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Published: 9 October 2018
ISBN: 9781473549449
Imprint: Vintage Digital
Format: EBook
Pages: 704

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Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami

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The ambitious major new novel from this internationally celebrated writer, on the scale of his bestselling 1Q84

The epic new novel from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author of 1Q84.
In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art – as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby – Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.

Pub date: 9 October 2018
ISBN: 9781473549449
Imprint: Vintage Digital
Format: EBook
Pages: 704

Categories:

Share…

About the Author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

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Praise for Killing Commendatore

“It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami”

Literary Review

“Murakami’s reality has many sides; some plain, some fancy. Translators Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen capture every colour on this mind-altering palette. No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. Murakami’s “Land of Metaphor” remains a country where wonders never cease”

Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

“Wild, thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked”

Sunday Times

“Exhilarating. . . . Only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art”

Washington Post

“Expansive and intricate . . . touches on many of the themes familiar in Mr. Murakami’s novels: the mystery of romantic love, the weight of history, the transcendence of art, the search for elusive things just outside our grasp”

New York Times

“I found it totally gripping with scarcely a dull page, the loose ends enhancing its mystery. An absorbing work by a great writer”

Daily Express

“An immersive big-hearted new novel”

Independent

“Written in a simple, readable style that leaves you free to concentrate on the weirdness of the content… There is no other writer able to give us the fix that his unique qualities provide”

Sunday Express

“In this novel, [Murakami] captures the creative process compellingly… The complex landscape that Murakami assembles in Killing Commendatore is a word portrait of the artist’s inner life”

Times Literary Supplement

“Murakami keeps the reader gripped”

The Week

“Murakami dancing along ‘the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then up the walls and onto the ceiling... Killing Commendatore is a perfect balance of tradition and individual talent”

Spectator

“Rich, sprawling… Killing Commendatore is a… powerful, sustained meditation on how we engage with works of art”

Daily Telegraph

“Brilliant… Murakami is good company, that most precious of qualities in an author”

Xan Brooks, Guardian

“Murakami has produced a captivating novel, full of otherworldly detours and fascinating digressions”

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

“One of the most influential novelists of his generation”

Observer

“Uproarious, outspoken, tinged with deep grief”

Boyd Tonkin, theartsdesk, **Books of the Year**

“An exemplary translation”

Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

“A massive 700-page exercise in narrative suspense. Reading the novel, you keep waiting for the book to fall to pieces, stunned that Murakami is getting so much from so little”

Matt Thorne, Catholic Herald

“Killing Commendatore appears then to be the summa of all the previous works of the author and of all the cultural influences that lead him to write them, shaping his imagination: a homage to his career, to his passions and art as well”

Ruth-Anne Walbank, SCAN