The City and Its Uncertain Walls

ByHaruki Murakami & Philip Gabriel

Release Date: 2024-11-19
Genre: Literary Fiction

Score: 4

From 125 Ratings

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he is heartbroken – and determined to find the imaginary town where he suspects she has taken up residence. Thus begins a lifelong search that takes the man into middle age, to a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own, and on a journey between the real world and this otherworld: a shadowless city where unicorns roam and willow trees grow.

There he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he must decide what he is willing to lose.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times– and singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword

Reviews

An Uncertain Message
3
By Richard Bakare
This book is classic Murakami from the first paragraph. However, in the end I’m not really sure what I read. This massive tome of a book is a meandering Magical Realism journey in Murakami style. Even Murakami wrestled with how to contain this story as he explains in the afterwards. While I did not hate it, I do find it hard to square its complexity and nuances into anything cohesive.

At best this is a coming of age drama that is expansive in scope, imagination, and themes. At other times it felt like escapism rooted in a disdain for the blandness of reality. With dreams and fantasy being the means for removing yourself from what’s in front of you. The philosophical aspects of dreaming and where the dreamscape you started and ended was the most interesting part for me.

At times the dream sequences reminded me of layer three of the dream as represented in the movie Inception. Mal and Dom build a city scape all their own but bereft of life. The lie of escapism. The mind becomes a city in its own that you can’t escape from. There was one jaw dropping moment that comes nearly at the very end but didn’t really move the story along to a meaningful conclusion.
Magic realism? No…
1
By Gary_P_Bagnall59
Cliche riddled nonsense. Shadows, Kafka’s Castle monumentally ripped off.., coupled with old doppelgänger, multiverse ideas. This is not magic realism. Marquez’s “one hundred years of solitude” is MR… where did it go wrong from “wind up bird…” and “Norwegian wood”?
It’s ridiculous
1
By JohnVos
I’ve always enjoyed Murakami’s writings, but reading this last one was a total waste of my time-he’s burned out.
READ ALL THE WAY THROUGH….
5
By juliusa
This is one to be read all the way through , without another book getting in the way. While it moves quickly, it also doesn’t move too quickly. While it appears somewhat repetitious, it reflects a repetitive routine life. Our walls we build lock us in to that repetitive life, lock us in to past dreams and don’t allow us to move on, keep shifting and thus making it hard to appreciate what we have and grow beyond the walls create fact from fiction despite all our knowledge. Guess you can tell from this there is much to walk away with from this gem. Allow it to happen. It’s a great book.