from the Seminary Coop Page at: http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0375411690 (Link no longer valid).
Sputnik transforms itself when the various storylines come apart to reveal each other in a suspenseful, hypnotic, Russian-doll kind of way. There are echoes of John Fowles's The Magus as the reasonable, likeable young narrator finds himself in a beautiful yet sinister place, wading deeper into mysterious waters, each new set of circumstances stranger and more seductive than the last. Some of the dark, mesmerising plot teases of Paul Auster or Ian McEwan also spring to mind. But, though that would be incentive enough, it's not why you read on.
His prose seems at first glance attractively lively, readable - comic, even. There are endless crunchy descriptions, perkily visceral phrases and definitions. The characters are impeccably realised; recognisable, modern, real. Attempting to explain Sumire's androgynous idiosyncrasies, K says he "doubts she even knew bras come in different sizes."
....But go in further, relax and slide beneath that prose, and the result is like peeking over the edge of a precipice: dizzying and rather frightening. This is, I think, a novel about loneliness and isolation; about the painfully fragmentary nature of our effect upon one another - the terrifying thought that maybe not even real, human love forges connections, that space, time and inexplicable events will always snake their way between ourselves and others.
Though Murakami seems to invite us to join him in a straightforward mystery adventure, he in fact does something much more upsetting. He frees us from his narrative in much the same way that his characters finally shake loose of one another - he sends us spinning, orbiting wildly. In doing so, he surely accomplishes the best, most unnerving job of fiction: to force you to look hard at the parts of yourself you never even suspected were there. (italics mine)
The book is narrated by Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who takes a teaching job on a Greek island only to be pulled into a complicated game of deception by the resident eccentric millionaire named Conchis (whose name seems to be a pun on conscious) who specializes in hypnotism and psychological manipulation, and the plot occasioned by his trickery is so convoluted it makes Lost seem like one of Aesop's Fables. Is the mysterious woman who comes to dinner the ghost of Conchis' dead lover? Or a schizophrenic patient? Or an actress held against her will? And was that a satyr chasing a nymph through Conchis' backyard?...Fowles' narrator is a man of no special talent or distinction, who nonetheless feels life owes him more than it has offered. He's blessed with an education, a middle-class life and even a love interest with whom he sleeps late and goes to French movies. And yet he finds himself wondering: Is this it? As he says, with typical myopia, "The pattern of destiny seemed pretty clear: down and down, and down."Getting mixed up with Conchis offers his life a shape and proves that he is special. For a while anyway, he believes that his old life — his real life in the real world, with its small victories and disappointments — was just a dull smear of dust on the outside of the magical life he was supposed to live. (From NPR, http://www.npr.org/2012/08/27/150727161/the-magus-a-thrilling-chilling-guilty-pleasure)
NEW YORK TIMES:
And as the NYT times says, The Magus is a stunner, magnificent in ambition, supple and gorgeous in execution. It fits no neat category; it is at once a pyrotechnical extravaganza, a wild, hilarious charade, a dynamo of suspense and horror, a profoundly serious probing into the nature of moral consciousness, a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul, an allegorical romance, a sophisticated account of modern love, a ghost story that will send shivers racing down the spine. Lush, compulsive, richly inventive, eerie, provocative, impossibly theatrical--it is, in spite of itself, convincing. It is, in fact, a trick ("magus" means magician or conjurer)--a trick about conviction. The stupefying thing is that Mr. Fowles has pulled it off. The book seems to have its own energy; it reverberates in the mind. (italics mine)
The plot can be only inadequately summarized. Nicholas Urfe, a youngish, charming, intelligent and rather callous Oxford graduate "handsomely equipped to fail," takes up with Alison, an Australian girl he meets at a party in London. Their affair becomes serious ("In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love"). This is more than Nicholas's effete cynicism can stand, so he leaves Alison to accept a job as an English instructor at the Lord Byron School, a sort of Eton-Harrow enclave on the Greek island of Phraxos, "only a look north from where Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon."
