Killing Commendatore - Hardcover

Murakami, Haruki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038569069X ISBN 13: 9780385690690

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2018

Synopsis

A publishing event: a major new, epic novel from the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

An unnamed thirty-something portrait painter, abandoned by his wife, becomes caretaker of the home of an aging famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When the younger man discovers an unknown painting in the attic, entitled "Killing Commendatore"--a painting that takes its cues from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni--he also discovers clues about Amada, his family and their involvement in a violent and failed plot to kill a Nazi leader in Vienna. As the painter slowly learns the truth, he is equally consumed by the story of a wealthy and mysterious neighbor, Menshiki, in what is, according to the author, a clear homage to The Great Gatsby. The painter becomes obsessed with Menshiki's doomed love affair, the young girl who might be his child and a stone-lined underground space in the nearby woods where Buddhist priests were once buried alive. This pit becomes a portal into another world, a surreal place where the figures from "Killing Commendatore" take form to guide our narrator on an epic journey. Ambitious and haunting, tactile and surreal, preoccupied with questions about trauma, art and the creative process, Killing Commendatore moves between the known world and a complex underworld.

About this title

About the Author

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, whose previous recipients include J. K. Rowling, Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie.

  *  Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen.<

Review

National Bestseller
A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Notable Book of 2018
A CBC Best Book of 2018
A Financial Times Best Book of 2018
A Library Journal Best Book of 2018
A Goodreads Best Fiction Book of 2018

"This 700-page novel promises more of Murakami's magical mist, but its size, beauty and concerns with lust and war bring us back to the vividness and scale of his 1997 epic, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." —The Boston Globe

"Exactly as lovely and strange as any Murakami fan would expect from the author." —Bustle

"[An] overwhelmingly rich novel . . . spectacular in its trenchancy and range. . . . The novel will only burnish [Murakami's] reputation, barely rivalled since the days of Dickens, as the living novelist who best combines literary excellence and commercial popularity." —The Telegraph (UK)

"Immersive, repetitive, big-hearted. . . . Killing Commendatore gets the balance right. Perhaps this lies in its exhilarating portrayal of how it feels to make art. In long, powerful passages, Murakami describes painting with the intensity of what seems like just-concealed autobiography." —The Washington Post

"The celebrated Japanese maverick keeps recombining his favourite idiosyncratic tropes to unexpectedly powerful effect. . . . Killing Commendatore is at times tense, creepy, absurdly funny, self-aware and baffling—and engrossing throughout. Late Murakami by way of late David Lynch." —Maclean's

"At first glance, Killing Commendatore, Murakami's whopping new novel, seems like a return to the surreal after several smaller, more intimate, realistic works. It's not, though. And that blurring of the boundaries is one of the novel's many strengths. . . . Killing Commendatore is strongest in its quiet moments, rewarding a slow immersion." —Toronto Star

"Eccentric and intriguing, Killing Commendatore is the product of a singular imagination. . . . Murakami is a wiz at melding the mundane with the surreal. . . . He has a way of imbuing the supernatural with uncommon urgency. His placid narrative voice belies the utter strangeness of his plot. . . . The worldview of Murakami's novels is consistent, and it's invigorating. In this book and many that came before it, he urges us to embrace the unusual, accept the unpredictable." —San Francisco Chronicle
 
"Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it. . . . He builds his self-contained world deliberately and faithfully, developing intrigue and suspense and even taking care to give each chapter a cliffhanger ending as in an old-fashioned serialized novel. . . . When you're under Mr. Murakami's trance you're likely to keep flipping the pages." —The Wall Street Journal

"Many of these themes are familiar in Murakami's work, but he continues to explore them with phenomenal energy and verve. And humour. What makes his voice so distinctive, and so captivating, is the mix of precise observation, clarity and deadpan humour. When it all seems to be going a bit too far, a flash of wit will remind us that this is a game, and we have been invited to play it. We are, in fact, in on the joke. . . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked." —The Times (UK)

"Murakami is happy to exist in a state of flux. . . . His pace remains easy and unhurried. His prose is warm, conversational and studded with quiet profundities. He's eminently good company; that most precious of qualities we look for in an author. We trust him to get us entertainingly lost, just as we trust that he'll eventually get us home." —The Guardian (UK)

"[Killing Commendatore] marks the return of a master." —Esquire

"Murakami returns with a sprawling epic of art, dislocation and secrets. . . . The story requires its players to work their way through mazes and moments of history that some would rather forget." —Kirkus Reviews 

"No ordinary trip; get ready for a wild ride." —Entertainment Weekly

"Again and again, the author of 1Q84 has delivered vast, complicated and engrossing narratives that bind together in unpredictable ways that are absolutely worth the wait. True to form, his latest comes in at just over 700 pages. The story of a painter's discovery of a lost work of art builds to a superb puzzle of monumental philosophical and emotional depth." —BookPage

"Murakami's [Killing Commendatore] is a meticulous yet gripping novel whose escalating surreal tone complements the author's tight focus on the domestic and the mundane. . . . Murakami's sense of humor helps balance the otherworldly and the prosaic, making this a consistently rewarding novel." —Publishers Weekly

"Murakami's free-form eclecticism scrambles distinctions between pop and high culture. His riffs mash up sensationalism and sublimity; the banal and bizarre. . . . No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. Murakami's 'Land of Metaphor' remains a country where wonders never cease." —The Financial Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Bond Street Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 038569069X
• ISBN 13: 9780385690690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688