Posted at 2014.08.24 Category : WSJ
WSJに村上春樹の新作の書評が載っていました。積読状態なので、時間ができたら読んでみたいと思います。wildly popular but not a populist, accessible yet boundlessly inventive（広く人気があるが人気取りに走っているわけでもなく、読みやすいが無限の発想力がある）という表現はうまいですね。
BOOKSHELF
Book Review: 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' by Haruki Murakami
His new tale of a searching train engineer is tidy, charming and ingenious.
By TOBY LICHTIG
Aug. 21, 2014 12:39 p.m. ET
Haruki Murakami is the closest thing we have to a global literary rock star who is also mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize. Mr. Murakami is as beloved in Europe or America as he is in Asia, wildly popular but not a populist, accessible yet boundlessly inventive. His writing, built on recurring motifs—dual realms, jazz records, questing males—and themes—solitude, guilt, the unbearable gulf between perception and reality—is both simple and entirely original.
WSJの書評ではカズオイシグロの村上春樹の作品の分類"the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" oneにならって、新作を後者に位置づけて好意的に評価していました。
Mr. Murakami's oeuvre can be broadly divided into two categories: What his friend Kazuo Ishiguro characterizes as "the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" one.
His previous book, "IQ84," fell squarely in the former camp. More than 1,000 pages long, published in two separate volumes, it was chaotic and something of a headache. Some reviewers, including this one, felt that form and focus had been sacrificed to freedom, that freedom had given way to sloppiness, and that the narrative's very unpredictability made it humdrum. Invention requires restraint; the sense that anything could happen stopped it from mattering what did. In this context, Mr. Murakami's trademark flourishes felt tired too.
It is thus something of a relief that his latest novel, which successfully inhabits the second category, balances creativity with subtlety and narrative propulsion. "The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" may have a baggy title, but it is, for the most part, tidy, charming and ingenious.
カズオイシグロがどのように書いていたのか気になったのでネット検索してみたところ、約10年前の記事でもう少し詳しく紹介しているものがありました。
Marathon man
Haruki Murakami ran a jazz club in Tokyo before he was first inspired to write. A reluctant celebrity since the publication of a best-selling novel 16 years ago, his work explores themes of love and loss. His relationship with his country has been complex but, after years in exile, he has returned to live in Japan
Richard Williams
The Guardian, Saturday 17 May 2003
"He has two distinct styles," says his friend and admirer Kazuo Ishiguro, the Booker-winning author of The Remains of the Day. "There's the bizarre, anarchic style and there's the very controlled, melancholy approach. Of the latter, South of the Border is beautifully judged, so fragile. It's almost like a piece of cocktail jazz you hear playing in a bar, a perfectly measured piece from beginning to end. On the other side is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the berserkly inventive side where he keeps hitting you with things and you're not quite sure what to do with them."
Ishiguro feels Murakami stands alone in Japanese literature. "I see much more of an affinity with some of the film-makers of his generation, such as Juzo Itami and Yoshimitsu Morita. There's the deadpan, surreal-verging-on-absurdist comic tone, a willingness to bend the edges of reality in stories set in an otherwise mundane setting, and the underlying melancholy observed in everyday middle-class rituals. And in his early work Murakami was saying, as they did, 'This is the Japan that we know and it has very little to do with any of those ideas you may have.'
"Yet," Ishiguro adds, "there's also a thematic obsession going back very far into the past, which is that falling-cherry-blossom thing, about the ephemerality of life. And he identifies it while his characters are still relatively young: they're people only just entering middle age but recognising that a time of beautiful energy has passed them by without them being quite aware of how it happened."
今回英訳されたのはPhilip Gabrielさんだそうで、翻訳について語られた部分を次のエントリーで取り上げます。
BOOKSHELF
Book Review: 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' by Haruki Murakami
His new tale of a searching train engineer is tidy, charming and ingenious.
By TOBY LICHTIG
Aug. 21, 2014 12:39 p.m. ET
Haruki Murakami is the closest thing we have to a global literary rock star who is also mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize. Mr. Murakami is as beloved in Europe or America as he is in Asia, wildly popular but not a populist, accessible yet boundlessly inventive. His writing, built on recurring motifs—dual realms, jazz records, questing males—and themes—solitude, guilt, the unbearable gulf between perception and reality—is both simple and entirely original.
WSJの書評ではカズオイシグロの村上春樹の作品の分類"the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" oneにならって、新作を後者に位置づけて好意的に評価していました。
Mr. Murakami's oeuvre can be broadly divided into two categories: What his friend Kazuo Ishiguro characterizes as "the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" one.
His previous book, "IQ84," fell squarely in the former camp. More than 1,000 pages long, published in two separate volumes, it was chaotic and something of a headache. Some reviewers, including this one, felt that form and focus had been sacrificed to freedom, that freedom had given way to sloppiness, and that the narrative's very unpredictability made it humdrum. Invention requires restraint; the sense that anything could happen stopped it from mattering what did. In this context, Mr. Murakami's trademark flourishes felt tired too.
It is thus something of a relief that his latest novel, which successfully inhabits the second category, balances creativity with subtlety and narrative propulsion. "The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" may have a baggy title, but it is, for the most part, tidy, charming and ingenious.
カズオイシグロがどのように書いていたのか気になったのでネット検索してみたところ、約10年前の記事でもう少し詳しく紹介しているものがありました。
Marathon man
Haruki Murakami ran a jazz club in Tokyo before he was first inspired to write. A reluctant celebrity since the publication of a best-selling novel 16 years ago, his work explores themes of love and loss. His relationship with his country has been complex but, after years in exile, he has returned to live in Japan
Richard Williams
The Guardian, Saturday 17 May 2003
"He has two distinct styles," says his friend and admirer Kazuo Ishiguro, the Booker-winning author of The Remains of the Day. "There's the bizarre, anarchic style and there's the very controlled, melancholy approach. Of the latter, South of the Border is beautifully judged, so fragile. It's almost like a piece of cocktail jazz you hear playing in a bar, a perfectly measured piece from beginning to end. On the other side is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the berserkly inventive side where he keeps hitting you with things and you're not quite sure what to do with them."
Ishiguro feels Murakami stands alone in Japanese literature. "I see much more of an affinity with some of the film-makers of his generation, such as Juzo Itami and Yoshimitsu Morita. There's the deadpan, surreal-verging-on-absurdist comic tone, a willingness to bend the edges of reality in stories set in an otherwise mundane setting, and the underlying melancholy observed in everyday middle-class rituals. And in his early work Murakami was saying, as they did, 'This is the Japan that we know and it has very little to do with any of those ideas you may have.'
"Yet," Ishiguro adds, "there's also a thematic obsession going back very far into the past, which is that falling-cherry-blossom thing, about the ephemerality of life. And he identifies it while his characters are still relatively young: they're people only just entering middle age but recognising that a time of beautiful energy has passed them by without them being quite aware of how it happened."
今回英訳されたのはPhilip Gabrielさんだそうで、翻訳について語られた部分を次のエントリーで取り上げます。
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