Bored, immeasurably depressed by the self-revelation that he is not, as he had thought, a talented poet ("I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to co-exist in the same mind"), out of phase with the throb of the sultry, white-sunned Mediterranean island. Nicholas contemplates suicide, then takes to long solitary walks. On one of these walks he meets a wealthy English-born Greek named Maurice Conchis who may or may or may not have collaborated with the Nazis during the war and now lives as a recluse on his palatial, art- encrusted island estate. Conchis is the magus.
The estate is known as Salle d'Attente (the Waiting Room), and it is here that Nicholas is ushered into the mysteries--Conchis's paradoxical views on life and his eccentric masques which, Nicholas later learns, are called "the godgame."
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/specials/fowles-magus1.html)
End of Comments by Loftus.
http://www.bevvincent.com/onyx/murakami-sputnik.html
I'm the exception. Even the writers in Japan have made a society, but not me. That's one reason why I keep escaping from Japan. That's my privilege. I can go anywhere. In Japan the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way. It's ridiculous, I guess. If you're a writer, an author, you're free to do anything, go anywhere, and that's the most important thing to me. So, naturally, they mostly don't like me. I don't like elitism. I am not missed when I'm gone.
Do they have a problem with what you write?
I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism. I like horror films, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, detective stories. I don't want to write those things. What I want to do is use those structures, not the content. I like to put my content in that structure. That's my way, my style. So both of those kinds of writers don't like me. Entertainment writers don't like me, and serious literature people don't like me. I'm kind of in-between, doing a new kind of thing. That's why I couldn't find my position in Japan for many years. But I'm feeling that things are changing drastically. I'm gaining more territory. I have had my very loyal readers in these 15 years or so. They're buying my books, and they're on my side. The writers and critics are not on my side.
You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very ... metaphysical.
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.
Another Review
Sputnik Sweetheart
Haruki Murakami, trans Philip Gabriel
Why do people have to be so lonely? What's the point of it all?' muses 'K', Murakami's mild-mannered narrator as he retreats from a Greek island. No ordinary anguish here - Sumire, the sulky object of his desire, has 'disappeared. Like smoke'.
If 'resolution' isn't a key word, you may be in for a treat, as Murakami's novel is a slippery fish which consistently defies categorisation. He takes the bare bones of a narrative and fleshes it out with the trademark surreal, labyrinthine imagery that has won him legions of fans worldwide. The effect is a dreamlike, detached quality.
As the book opens, Sumire is experiencing first love, 'a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains'. Her desire, although not her affection, is unrequited by glamorous wine merchant Miu, a woman 17 years her senior. Sumire updates her best friend K on developments in urgent chain-smoking 3am communications from a phone box. K has become adept at concealing his true feelings and offers advice and support - but much of the narrative involves his detailed reconstruction of Sumire's desire. 'Deep within Miu's eyes, as if in a quiet pool in a swift stream, wordless currents vied with one another. Only gradually did these clashing currents settle.'
Is this Sumire's exaggerated telephone description, or the overheated imagination of K, condemned to vicarious thrills? It's unclear, but the structure of retelling is fascinating: male author creates a non-starter lesbian affair seen through the wistful eyes of a third party. Murakami doesn't engage in any conventional coming-out discussion - initially Sumire feels that Miu 'happened to be a woman' - but, again, the interest lies in K's ambivalent response to the fact.
Despite allowing himself a certain amount of grief that Sumire does not feel for him 'as a man', he seems to have her best interests at heart - or does he? Murakami treads an intriguingly fine line.
When Sumire, reader of scientific articles, amusingly decides that her lesbianism must be linked to a small bone in her ear, K responds that 'any explanation or logic that explains anything so easily has a hidden trap in it_ don't leap to any conclusions'.
There's a suspicion here that his apparent sagacity stems from ulterior motives, but he staunchly represses his desire for Sumire, and they talk concepts and metaphors instead.
Murakami omits direct Japanese cultural references - the friends listen to Bach, love Marc Bolan and discuss Kerouac which, combined with the American English translation, gives the novel a strange flavour. There's a sense of rootlessness and a dislocation from their immediate surroundings in K and Sumire's conversations on dead icons, and this enhances the sense of the characters being adrift in a foreign land which is their own. Even Sumire's name for her lover, Sputnik Sweetheart, is based on Miu mishearing her reference to Beatniks in their first tentative conversation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/03/fiction.harukimurakami