David’s Reviews > Kafka on the Shore > Status Update

Liking it David?

Liking it a lot.

I remember really enjoying Mr Nakata's parts, so vivid. I thought it was a good idea to keep the main kids prose to be pretty amateur to try and make it believable that he actually wrote it.

I fully agree. Mr Nakata's parts are intensely strong. And the Kafka kid's parts are nice in a teenage angsty way. I also enjoy the accounts of the incident during WWII involving Nakata.

I've got the feeling however that the book will dissolve into vagueness and nothing will really be explained or resolved. I hope not because I'm enjoying it.

From memory your feeling is kind of true but kind of not. Rarely do I like book endings and I didn't really care for Kafka's end.

Josh, I just have to ask: What book endings do you like/love?

Number 1 ending would be Shantaram's ending, man. I loved that ending and thought it was so clever/touching. As a kid I really loved the last harry potters ending.

Yukio Mishima's ending for Patriotism. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer's, Of Mice and Men's, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test's, Animal Farms. There must be more Emery >_< What about you?

Just to randomly chip in: I loved Stoner's ending. The melancholy/beautiful feels worked perfectly with the overall tone of the novel. Gravity's Rainbow had a good ending. Also, though he gets a lot of flack for poor endings, I thought the ending of Stephen King's IT was very well done. I can still remember it after about 10 years.

Oh man, I couldn't stand Stoner's ending. Stoner choosing to stay with his wife was the dumbest thing I've ever read.

I loved Stoners ending, it felt like the perfect ending to his life of boredom and sadness, and how he always just keeps working on through that. Other endings I've loved were Infinite Jest, Ulysses, American Psycho, Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, and Gravity's Rainbow. The ending to brothers Karamazov fucking tore me up inside, it was the perfect mix of hopelessness and uplifting in an odd way.

>tfw Brothers Karamazov was only intended to be a prelude to 1-2 more novels that Dostoevsky intended to be his true masterworks.

That in and of itself is just soul crushing; I really just think it would've been so incredible, and it's already so incredible, but to be so much bigger and more epic, god that just sounds so amazing.

We will never know Alex :/ Gregory David Roberts said he wrote 2 or 3 manuscripts of Shantaram and they were destroyed(once by prison guards). Shantaram is over 1,000 pages, I can't even imagine having to try and rewrite all that, the books would be so different from one another. To have that much drive and determination is incredible.