Trying to be clever

It has not been a conducive week to be creative, with a stressful week finally over that ended with a long car ride. Honestly what had a greater impact was the book I have been struggling with. It is 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The best way to describe it is numbing. The book is over nine hundred pages and it's challenge is not from vocabulary or complexity in sentenced structure. 1Q84 is rather an endurance test. It is like a long run, stretched out tensions, a stream of mundane with flashes of excitement. The only drive is to see the finish, a finish that you already have a sense of what it will look like.

This is the second book of murkami I have read and I find the style quite enjoyable. Very dreamlike wrapped in a thoughtful view of the mundane. I could see why some would be unhappy with the mundane passages, that drag the story in some people's view. I feel this is a misreading of what murkami is doing. The dream like passages requires a grounding in a reality or the piece falls apart or drift into a mush of nonsense (odd that I feel that nonsense must have a structure, I guess I have difficulty with messes).

This is a roundabout way to say that this book is a wearying challenge of a read, particularly during a work week. The question I'm playing with is a question of cleverness. Plodding, and 1Q84 is essentially a slow burn plodding book (which might be an element of Japanese culture, as their manga, video games, and books are all slow builds rather than a quick punch that American books seem to have) through leaves me wondering whether the pay off is going to match the investment. I don't doubt it's beautiful writing the books contains (despite a weak ear for conversation), I wonder whether the book is clever or not. I don't think plot is the key indicator of cleverness, but perhaps the easiest to notice.

I am unsure if there is a design to it, a clever pattern of beauty or cultural reference, that I am struggling to figure out or if it is a simple detective story with bad dialogue. With a sigh, I have concluded that I need to finish the book before I can come close to answering it.

Not the best book companion during a long week. :)

Later S