Killing Commendatore: A Novel

I am listening to the Audible version. It is excellent...This book is well-suited for Audible. The narration is excellent.

A beautiful journey of inner landscapes.

Not for me.

Exquisite writing: Author uses beautiful prose to paint pictures. His characters are very interesting. Plot is quite intriguing. However, the ending was a total blah, just like his 1Q84 novel. He builds up the intrigue with every page and then instead of a final climax, he's ending is a let down.

What I love about Murakami is his attention to the quieter moments of life. Cleaning up. Preparing a "simple dinner." Lighting a fire. Listening to music. Are these not the activities that make us who we are? The line by line writing is so beautiful and economic. I tell my friends that reading Haruki Murakami is like getting a brain massage. Few writers absorb me into the magic of the page like this writer does, and Killing Commendatore absolutely shimmers with magic. The portrait-painting narrator takes up residence in the old house of a famous Japanese style painter and discovers an unknown painting by the artist hidden in the attic. The painting is wrapped in paper. So curious is the narrator about this secret painting that he cannot resist unpackaging it. What the painting portrays is so powerful that it sends the narrator's whole world careering down a strange path. For some reason, the catalyst of the painting reminded me of Aomame's descent from the elevated highway at the beginning of Murakami's previous tome, 1Q84, an event that sets the strangeness of the book into motion.Both books are enormous accomplishments (and enormously good) so it's hard for me to say which I enjoyed more, but I would have say that I enjoyed Killing Commendatore slightly less that 1Q84. Occassionally, I found myself able to skim through pages without missing any major plot points. When the Commendatore from the painting emerges into reality as a two-foot "Idea" and begins to speak to the narrator, I often found his philosophical musings hard to follow and uninteresting. For me, those interactions with the Commendatore felt like filler and didn't really drive the plot. But that's about it from me in the criticism department. We've been gifted another big book from Murakami, and there is more than enough to like about it. The complexities of the narrator's previous marriage to a loveless woman and his heartbreaking relationship with his ailing sister were so engaging and beautifully explored. The narrator's troubled past parallel's that of the famous creator of Killing Commendatore who suffered greatly during a stint in Nazi-occupied Austria while also bearing witness to the suicide of a musically inclined brother who was forced into brutal military service.While the abuses suffered by the master artist appear to have inspired his greatest work, Killing Commendatore, the parallel struggles of the book's portrait-painting narrator also propel him toward the discovery of his own "artistic style," something for which he yearns greatly. The mysterious power of Killing Commendatore appears to have also helped in this regard, as well.Yet another essential Haruki Murakami addition.

Just because an author can write over 750 pages doesn’t mean they should... Remove every third word and please stop repeating the same drivel and phrases like the reader/listener doesn’t know what’s already happened in the past chapters. If I ever have to hear “the man with the white Subaru Forester” one more time I’ll be forced to write a bad review. Enjoyed the early works of Murakami, but this- I don’t have time for. Sorry not sorry. Missed the nail and kept on pounding on all the wrong points.

Nothing happens. The author spends way way way too much time on what kind of drinks certain characters are drinking and how Mr. White Hair makes the most elegant omelet and other useless annoying details about stuff that isn't important and does not add anything to the story. Plus, I don't like how the author makes up bull**** without any real explanation other than "something supernatural happened."

Killing Commendatore provides the Murakami fill to his fans but not much more.The story is surprisingly simple, made even more so with the over-explained climax. Murakami excels while creating another surreal world where nothing makes sense. Almost all the characters in the book start off well with interesting characterizations. One has to condemn the author's voyeuristic obsession with breasts, reflected in multiple characters thinking identically on a single aspect. Outside that, the book handles the sexual topics maturely, another new in a Murakami work but only after making that huge allowance. There are greater positives in the way Murakami explains various settings in rural Japan, pre-WW2 Vienna, various paintings, and the mysterious realms.The biggest setback is in the author's unusual hesitancy in taking any extraordinary risks. This is difficult to elaborate without giving some of the book's secret away. Suffice to say that the story's well built potential is almost completely unfulfilled as the book refuses to raise the tension levels.