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A crafty writer with some spurious ideas

Revisado: 06-27-24

Mr. Wolfe is a terrific writer. He can create characters, give them believable motivations, construct situations with tension and resolution, and do all this with a mastery of prose that is a delight to read. However, although it reads like fiction, this is presented as fact.
He seems to have personal grudges against Darwin and Chomsky. I began to wonder if they owed him money or insulted him at a party. He paints Darwin's evolutionary conceptions as slipshod, which is easy to do with 150 years of further developed knowledge of biology and proto-human anthropology. And somehow, Darwin was both an opportunist and a laggard in bringing his work to the public.
Wolfe probably has been to a party with Chomsky, and maybe Chomsky did spill his drink on him. But it seems that the main beef he has is Chomskly's changing his mind because data hasn't supported his earlier assertions. Isn't this an example of the processes of science at work? In the end, it seemed like the take of a student doing a Bruno Latour Agent-Network Theory paper that critiques science as a product of entrenched elitism.
The overall premise that we still don't understand how we have language is a great question. I appreciate this book's entertaining set-up, but it does a disservice to providing any further insight.

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Writer's gotta write

Revisado: 03-14-23

I didn't enjoy much about this book, but I liked it. Everything is unreliable: narrators, memories, our own realities. It doesn't mean that all is relative, there is a shared reality we are part of, but we are always renegotiating the way we inhabit it. Some art can activate the parts of your consciousness that are meant to keep tabs on this. This book belongs in that category.

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redundant

Revisado: 11-26-17

bombastic, de trop, diffuse, extra, extravagant, inessential, inordinate, iterating, long-winded, loquacious, oratorical, padded, palaverous, periphrastic, pleonastic, prolix, reiterating, spare, supererogatory, superfluous, supernumerary, surplus, tautological, unnecessary, unwanted, verbose, wordy

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Please give us an Unabridged version

Revisado: 02-19-12

Why abridged? Left gaps and joyful passages out of the experience. Minimum words in review.

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esto le resultó útil a 7 personas

mesmerizing but so what

Revisado: 02-19-12

Murakami's prose is compelling. But it still should be put to some concise purpose. This book is so redundant and its structure is indulgently arbitrary. In the first book, setting up the character as having an adventurous sexual life is so drawn out that you think it would be highly relevant, but it isn't. The last book is so repetitive about the unrequited relationship. I think his editors are grateful to get a giant book that looks impressive and yet afraid to actually edit it, that we are left with a story that should be a third this length, and we might still not care much about it. The interview with the translators at the end was interesting, and it was also somewhat telling about their own views as they recounted their favorite Murakami stories - they didn't come up with anything generous to say about this one.

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