Ilse is on page 138 of 236 of A Woman: I realized that my critical facility had seemingly expanded and intensified; and that I had a kind of heartfelt nostalgia for all the things that my education had lacked. Poetry, music, the arts of colour and form remained almost unknown to me, while the whole of my body longed for the rapture they might bring; the thought by which I lived sometimes wanted to take flight, to mingle with light and with sound.

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There is a passage in this quite early on that refers to love arriving out of nowhere like a tornado. It's just a pity this novel couldn't produce the power and unforgettable nature of one of them. This was a pretty weak effort when compared to some of his others. For me, the Murakami magic touch just wasn't there. Never mind a tornado, this had about as much force as a mouse passing wind. Something tells me I should gone with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle instead. One thing I will say as a positive though, is that Sputnik Sweetheart was never predictable. It shifted into a different kettle of fish about halfway in, with the mysterious disappearance on a Greek island of one of its main characters, and a Ferris wheel ride that goes into the realms of a hypnotic other worldly state. I thought it might at least start to get suspenseful and unsettling, but I found it to be neither. On an emotional level too, despite themes of loneliness, isolation and yearning within the narrative, the female characters of Sumire and Miu didn't leave me feeling much. The narrator, K, who clearly liked Sumire a lot; getting uncontrollable hard-ons in her presence, only became more of a character I felt something for around the time it was all about to end. The most I've ever been moved by Murakami characters; right deep down inside, was in South of the Border, West of the Sun. That was miles better than this."

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Despite this having 'the End of the World' in it's title, I felt there was very little of the foreboding and eerie feeling from something like 'After Dark', which, in my opinion, is vastly underrated, and easily the best novel I've read by him so far. That felt more like a nightmarish noir; one that really got under my skin, while this effort fell more into the realms of Studio Ghibli fantasy and sci-fi, which isn't really my thing. I liked the double narrative style; which actually wasn't as complex as I thought it would be, so it's relatively easy to read, and Murakami's use of linguistic trickery; which appears every now and again, was pretty cool. Again there are lots of western culture references; which seems to be one of his specialities, and characters that seem to have sex on their minds at the strangest of times: like crawling through a sewer, is another thing I've noticed in some of his other work too. Someone mentioned this is like a cross between Kafka and Philip K. Dick, and I can kind of see what that person was getting at. I'd also add that I could see from one of the two narratives, a little bit of The Tartar Steppe in there too. Yes, I quite liked this; I was intrigued for the most part, but on the downside, the characters felt far too flat-minded; much like cardboard cutouts, meaning there is very little emotion in the story; if any, and even though it sounds wildly imaginative and inventive, we do get fobbed off a bit, and I found a promising theme; that of the narrators shadow: which seemed to hold all the answers, just dwindled and went nowhere in the end."

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I must be one of only a few that didn't think a great deal of Master and Margarita. Not that it was bad, I just didn't think of it as the masterpiece I expected, generally brought on by all the hype surrounding it. Personally, I much preferred The White Guard, of which the subject matter interested me far more, but neither could match Heart of a Dog, which I loved. This is one of the last books Bulgakov wrote, and I felt it the closest of his novels to Nabokov. Although it didn't see the light of day until 1967 this black satire explores the problem of censorship from much earlier on and which plagued Bulgakov and many other writers like him. First gaining success as a playwright, this satirical comedy revisits his theatre days, probably with the intention of settling some old scores in the process. The Moscow Art Theatre was likely high on his mind, with Black Snow's principal characters being indisputable caricatures of theatre practitioners like Konstantin Stanislavski among others.
Propelled into the world of egomania, work contracts, and backstage squabbles after his woeful novel is turned into a play, Maxudov chronicles his experiences with a clinical eye for the absurd. He simply falls in love with his new tag as a playwright, and doesn't want to be away from this world for a second, but he soon finds out the theatre is not the magic place it had once seemed, and its two cocksure co-directors have not been on speaking terms for years. Filled with some dazzling set pieces, we get petty animosities, intrigues, clashing egos, and above all, the absurdities of the Theatre's famous Method. Maxudov is obliged to cut, alter, substitute his play, and in the end its beyond recognition. Rehearsals drag for so long that with the off season coming on, he suddenly acknowledges that production may never materialise. Maxudov's lethal treatment at the hands of the literary elite is superbly carried through, and unlike Bulgakov who in reality didn't have the luxury to criticise or rant and rave, Maxudov does so accordingly."