Book Review: The City and It's Uncertain Walls

I want to preface this by saying I use "Book Review" in a very loose sense. This is probably more of a vibe check than anything else.

Which is alright because honestly this whole book is kind of one extended vibe check and it's not really my vibe. I've never been a huge Murakami fan. I think I started and stopped with The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, a million years ago, which I only read because the guy I was dating whose other favorite book was The Rachel Papers told me I should read it. Do you see how many things are wrong with this statement?

Why read this, then? Well, it's been on the TBR pile for more than a year (I think it was a gift from my mother) and I'm trying to make a dent in the TBR because reading five books on the TBR is the only way I can let myself by a new book.

(There is one exception to this rule which is that I am trying to visit a different indie bookstore every month this year so honestly that TBR hasn't got a chance.)

But it's a new year and I'm making an effort on the TBR. Unfortunately, I didn't love this book, but I got too deep to DNF it. Which is to say, the first hundred pages or so are a truly gripping story about the sort of love young gone wrong that becomes a lifelong obsession. I was totally sold on that part.

Then we got to the CIty and It's Uncertain Walls sections and there were unicorns, so it was hard to turn away.

And then this sort of went off the rails for me. There were some really charming episodes, including a ghost and an autistic boy who is described as a human library because of how accurately he can recall the enormous amount of books he mows through on the daily.

There are a lot of interesting ideas about multiple realities, mostly in the mind, or metaphysical, and that some folks aren't meant for this world, and some folks are more shadows than themselves.

I am not convinced Murakami needed 400+ pages to make those points, and about halfway in I started reading / skimming as quickly as possible to get to the end and move on with my life.

However, writers, take heart! He managed to publish this novel despite it being a rehash of an earlier story by the same name, which was the basis of the idea for Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Yeah, if you're counting, this is the third time he's written this basic story.

I think we should take a few lessons about revision from that. Revision is important. Revision makes a lot of things better -- Murakami didn't like the early story, and Hard Boiled Wonderland was a big hit. Revision works.

But I think what I got from reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls is that sometimes you gotta stop rehashing and move on.