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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9557.Sputnik_Sweetheart?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Sputnik Sweetheart" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1166028151m/9557.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9557.Sputnik_Sweetheart?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Sputnik Sweetheart</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3354.Haruki_Murakami">Haruki Murakami</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2104112?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 4 of 5 stars 
 
 I just read Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami and Anansi Boys by Gaiman back to back. I'm a big fan of both authors. I've read all of Gaiman's work going back to the much celebrated Sandman comic books and I've been tearing through Murakami's as I get my hands on them. I'm struck by how similar they are, and yet the quality of the literature is strikingly different. Gaiman's novels, in particular the best of them, American Gods, weaves between realism and fantasy to make ordinary events and myth come together. Generally there are appealing everyman main characters who are drawn into a magical world where they help prevent some sort of disaster. It's a little formulaic, and the best parts are the descriptions of the mythical characters in reality. One of my favorite characters from Sandman is an ancient Egyptian god who goes into the travel business when people no longer worship him. He's spectacularly successful. That's a fun kind of combination of myth and reality where your own travel agent might just be a deposed god making the best of eternity.
 
 Murakami similarily works in between our world and some magical world, though Gaiman's "real world" seems much more solid reality than Murakami's and Gaiman's fantastical world is also more solid, but not necessarily more vivid. Murakami's main characters are often, or at least of the three of his books I've read, Everymen, who to varying degrees become entwined in a magical world. In Sputnik Sweetheart the Everyman narrator observes the after effects of someone else's crossing into a magical world. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the Everyman main character crosses himself, as he does in Kafka By the Shore.
 
 Murakami is working with Big Themes, you know those things they do in serious literature. Some of his themes, as I've been able to figure them out are:
 1) The West (Europe/U.S.) is a different reality for the Japanese than Japan.
 2) Past wrong-doings haunt the future. (Think WWII and its impact which is a recurring motif, and completely fascinating for the stories in of themselves.)
 3) What we perceive is only a tiny part of what is out there or how we interact with things.
 4) The ultimate evil is believing in nothing.
 
 I particularly like his use of the last one. He makes really unappealing, seemingly inoccuous characters horribly evil in barely explicable, inhumane ways. In WUBC the horrible evil is so inoccuous a favorite cat is named after it. In KBTS the banal, "my dad the jerk" turns out to be true so much more so than we could ever have complained of in our own teenage days, and is more so than the teenage main character ever realizes (eats the souls of cats for his flute?!)
 
 Gaiman's stories stick to your bones. You can ruminate over his writing later and find more depth to it, but Anansi Boys is the weakest of his pickings. American Gods is substantially better, but I go back and re-read The Sandman books every now and then, and I don't ever expect to pick up either American Gods nor Anansi Boys yet again.
 
 The biggest weakness of Gaiman's latest is highlighted by Murakami's strength: the narrative flow to describe things so that the words vanish and pictures appear. Murakami can describe whistling opera while making spaghetti so that you forget that you're not actually sitting in the kitchen watching it done. And then add to that the depth of the themes, the importance and the opacity of them, and you have a much more engaging work than Gaiman's latest.
 
 Clearly they are authors of two different camps. Gaiman's a comic book writer who dabbles in fantasy fiction, while Murakami is a "serious novelist." I don't see the two has being worlds apart (haha - get it!) and I think Gaiman could easily improve his writing if he spent a little more time making the descriptions descriptive.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/123420?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Sarah's review
rating:
bookshelves: completedreading

I just read Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami and Anansi Boys by Gaiman back to back. I'm a big fan of both authors. I've read all of Gaiman's work going back to the much celebrated Sandman comic books and I've been tearing through Murakami's as I get my hands on them. I'm struck by how similar they are, and yet the quality of the literature is strikingly different. Gaiman's novels, in particular the best of them, American Gods, weaves between realism and fantasy to make ordinary events and myth come together. Generally there are appealing everyman main characters who are drawn into a magical world where they help prevent some sort of disaster. It's a little formulaic, and the best parts are the descriptions of the mythical characters in reality. One of my favorite characters from Sandman is an ancient Egyptian god who goes into the travel business when people no longer worship him. He's spectacularly successful. That's a fun kind of combination of myth and reality where your own trav...more

I just read Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami and Anansi Boys by Gaiman back to back. I'm a big fan of both authors. I've read all of Gaiman's work going back to the much celebrated Sandman comic books and I've been tearing through Murakami's as I get my hands on them. I'm struck by how similar they are, and yet the quality of the literature is strikingly different. Gaiman's novels, in particular the best of them, American Gods, weaves between realism and fantasy to make ordinary events and myth come together. Generally there are appealing everyman main characters who are drawn into a magical world where they help prevent some sort of disaster. It's a little formulaic, and the best parts are the descriptions of the mythical characters in reality. One of my favorite characters from Sandman is an ancient Egyptian god who goes into the travel business when people no longer worship him. He's spectacularly successful. That's a fun kind of combination of myth and reality where your own travel agent might just be a deposed god making the best of eternity.

Murakami similarily works in between our world and some magical world, though Gaiman's "real world" seems much more solid reality than Murakami's and Gaiman's fantastical world is also more solid, but not necessarily more vivid. Murakami's main characters are often, or at least of the three of his books I've read, Everymen, who to varying degrees become entwined in a magical world. In Sputnik Sweetheart the Everyman narrator observes the after effects of someone else's crossing into a magical world. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the Everyman main character crosses himself, as he does in Kafka By the Shore.

Murakami is working with Big Themes, you know those things they do in serious literature. Some of his themes, as I've been able to figure them out are:
1) The West (Europe/U.S.) is a different reality for the Japanese than Japan.
2) Past wrong-doings haunt the future. (Think WWII and its impact which is a recurring motif, and completely fascinating for the stories in of themselves.)
3) What we perceive is only a tiny part of what is out there or how we interact with things.
4) The ultimate evil is believing in nothing.

I particularly like his use of the last one. He makes really unappealing, seemingly inoccuous characters horribly evil in barely explicable, inhumane ways. In WUBC the horrible evil is so inoccuous a favorite cat is named after it. In KBTS the banal, "my dad the jerk" turns out to be true so much more so than we could ever have complained of in our own teenage days, and is more so than the teenage main character ever realizes (eats the souls of cats for his flute?!)

Gaiman's stories stick to your bones. You can ruminate over his writing later and find more depth to it, but Anansi Boys is the weakest of his pickings. American Gods is substantially better, but I go back and re-read The Sandman books every now and then, and I don't ever expect to pick up either American Gods nor Anansi Boys yet again.

The biggest weakness of Gaiman's latest is highlighted by Murakami's strength: the narrative flow to describe things so that the words vanish and pictures appear. Murakami can describe whistling opera while making spaghetti so that you forget that you're not actually sitting in the kitchen watching it done. And then add to that the depth of the themes, the importance and the opacity of them, and you have a much more engaging work than Gaiman's latest.

Clearly they are authors of two different camps. Gaiman's a comic book writer who dabbles in fantasy fiction, while Murakami is a "serious novelist." I don't see the two has being worlds apart (haha - get it!) and I think Gaiman could easily improve his writing if he spent a little more time making the descriptions descriptive....less

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message 1: by Rachael

08/14/2007 07:17PM

read this review and wanted to suggest good omens if you've not yet read it. gaiman and pratchett, nice fun read about the coming end of the world, gaiman-style.