As you might expect for a 700+ page novel, a fair amount of stuff happens in Killing Commendatore but the story is actually quite easy to summarise: there isn’t one! Which is a large part of what makes it such a frustrating read.
A portrait painter’s marriage dissolves leading to him wandering Japan aimlessly until he happens across the home of a famous artist who’s dying in hospital. The artist’s son invites him to stay and he discovers a painting hidden in the attic: a piece entitled Killing Commendatore. Inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni and reimagined through Japanese history, it might be tied into a Nazi assassination attempt from WW2. Or not.
There’s a mysterious bell that rings in the night, a mummified priest buried alive in a shrine, a living idea come to life from the painting - the Commandatore himself - a strange rich man spying on a little girl he believes is his daughter, though she isn’t aware that he’s her possible dad, and a LOT of awkward sex!
So… what’s the point? I really don’t know. I picked up the Great Gatsby homage - the charismatic rich guy with the chequered past living in the flashy house across the way, the bell in the night like the haunting green light - but I don’t think Murakami pulled it off convincingly nor did I understand why he wanted to do it. Nor why this book needed to be 700+ pages! There’s so little material here that’s maddeningly stretched out. Fitzgerald did so much more with so much less!
There’s also a spooky Orpheus Descending sequence that felt tacked on and unnecessary. Not to mention utterly baffling - something about living metaphors and similes?! Which wasn’t nearly as creepy as the numerous passages on the main character’s sister’s breasts and a prepubescent little girl’s - whaaat whyyyy?! Too weird!
Murakami tries to create some kind of resolution towards the end by making the little girl bizarrely hide out at the rich guy’s house without any clear way for how she planned to find out what she wanted to know, and then arbitrarily turning the rich guy into the villain for a hot minute - none of it worked.
It would be inaccurate to say that I disliked everything about the book - after all, I did finish it. The Commendatore himself was an amusing character and he improved every scene he appeared in (“Affirmative, my friends!”). As incomprehensible as the Orpheus Descending sequence was, the dark and sinister shift was a welcome change of pace to the mundane reality that made up most of the novel. And I’ve never read anything like that before either even if I didn’t get it! The Nazi assassination and the mummified priest were compelling ideas that might’ve worked in a better thought-out piece but here just felt carelessly thrown in.
Killing Commendatore is not a good novel. It’s much too long, way too unfocused and rambling beyond belief. The story is unmemorable, the characters are unremarkable and it’s so confusing what the author’s driving at that little to none of it leaves any impression - for such a chunky book its lack of substance makes it very light.
It’s not Haruki Murakami’s worst (that would be Colorless Tsukuru) but Killing Commendatore is a sprawling mess of half-baked ideas and an unsatisfying non-story that I wouldn’t recommend even to fans of this author.
No comments:
Post a Comment