killing commendatore (haruki murakami): a review

 Killing Commendatore (a review)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐

(prospective readers of this book should be aware that my review has minor spoilers in it)

Killing Commendatore is 681 pages. It is so long that I had forgotten the beginning by the end. It took me about a month to read. That is a long time for me to be reading a book. I put all of that time into reading this book, and I still have no idea what it was about, what the importance of anything was, or what was even the point. I have read several reddit posts discussing this book, and I still don't understand it. I have read a review of Killing Commendatore in the Los Angeles Times, and I still don't understand it. I also don't understand either why strangers on the internet do not want to discuss in public forums what the various symbols in this book—because I know there must be symbols—represent. I would like someone on the internet to comprehensively explain this book to me, and I don't think that's too much to ask for.

This is a book about a man who goes to live in the mountains in the home of a famous painter who has dementia after the man's wife divorces him. The famous painter is not living in the house. Actually, it's a little unclear. But, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, the famous painter is not living in the house. While he is staying in this house, our protagonist finds an interesting painting depicting a guy killing another guy and also meets yet another guy called Menshiki, whose name means "avoiding colors." I know that's important, but I don't know why! Then, a whole bunch of weird stuff starts happening. He starts hearing bells in the middle of the night and finds a pit covered with rocks and there's a teenaged girl (Mariye) who may or may not be Menshiki's daughter (she is written very creepily and it is very clear that the author is a man). The protagonist, a portrait painter, paints some portraits. He meets a small man who is not a person, but rather, the representation of an Idea (Murakami's capitalization, not mine). Fun times ensue.

Given that my brief summary is sort of long, you might reasonably conclude that Killing Commendatore has a lot of plot and is a reasonable length for the amount of plot it has. This is actually not the case. This book does not have a ton of plot; the plot is just hard to explain. It is also longer than it needs to be. Killing Commendatore is ~550 pages of exposition and ~131 pages of the actual exciting part. You could fit at least one, maybe two, books into the number of pages it takes to get to the good part. This complaint makes the book sound boring. It's not really that boring. Well, it is, but it's one of (I think) three books I've read that are boring in a good way: Killing Commendatore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Making Our Democracy Work: A Judges View (by Stephen Breyer). Actually, everything Stephen Breyer has ever written is boring in a good way. Also maybe Don Quixote. So it might be more than three. Anyway, this is the kind of book that you can read 30 pages of before bed, and that's sort of the limit, because you're not invested, but it's holding your attention pretty well. It's relaxing. Nothing happens, but that's okay. 

Even though this book was boring in a good way, I was expecting some payoff at the end. And the payoff sort of came—there was a good part—but then there were 50 more pages of nothing, and the good part just felt like a pointless little surreal adventure. Like all the symbols were thrown together against a wall. I mean, what was the point? Why did any of this happen? If anyone wants to read this book and explain it in the comments, I won't compensate you, but you would have the satisfaction of knowing that you are a super cool person.