Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains--flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it wound up. almost.
Yet another book that consists of mostly a character study of a free-spirited, emotional nonconformist who is apparently fated to be crushed under the wheels of dull regular society. More than anything, it reminded me of other books. Many of them. Especially John Green novels in which the girl, loved by the narrator, disappears leaving the narrator to have The Feels over her. Or possibly an alternate, Japanese Lolita in which the narrator behaves better, stifling his creepy feelings while watching helplessly as a female Quilty carries her off. In Sputnik Sweetheart (so named because the older female lover confuses Sputnik with Beatnik), the male narrator is 25 and the manic dreamgirl 22; still, I had to keep reminding myself of this because he is a teacher and she a student. His soul is old; hers is young and flighty. She's in love with the older woman but he's the one she calls at midnight with her emo crises, which he listens to stoically, even when he hasn't eaten all day and is exhausted.
And then she's gone. Not necessarily dead. Not necessarily run off to flee "all this". But maybe a little of each. It gets philosophical.
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains--flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it wound up. almost.
Yet another book that consists of mostly a character study of a free-spirited, emotional nonconformist who is apparently fated to be crushed under the wheels of dull regular society. More than anything, it reminded me of other books. Many of them. Especially John Green novels in which the girl, loved by the narrator, disappears leaving the narrator to have The Feels over her. Or possibly an alternate, Japanese Lolita in which the narrator behaves better, stifling his creepy feelings while watching helplessly as a female Quilty carries her off. In Sputnik Sweetheart (so named because the older female lover confuses Sputnik with Beatnik), the male narrator is 25 and the manic dreamgirl 22; still, I had to keep reminding myself of this because he is a teacher and she a student. His soul is old; hers is young and flighty. She's in love with the older woman but he's the one she calls at midnight with her emo crises, which he listens to stoically, even when he hasn't eaten all day and is exhausted.
And then she's gone. Not necessarily dead. Not necessarily run off to flee "all this". But maybe a little of each. It gets philosophical.