1001 Group Read - April, 2013: 1Q84

Here you go, folks! I'm going to sit this one out and just enjoy reading the comments. I have too many other books piling up on me to start a brand new one from the list. Enjoy and have fun!

I did not vote for this brick! But that's exactly what these reads are good for: to make me read items from the list that I would otherwise avoid. So my copy was waiting for me when I arrived home yesterday and I will dig in as soon as I finish Dracula.

Have 500 pages of The Clash of the Kings to go and then I will start this one.

I'll start after finishing The Sea, The Sea. So far I liked all Murakamis I read, but somehow I am not really looking forward to this one. On the other hand it has been sitting on my shelf long enough. And maybe (hopefully) I'm in for a pleasant surprise?

Should anyone participate in the TIOLI in the 75group, I entered the book into challenge #1.

I'm also planning on reading along, but I'm currently in the midst of a (non-list) 1,100 page book, which I have to finish first. I might have taken on a few too many long ones this month.

I should be starting this one in a couple of days. Its on my night stand just waiting for me.

Well, I have begun the book(s) about two weeks ago and I can't stop reading. I am already in the end of book 2. The magic of Murakami kind of creeps slowly into the story. But I will wait for others to commentate cause I don't know how far you have read. All I can say is that I REALLY like it.

#7, I read it in my own last month and felt the same! I couldn't put it down and flew through the first two books. The third slowed down a bit and seemed to become a little less cohesive. I'm curious to see what you think about book 3.

I'll be starting later on today (if I can find my kindle anywhere!) I need something gripping as I've not really been that into my reading lately

I've read about 100 pages. Hard to know how to "discuss" this one without giving things away. It's very enjoyable and well crafted, better than After the Quake which is the only other Murakami I have read. So far, however, I can't see exactly why it's a 1001 book or what the bigger meaning is. I assume that the title refers to Orwell (rather than to Intelligence Quotient) but that is not helping me make sense of it. I'll see what I think after another 100 pages or so....

#10, I found an interesting take on the title recently. It is definitely a reference, at least in part, to Orwell, and "Big Brother" occasionally comes up in the narrative. However, I think the "Q" is also a pun that is lost in translation. The word for 9 in Japanese is "kyuu," pronounced just like the letter, which makes Aomame's differentiation between 1984 and 1Q84 more subtle than in English translation.

I had just enough of an intro to Japanese language several years ago to also remember the existence of sentence-ending particles - essentially a suffix that indicates whether the sentence is a question, or an exclamation, or whatever. So the repetition of Fuka-Eri's tendency to ask questions "without question marks" would really be a grammatical oddity, and not just a matter of tone or inflection as in English.

This is one book I really wished I could've read in its original language. Are there any Japanese speakers who have read the book? I'd be interested to know what other ways Murakami plays with grammar that we miss in the translation.

As expected, this book has taken full hold of me from the moment I started it on Saturday. I finished vol 1 this morning. Since then I read another 60 pages.
So far I love it, there hasn't been a single boring chapter, but there's still a long way to go, and I hope that with such a build-up, Murakami won't leave me hanging "in the nowhere" after 1,200 pages.

I love how Murakami lets the reader guess ahead and then grants those little moments of success when something proves right, although it's of course impossible to come to a full solution.

And I realize now how much of 1984 I have already forgotten.

Starting on the book tomorrow. Thanks for the tips on the book title - I had always read it as IQ rather than 1Q. Good sign that everyone is enjoying it - hope it lasts.

Just want to say a thank you to sabrinahughes for some very enlightening comments.

I'm about 100 pages in... still not sure what to make of it, though I've found it interesting so far. I would probably enjoy this book more if I hadn't read Kafka on the Shore previously... I kind of feel like I'm bracing for the whole thing to run off the rails.

#11, I became curious about the original Japanese when I got to the bit where Aomame names her new reality 1Q84 and says "Q is for 'question mark,'" because Japanese typically just uses the particles rather than question marks. I found a fascinating blog, http://howtojaponese.com/2011/11/04/1q84-english-translation-liveblog/, that live blogs the author's reading of the book in English and compares it to the Japanese. The relevant part about my question is below. As you can see, Murakami basically switched into English for the words "question mark" in the original, so 1Q84 is a cross-linguistic pun from the get-go. I wonder how jarring that must be for Japanese readers who don't speak English.

From the blog:

00:12 Awesome translation of the section in Chapter 9 where Aomame names the alternate universe. My translation two years ago was: “1Q84 – that’s what I’ll call this new world, decided Aomame. Q is the Q from ‘question mark.’ That which creates a question.”

The original Japanese is 1Q84—私はこの新しい世界をそのように呼ぶことにしよう、青豆はそう決めた。Qはquestion markのQだ。疑問を背負ったもの。

And Rubin’s great version is: “1Q84–that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a question.”

