/lit/ - Literature

>>20629020
yeah, murakami is an overrated pervert. His ESG score is pretty high, that's probably why they continue publishing him.

>>20629020
I’ve read most of murakami’s works and basically it’s a stylistic choice. It’s supposed to feel like a fever dream so it in a sense reads like one.

It’s 1) not his strongest writing, 2) from a time in his career when he was intentionally writing very “plain” prose on purpose, 3) translated by one of the plainest murakami translators, 4) If I recall it’s also 3rd person, and he writes a very detached 3rd.

For contrast try reading anything translated by the first guy... Alfred I think.

Anyhow - many factors at play.

>>20629056
>>20629046
What do you reckon is his best work? I've only read "Norwegian Wood" and "South of the border".

>>20629056
>he was intentionally writing very “plain” prose on purpose
y though

>>20629056
Alfred Birnbaum is a lousy translator imo. What he did with 'Wild Sheep Chase' was nothing short of vandalism. Jay Rubin is the best - shame he only did WUBC.

>>20629145
A Wild sheep chase is his best due to the strange plot and characters. Although his best written character is the movie star in dance dance dance.

>>20629177
Bruh, AWSC is filled with the hallmarks of a lazy/incompetent writer. Two very long, meandering info dumps and those two letters from 'the rat', the first letter of which was so totally pointless to the story's trajectory.

>>20629174
The translator of Wonderland just left out the scene where the protagonist drops his pants and shows the girl his penis. He left out other stuff as well. I was lucky reading it in German.

>>20629190
I read Murakami in German and its fucking atrocious so I switched to English and it was a breath of fresh air. Binbaum and Rubin actually work and hang out with Murakami in Japan so you know it's going to be the best of all translations. But yeah, the German was super clunky and awkward imo.

>>20629190
I've read one translation of David Copperfield where the translator just decided to remove a sentence which disparaged jews. Completely erased it from the original text. Can't fucking stand this kind of shit. Who the fuck do some translators think they are? They're just tools to transport the text into a different language, they don't fucking get to change it based on their preferences.

>>20629145
definitively he doesn't really have one, largely because his work can be divided into two categories:
>stories with supernatural elements
>stories without supernatural elements
in the case of the former, its a tie between kafka OR wind up bird chronicles.
Kafka is the easier and shorter read (i however think chronicle has some better stand out chapters).
For non-supernatural, norwegian wood (though personally i enjoyed colourless tsukuru most, but even that has one supernatural chapter).

>>20629185
Reading hear the wind sing then pinball and finally going into AWSC was a great experience. Seeing someone slowly get better finding their style while the story continues is cool. Sure AWSC is one of his early works so yeah it would be shit in some ways but considering he recycles half his ideas in his later works I still think it holds some merit over the others. I feel like it’s his first book where he finds his postmodern style.

is 1Q84 good?

>>20629256
I liked it but there are often whole sentences and even paragraphs repeated almost verbatim, as if he published the manuscript without editing it first. Seemed really sloppy.

>>20629256
The novel is like 600 pages of building up a climax. And when the climax finally happened at the end, it fell pretty flat for me, and then the novel immediately ends.

>>20629020
The author was a former bartender who just decided to write books one day. He's good pop fiction but because he's Japanese he gets fetishized in the west.

Read mishima.

>>20629349
>The author was a former bartender who just decided to write books one day.

Unironically based. There's no pretension to it, unlike this board that larps about writing but doesn't do a damn thing irl.

>>20629145
I think it stems from his admiration for minimalists like Carver. He obliquely references this transition in his style if you comb through his interviews.

>>20629349
>a former bartender
And the Queen herself was just a debate goddess before becoming the voice of her generation. What's your point?