Re:Haruki Murakami and the Scarcity of Serious Thought
by jfengel on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @03:36PM
(#27596155)
Interesting. It's definitely good writing, but a bit florid for my taste.
"Freezing as an icehouse" doesn't really add anything; cold is all that icehouses are (and who has an ice house any more?)
"His stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field" doesn't really connect for me. To me, anthouses are small affairs, and the big ones I've heard of are uneven, ragged things totally unlike a swollen stomach.
In "questioning, opened eyes", the word "questioning" is too on-the-nose. It's assigning an action to a dead body. It opens an image (that the dead person is doing something) and then immediately drops it.
All of this is English-major/editor stuff -- me explaining why I didn't care for it after the fact. All I knew when reading it was that 1Q84 was an enormous object, and seeing too many adjectives in it makes it feel padded rather than rich.
The sample you give gets significantly better after that, though the meandering paragraph about "Once time has passed, it can't be taken back" is trite. I feel like this has a lot of potential, but also needed an editor.
(To my taste, that is. Sometimes, editors make good books great. Sometimes, they squeeze the life and character out of them. Which is which depends on the editor, the author, and the reader.)
"Freezing as an icehouse" doesn't really add anything; cold is all that icehouses are (and who has an ice house any more?)
"His stomach was swollen, like an anthill in a field" doesn't really connect for me. To me, anthouses are small affairs, and the big ones I've heard of are uneven, ragged things totally unlike a swollen stomach.
In "questioning, opened eyes", the word "questioning" is too on-the-nose. It's assigning an action to a dead body. It opens an image (that the dead person is doing something) and then immediately drops it.
All of this is English-major/editor stuff -- me explaining why I didn't care for it after the fact. All I knew when reading it was that 1Q84 was an enormous object, and seeing too many adjectives in it makes it feel padded rather than rich.
The sample you give gets significantly better after that, though the meandering paragraph about "Once time has passed, it can't be taken back" is trite. I feel like this has a lot of potential, but also needed an editor.
(To my taste, that is. Sometimes, editors make good books great. Sometimes, they squeeze the life and character out of them. Which is which depends on the editor, the author, and the reader.)