I'm about 160 pages into the book now - just at the paragraph quoted in #15 above. As everyone else has stated this book doesn't seem as long as it looks - flying through the pages and enjoying it so far. Like #14 I found Kafka on the Shore a bit too wierd and I'm preferring 1Q84. Don't think I've ever seen a book title discussed in so much detail before - keep it coming.

#16 - Just wait, it'll get more weird. I won't say more...

What I like with Murakami is that if you get an early hint of something, one cannot be sure that what you suspect to happen really will happen. The story can turn any way, go straight on or change direction to something else. It may be ordinary or it may be magic, but nothing really surprises you. That is why I loved Kafka On the Shore.

Wow, quaintlittlehead, what a great find!

Well, I'm through! How are you guys doing?

Finished today. Feeling a little sad and lost now that 1Q84 has expelled me and had to compensate by cooking Japanese food in Murakami style and drinking a glass of chilled white wine. Even did some stretching exercises.

I'm about 1/4 through and have finally gotten a pretty clear sense of what all the plot threads are and how they interconnect. Enjoying this a lot. I also appreciate the comments above on the language and original Japanese; I often feel, even in reading this clearly very good translation, that I'm really missing something without knowing the original.

#21: I had to listen to Janacek's Sinfonietta several times.

The book is a cat town.

Just started, my copy arrived on Friday. Good so far, I haven't read a Murakami in a while, so very happy to get stuck in.

Finished this last night, and enjoyed it a lot but it didn't really dazzle me.

It was a definite page turner and an enjoyable read, but I've got to admit it fell a bit flat for me by the end. I had a shrug of the shoulders moment when I finished it.

My main criticism (and this may well just be a personal thing) was that I thought that I could feel the author's presence, and particularly his ego. It's hard to explain that feeling, but it has something to do with the "perfectly flawed" characters which felt almost like the author was living out a fantasy. In that sense it reminded me of The Millennium Trilogy and The Da Vinci Code by Robert Langdon...,sorry, I mean Dan Brown. Like Brown's works, although to a lesser extent, 1Q84 also had a few of those tenuous inclusions of little facts that seem to scream out "look at how much stuff I know" but feel crow barred into the plot (Occam's Razor springs to mind.)

To put it another way, I was always very aware that I was reading a novel rather than being transported into the story.

That all sounds a bit harsh now I read it back, so I feel like I should re-iterate that I did very much enjoy the book and the pages rattled by, but I think I was just expecting a bit more (despite suggestions by others that this is not Murakami's best)

p.s. great info on the translation quirks! I had a feeling that there was something lost in the translation of the title which made the sections that discussed "1Q84" a bit clunky to read!

I'm about halfway through and have just finished the part that muses, "As a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people. It had fascinated Tengo and Komatsu and Professor Ebisuno and an amazing number of readers. What more did it have to do?" I couldn't help but feel a bit like you there, wondering to what extent Murakami was talking about this book itself, and whether I'll feel there's more to it all in the end, although I am also enjoying it immensely.

Good conversation.

About a year ago my group (Author Theme Reads) discussed this book as well. I remember writing out all the Orwell references that showed up in the book and also mentioned the How to Japanese blog (a blog I've followed for a long time).

Perhaps you guys might get some interesting info out of that discussion as well?

http://www.librarything.com/topic/128390

I'm only 120 pages in but enjoying it - although Aomame's desire for balding men put me off of her a bit, my problrm seems to be finding tome to read :(

Finished. I quite enjoyed this. It is very readable and it took me less time to read this than many books half this size. Marukami drip-feeds you enough new information to keep you interested in what's going to happen next. However the pace never gets beyond this drip-feed and there seemed to be a lot of repetition, particularly in the third book. There was a lack of tension and the conclusion almost seemed inevitable. However I quite enjoyed the slow calm feel of the story. 3.5/5

#30, I read on another discussion thread (linked above) that Book III was published quite a bit later and hence separately from the first two. Probably that's why it now seems repetitive. I'm still working my way through Book II and quite enjoying it.

Thanks for the link to the other discussion thread!

I finished the book on Sunday - I had planned to read until the end of Volume II, but just couldn't bring myself to putting it down again!
The third volume is rather different, I felt it was more about clarifying some of the ideas of the book, (then seemingly muddying the waters again nearer the end!). While I could see where the book was going, I wanted to read on to see how we'd get there and what it would be like.

I wouldn't have got into the book so much if I hadn't have liked the characters so much, there was a lot to them.

I've still not finished this, hopefully I will be able to spend some time reading in the next week or two and get it done, I haven't even finished the first book yet

I will finish it later today. After a promising start it gets more and more annoying as you go along. I gather that vol. 3 was published well after the others and I feel as if he was responding to readers' demands that he clarify this and that, so that it gets excessively clear about the things he wanted to be clear while remaining completely silent on other ambiguities.

I completed this the other day and although, I was terrified at the length of the tome, it read very fast. I was afraid that after being captured by the story I would be left hanging (so many books these days just stop with no resolution). I wasn't particularly enamored of the ending but it did have an ending at least. Loved the read though!