Billy Bob's Book Review Corner

It’s that time again. WHAT TIME IS IT, BILLY BOB? Well kids, it’s time for the 3rd EVER installment of Billy Bob’s Book Review Corner. Now aren’t you excited? Hey, calm down would you?

I just finished reading “Killing Commendatore”, a book which might be most easily described as “weird, even for a Murakami novel”. I’ve tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, although I’m not sure this book can be spoiled. It might be the most spoiler-proof book ever written. If someone tried to spoil a David Lynch movie like “Inland Empire”, would it really make any difference?

If you’ve never read anything by Murakami, it will be difficult to impress upon you exactly how much of a crazy weirdo he is. I don’t actually know much about him as a real person; I’m just assuming his main characters are self-inserts and that therefore he must be a relaxed, unthreatening individual who constantly sees shit that probably isn’t really there and maybe doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

This is my third Murakami novel, and the second of the three in which the author is strangely fixated with a hole in the ground, giving him a very impressive 66% meaningful hole ratio. I challenge you to find any other author who can beat that.

Anyway, Killing Commendatore is a book about a painter who has entered a phase in his life where perhaps it’s fair to say that he’s spinning his wheels. He’s a bit young at 36 to be entering his midlife crisis period, but it strikes everyone at different times, and he’s got all the classic symptoms. He’s a little disappointed that his paintings are all commissioned portraits, which he sees as a soulless commercial venture, but not so disappointed that he tries to do anything about it until after his wife has gotten bored with his extremely boring personality and left him. The narrative of the book is told in an approximately seven month window after this event takes place, and follows the painter on a journey of personal discovery in which he has a decisive, yet considerably vague, spiritual experience.

Despite me busting on Murakami a bit in the first couple paragraphs of this review, this book is brilliant, as long as you don’t mind authors being considerably opaque with the point they’re making. Murakami is an extremely gifted writer with the power to draw you into scenes where nothing particularly interesting is happening and makes you feel like you are standing in the room with the characters. You can hear the main character’s records. You can feel the cold and the rain outside his house. You can smell the mountain air. I’m not kidding. It’s vivid and intense in a way that few authors could match. And it’s interesting to think about this book in those terms because the main conceit of it is the main character (who goes unnamed) capturing dynamic aspects of people he meets in portraiture to where viewers are astounded at how they can feel the subject’s personality resonating from his canvas in a way they can’t exactly describe.

Of course, if you’re a regular reader of Murakami, you’ll be expecting a journey to some sort of alternate reality, and that certainly exists here. You’ll figure it’s coming as soon as the meaningful hole in the ground is revealed, naturally. But it’s an interesting facet of Murakami’s unbelievable weirdness how he describes the physical, real aspects of his stories’ fantasy elements in his usual stunning detail, while leaving the literal meaning of them fuzzy and unclear. I won’t give away everything that happens (not that it would matter that much if I did) but when you close this book, you’re going to be asking yourself whether anything in the book actually happened. And if you reflect on it for a while, you will realize that Murakami did this to you on purpose, and was in fact very explicit in letting you know he was doing so. At some point, those lingering questions about how real the painter’s recollection of events is become kind of irrelevant and you sort of just have a strong desire to find Murakami and give him a nice solid kick in the nuts so he feels something that isn’t obscured in several layers of metaphor for once.

I was discussing this book with a friend, and it helped me kind of grasp what Murakami’s schtick is. He definitely has something that ties all of his work together, and I think it’s this thing where he writes a novel in three layers. The first layer, comprising at least ¾ of the novel, is describing the ordinary life of his subject and really getting into the character’s head. The second layer is the character’s struggle to find some kind of universal truth that unifies the mundane details of their day to day moments with the bizarre shit that sometimes happens because they are unfortunately living in a Murakami novel. The third layer is said bizarre shit becoming an in-your-face reality, typically representing the climax of his books. If you like the formula, this book is a must read.

Maybe having a layered approach to writing where you have to keep digging deeper means that his fetish for getting trapped in a hole in the ground is a metaphor for his whole life, although I doubt it. He’s probably just nuts, but I’m glad he is.