to a Goethe poem. It tells the story of a beautiful young woman who does some callous things. I think the song is a symbol (another key concept in this novel) of the story as a whole. It is good to read a book that can make creative and appropriate references to Mozart and music -- not to speak of Charles Peirce's philosophy of signs and symbols.

Miu aspired to be a concert pianist before an event occured which changed her life. There are outstanding discussions in this book of music and of the joy of playing the piano. The love of music is tied closely in this book to the welcoming and acceptance of one's human sexuality.

There is a spiritual theme I find implicit throughout this book which might have been more fully developed. The book led me to think about the nature of human desire, about the relationship between sexuality and intimacy, and about frustration and unhappiness resulting from the lack of self-knowledge. The characters in this book are all lonely and all exhibit deep sexual frustration. The exploration of these issues suggests a consideration of the nature of desire, sexuality, change, and self-awareness that are profoundly explored in many religous traditions.

I didn't find the characters in this book fully bore the weight Murakami put upon them. The male narrator for me was the only appealing character in the book. Even here, I had trouble getting involved with a young man who remains deeply obsessed with a woman who rejects him physically in favor of a woman. Miu left me cold, and I didn't like Sumire. The book reads quickly and well, and is highly evocative in its spare prose. The book stayed me and stimulated by thought and reflection long after I had finished it.