Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel / Tr. [from Japanese] by Alfred Birnbaum. - Books (Murakami, Hardcover)

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Customer Reviews of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel / Tr. [from Japanese] by Alfred Birnbaum.

Jonathan Hawes

1st January 2009

hard boiled excellence

What a superb novel- This book lives on in your mind, it has a life outside the pages. Great characters who seem to have so much more to offer than their descriptions.. He is a very talented individual..

John Lynham
Sheffield, UK
2nd September 2008

Wry humour in a dying fall
This early novel stands halfway between the silliness of A Wild Sheep Chase and the heart-gripping humanity of Norwegian Wood. From the "young, beautiful, fat woman", like a Pink Rabbit leading the narrator through a slimy Underworld beneath a satirically alternative Tokyo to a revelation of his true self, to the shy librarian in the pre-industrial enclosure of the Town who yearns to recover her mind, Murakami shows his genius for creating individualised, sympathetic and often strong-minded female characters.
The narrator is classic Murakami, an averagely sensual man who with the same beautiful woman is sometimes impotent and sometimes manages it three times in a row, who never really understands what's going on around him, or what he's meant to be doing:
"'I wouldn't know,' seems to be a pet expression with you," she observed
"Maybe so."
"And 'maybe so' is another."
I didn't know what to say.
The Wonderland chapters can get a little tiresome, with their varieties of colloquial and endless name-checking of Western cultural icons, not to mention the wacky science of the ancient Professor. It's the present tense End of the World sections, with their restrained, traditional narrative style, and the soul-less, threatening atmosphere they build up, that in the end leave a stronger, more disturbing impression.
Endlessly inventive, the book shows a master in the making, not perfectly formed, as yet, but flexing extraordinary muscles.

Hannah Jay
England
22nd June 2008

Amazing
This is the first Murakami book I've read and I felt compelled to review it afterwards, as it thoroughly engrossed and compelled me. This book is full of surreal happenings and powerful imagery. The story is such a clever idea and is unlike anything I've ever read before. You get drawn into a story which reads like a thriller at times, and at others times is a ethereal mystery. It is a book about the power of the subconscious mind and the landscape of the mind. I personally would recommend it to anybody!

ea_solinas
MD USA
25th March 2008

Unicorns at the end of the world
Imagine if Raymond Chandler had collaborated with David Lynch, maybe with Philip K. Dick throwing in a few cents every now and then.

That gives you some idea of what Haruki Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" is like. Split into two different, barely-intertwined narratives, Murakami's quirkily bittersweet novel is a bizarre sci-fi mystery and an exploration of the human mind's limits... right to the world's end. It's a brilliant, bittersweetly intricate novel, and one of Murakami's best.

The protagonist is just doing his job -- he's a "shuffler," with a chip in his brain -- when he visits an eccentric scientist and his precocious granddaughter. But then he gets sent an animal skull, which appears to be a unicorn's. And even weirder, corporate agents are invading his home and tearing it apart.

At the same time -- in alternating chapters -- we are told the story of a man who arrives at a walled city surrounded by unicorns, at the End of the World. He becomes the Dreamreader at the library, finding memories hidden in skulls. But he soon discovers that this city is a prison of sorts -- and that after surrendering his shadow, he faces losing his soul.

Meanwhile, the original narrator -- who may also be the second -- is called in by the granddaughter when her grandfather disappears. Turns out the whole world may be about to end. The two brave an underground cavern riddled with voracious, monstrous INKlings, only for the narrator to discover that the greatest danger is in his own mind -- and it offer a terrifying, glorious possibility to him.

Not many serious authors could write about computer chips, unicorns, sci-fi corporations, the intricacies of brain "circuitry," and sewers full of nasty Japanese hobgoblins who like rotting meat. All in the same book, and without making you shake your head and groan "Aw, come on!".

But amazingly, that is not what makes "Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End of the World" a work of genius. Rather it's that "Hard Boiled Wonderland" and "The End of the World" are two separate books -- one is written in angular, wry prose in a grimy urban landscape, with moments of horror woven in. And one is written in flowing, soft, almost dreamlike prose in a pale, almost idyllic world that may or may not be real.

In both stories, Murakami weaves intricate, detailed webs of words, evoking subterranean chases from flesh-eating kappas and mildly comic encounters with thugs, as well as the poignant emptiness of the End of the World city. And he explores the whole concept of the mind being infinite, and that time does not exist in our dreams.

As both plots wind on, Murakami intricately twines them together. Hints, phrases, a shared lover, and the whole question of unicorns -- these tie together the two alternating plots, first in tiny ways. As the final quarter of the book unfolds, Murakami paints a complex vision of just what is going on for our unlikely heroes -- and reveals just where the End of the World is.

And it's even harder to tell at first if there is are two narrators, or if one of them is dreamed, in another time, or on another planet. The Shuffler and Dreamreader seem like very different men, but similarities start to pop up between them -- such as their dual attractions to pretty young librarians -- but Murakami successfully keeps you guessing until he reveals what the Shuffler and Dreamreader truly are.

"Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" is a masterpiece of modern fiction -- a sci-fi mystery that looks to the horizon of the human mind, written as two intertwined stories. Definitely outstanding.

Iivex Elucid
UK
25th February 2008

Forced
Having read, and enjoyed The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Murakami, I was expecting something equally as good from this book, but I was rather disappointed.

Simply put, the book feels forced and pretentious. Not necessarily the storyline, but the flow of ideas. It feels as if Murakami has found an idea he wants to put across, then works backwards, constructing a story that leads to this final idea of accepting the end of the world. However, this story is like a cut-and-paste. Characters come in, concepts are thought up, and places made just to channel the character towards the final end. It's almost as if most of the pieces of the story have been put in place just because the writer CAN put them in. The pages are cluttered with unnecessary detours, leeches, climbing ladders and "information wars".

All this detracted from the book. Much like the unnecessary detour in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle where Manchuria is mentioned. That felt like it was put in just to make the book controversial in Japan. With Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it feels like the whole book was an unnecessary detour from the meaning, which was itself clearly evident at the end of the book, but came about with such lack of subtlety that any impact was lost.

In this book Murakami is about as subtle as a hammer. It's almost painful to read the way he tries to force the two worlds to come into some sort of contact with one another (i.e. through skulls) throughout the book. It's a shame really because I had high hopes for this book, but it may have tarnished my view of Murakami.

This book needs a May Kasahara.