Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (December 2017)
Sputnik Sweetheart was among the books I reread this past December. As it turned out, the process of rereading revealed (editor’s note: surprise!) that this book was not one I recalled very well from my first reading experience.
It contained a lot of what I’ve described on TOA as The Murakami Hallmarks – a lonely male protagonist in his mid-thirties, some scenes involving one or more characters and their unusual amount of jazz knowledge, some out-of-this-world elements yet not enough to label the book as ‘fantasy’. But the book was a little different in key ways from his typical fare.
Sputnik Sweetheart wasn’t as long or meandering as some of Murakami’s other novels – around two hundred pages or so. He didn’t rely on the mysterious to hold the reader’s attention. It just made its point, often bluntly, and I found this style moved me more so than some of his other novels.
I don’t want to get bogged down by trying to avoid spoilers as I review. So, I’ve taken the ten notes I took down as I read and arranged them below. My least favorite idea is at the top and my favorite thought rounds out the list. It’s a lazy form of review, no doubt, but perhaps this blunt approach is appropriate for a book I found often drew its force from its most direct passages.
10) A basic agreement with reality is to accept things as they are and to leave them that way.
9) What’s nurtured slowly grows well.
8) At a certain point, people stop telling us all the fascinating and wonderful stories of childhood.
7) Getting old means knowing you are going nowhere yet keeping the wheels spinning.
6) Untold stories become the prisoners inside us.
5) One book is often insufficient to explain anything. If the logic ties it all up in a neat bow, look out for a trap.
4) The tool to keep what we know and what we don’t know in harmony is thinking.
3) Loss is hard because there are no feelings available to immediately take their place.
2) There are some doors within us that we are too weak to open. In these cases, all we can do is wait.
1) Those used to being strong or who always solve problems by becoming stronger have a difficult time relating to the weak, the sick, or less fortunate.
