Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Killing Commendatore
Author: MURAKAMI HARUKI
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 10/10/2018
Imprint: HARVILL SECKER
Price: $45.00
Publishing status: Active
In his epic, unsettling new novel, Haruki
Murakami demonstrates his trademark
mastery of the profound and the surreal. A
painter seeks refuge from Tokyo after his
wife leaves him, retreating to the home of a
famous artist atop a rural mountain. Here he
paints and ruminates, before the discovery
of a strange painting in the attic begins a
mysterious series of events. What follows
is a dizzyingly ambitious and inventive
riff on The Great Gatsby, one that is equal
parts an absurdist coming-of-age story and
bizarre supernatural jaunt, complete with
capricious spirits and ghostly bells. Killing
Commendatore is Murakami’s 14th novel,
and it returns to many of the themes he has
circled around over the course of his career,
including jazz music, metaphysical rabbit
holes and the meaning of art.
The ambitious major new novel from this internationally celebrated writer, on the scale of his bestselling 1Q84
The painter’s wife has left him for a younger man. Taking some time away from Tokyo, he starts looking after the empty house of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. Not long after he moves in, a scraping sound in the attic leads him to find a carefully wrapped canvas, labelled ‘Killing Commendatore’. This unusual painting leads him to delve into Amada’s life story and those of his neighbours. It also brings him into contact with a strange parallel universe, from which the Commendatore himself emerges. When his neighbour’s daughter vanishes, the painter must embark on a quest that leads him back to a tragedy in his own past.
A profound engagement with art and its creation, Killing Commendatore asks whether confronting the past can ever bring comfort, or just more pain? Ambitious, haunting, and multi-layered, it is reminiscent of Murakami’s masterpiece The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and takes his narrative art in new and exciting directions.
ISBN: 9781787300194
Pages: 608