Murakami's 1Q84: time, space and sex

I am completely hooked on the Murakami book. I read and read and read yesterday and it has been such a long time since a book has engaged me like this. It made me once again remember about why i fell in love with literature, and with fiction in particular. You can explore possibilities in such freedom - in a freedom which there is no equivalent really in any other art. And you do so with the most frustrating and most demanding of the arts as well - writing. It is a paradox. Writing is grounding. It putting bars on an experience. All art does this - it freezes time and space. A feeling. A sensation. It is most evident in non-fiction, where everything is fact, everything is made as true as possible. However, with fiction, what writers try and do is  set time and space free - you can go anywhere and do anything. And that is what Murakami does best.

Apart from Margaret Atwood, he is probably the contemporary novelist i love best and most. I think it is his demanding nature - he demands and expects so much, not just from the reader, but himself and the medium as well. Reading him i can see and feel the mastery which has gone into the making of the structure of the novel. But his style is also breathtaking. I'd imagine that in a past life he must have been a sword maker. Constantly seeking the truth, no matter what, no tolerating a single blemish, not letting up until he has crafted the finest piece of work he can manage.

In 1Q84, he crams in so much. There are homages to film, to jazz, to classical music, to nationalism, to the individual. And there is a dark side as well. What is also fantastic about 1Q84 is that it has this filmic quality to it. I feel as if i am inside the novel. When was the last time a novel made me feel like that? As if i am taking part in the drama that is unfolding. It has a Kafkaesque quality too. Just as you think you know what is taking place, you turn the corner and suddenly you are falling through what was previously reality. How can you be sure that you know what you know? And this seeps into other bits of life as well.

The mark of a great writer is that they do not judge. They are the supreme observers. And it is a putting together of observations, how this is ordered, which create a novel. Great writers stand back, they enable the prose to speak and live. They do not inhabit the writing itself - and Murakami is the master of this art. But he is also funny. There is humour and forgiveness as well because there is no judgement. The topics he deals with are not easy. Domestic violence, pedophilia, cults and ideals, the law and vigilantes. Then on a metaphysical level - how can we know what we know is real? IS anything ever real? Can we say we know what we know? I was thinking as well all his characters are so incomplete - because of such terrible wounds in their lives they find it impossible to be whole. Something has been taken away from them, at some point in their lives they have had to endure terrible indignity. They have had their humanity brutally violated. The various characters have had to deal with the painfulness of being human. At the most intimate and the most vulnerable level. Sex becomes the metaphor for this in the novel. At some level we have all been raped. At some level we have raped. And he says this without judgement at all. It is what it is.

But it does not stop people from trying their best. It is a novel about how we limp along, but it is oddly not depressing. Instead, it is compelling. One of the characters says, my love is like the Tibetan Wheel of Passion. The outside changes constantly, but around the axle, it is a fixed point, so contradictions can exist.

It is actually inspirational. And for me that someone is able to write the way he does is actually more inspirational than the subjects he writes about. The final redemption is not in the storyline, but the actual writing. We can do such wonderful things, human beings, the writer says with his writing.

What is reality? What is real, is the question that we are always left with. It is a story. A fantastic story. Each of us a portal, a wormhole, into another universe. Where we meet with each other we create another new portal, another new reality. Perhaps what particle physicists, quantum physics has missed is that we are not surrounded by blackholes or darkmatter which takes us into different places, but that we ourselves are those blackholes, we ourselves generate the darkmatter that is constantly skewing time and space.

It is fantastic. It is the art of the impossible. When i read work like Murakami's i think, my god, there is no art greater than the art of writing. It is only with writing that we can tie all these strands together, only with writing, when does so skilfully, that we are able to explore the realms which have never existed in a manner which is completely and uniquely individual. I haven't finished reading the book yet, but i can't wait to. Yet, at some level i really don't want to. I want it to go on and on and on. I want it to keep speaking to me, telling me a story. Until there are two moons in the sky.