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Murakami book print run hits 1 million in week

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gosh i can't wait to read this!! :D

0 ( +2 / -2 )

I don't know if the above poster is serious or not but I can hardly wait to read it. Murakami is fantastic and possibly the best living literary figure on the planet.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Just finished reading books I and II of IQ84 and now wanting more. He is very good.

BTW, the title translation suggests "Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgimage" but I am wondering why Junrei no Toshi is not singular, ie, "His Year of Pilgrimage"?

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Speaking of lazy title translations, browse through a stack of movies. A recent favorite was the 1990s movie Fly Away Home, renamed bluntly Goose for domestic moviegoers. If a future movie is called Goose, at least Fry A Weigh Homu will still be available for a translated title.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Murakami is fantastic and possibly the best living literary figure on the planet.

Wow that is quite a claim but just a touch of hyperbole there if you permit me to point that out. I hope you have read the work of hundreds of living writers to make a claim like that. For the record, I too think that Murakami is a great writer but there a quite a few decent writers about you know. How about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Sebastian Faulks, JG Ballard, Doris Lessing, John Irving, Tom Wolfe, Gunter Grass, Ben Okri, Peter Ackroyd, J.M. Coetzee, Herta Muller and Milan Kundera (and that's just novelists not all literary figures). Come on Murakami is a great writer and I get it that you like him but he isn't exactly Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner or James Joyce. That is to say that he hasn't redefined literature in his era, which I would say is the benchmark to be considered (possibly) the greatest living literary figure on the planet. To tell the truth I don't think there is a single living writer which has attained that qualification but there are many great writers about at the moment of which Murakami is one. It's too difficult anyway to compare literature across languages and cultures, obviously my tastes show a bias towards people writing in the English language and someone else will show a bias towards their language. However, I don't feel that Murakami in anyway stands head and shoulders above any of the novelists I have mentioned.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Good news!

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Lemmings chasing after the grossly overrated Murakami. Such a waste of so many beautiful trees.

-6 ( +1 / -7 )

Proof that famous people just keep on getting more famous no matter what they do, while any new talent languishes in obscurity.

-4 ( +1 / -5 )

@proxy; yep i was dead serious - he's one of my favourite authors, hence my username ;)

and for Murakami "skeptics", please don't discredit his work based on the public furor surrounding him. just ignore it all, pick up his book and judge it by its own value and not by the praises of the press.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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