A very typical of Murakami’s, another story with a blend of real and imaginary world…with open loose ends…with young characters, complex minds… which suddenly ends into nowhere but each’s own perspective…
Sometimes I feel so – I don’t know – lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.
“Like a little lost Sputnik?”
I guess so. . .
With loneliness as the basic theme of the book, the writer weaves his signature style story…simple writing with catchy metaphors will drag you till the end and make you finish the book, but will leave you with not much new to already in other Murakami stories…
The writer works around these fundamental feelings like love, loneliness, death etc but this thought that ‘we forget everything over our daily chores’ is what he most strongly critiques..
The below lines are from Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka on the shore… the resemblance is how I remember Murakami…
“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 people 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 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.”
– Sputnik Sweetheart
“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds.”
― Kafka on the Shore
Kafka on the shore, Norwegian Wood or Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the world…any of these would be much better ones to start Haruki Murakami and Sputnik Sweetheart would be a one time read for Murakami lovers…
Disha 