Aimee Bender says it and Rake's Progress points it out and then Conversational Reading riffs on it: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is sort of a mess.
To which I'll add: well, yeah. Hell yeah!
But (if I may disagree a bit with a superior blogger, whose blog is a well-shaped perfect pebble to my own random scrunch of scattered dirt-clumps of a blog, and if I may voice my disagreement over here in the safe warm confines of my own basically non-existent corner of the internet) I don't think of this book so much as (as Conv. Reading puts it) "huge and unwieldy" in the sense that "Maybe toward the end this one got away from Murakami a little". I think, rather, that there's a definite shape to the novel. Of sorts, possibly. I don't think anything here is really accidental, or at least there's nothing more accidental than happens in any novel. The novel certainly feels like it veers toward chaos...but, I think it's an...artfully contained chaos, perhaps? Maybe? If there's such a thing as a to-be-read pile for already-read books, this one's right up there; I'm really really intrigued by it, and would love to see what comes out of a second reading. One where I'm inclined to dwell on details and consider ideas, more than I'm inclined to just read the whole thing as fast as possible because it's so ohmygod good. And in any case I reserve the right to say "Yeah, you got me, I'm a fool," if I'm shown to be completely wrong with this train of thought.
Also out of all this I can pretty safely say that this re-confirms my desire to read Aimee Bender. She sounds pretty awesome.
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