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the complete review - fiction

Sputnik Sweetheart

by
Murakami Haruki

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : wistful tale of human relationships

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Most opinions quite favourable, but a lot of uncertainty about the book.

  From the Reviews:

• "Sputnik Sweetheart is a little like an Eric Rohmer film, in that everybody talks incessantly and not always cogently, but their babble matters less than the deeper feelings and human truths it betrays. Alas, it also runs the same risk of appearing slight the moment one abandons the effort of caring." - Patrick Gale, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Sputnik Sweetheart, his latest offering to appear in English, though slighter than some of its predecessors, quickly draws you in and holds you there." - The Economist
  
  
• "As the telling spins and shifts through fantasies and dreamscapes, Sputnik Sweetheart reveals itself as a lyrical tale about the surreal orbits of desire." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Like all Murakami's novels, Sputnik Sweetheart has a dreamlike logic to it, and an irreducible strangeness. (...) It's about love and the loss of love, vocation and the loss of vocation, sexual desire and the loss of that as well. It is a beautiful novel, as light as a feather, and yet enduringly sad." - Jenny Turner, Evening Standard
  
  
• "I'll come right out and say it: I don't really know what Murakami's startling new novel is about. But it has touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I've read in a long time. (...) Murakami has given us a work so much larger and more pungent than the sum of its parts." - Julie Myerson, The Guardian
  
  
• "Sputnik Sweetheart, with its precise but deceptive prose, can be read inside two hours, but is carefully put together like a low-yield time bomb to stay in the mind and throw off associations." - Kim Newman, The Independent
  
  
• "But Sputnik Sweetheart is a story that ends before the novel does -- mainly because this version of the escape-hatch idea is too blunt to be persuasive. People don't vanish through wormholes in the cosmic fabric, no matter how much we might fear or wish they do." - Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "In Sputnik Sweetheart überwiegen bei weitem der sprachliche Flitter und eine hohltönende Weltläufigkeit -- die sich noch so ironisch spritzig geben mag. Umso überzeugender ist ein isoliertes Kapitel gegen Ende des Buches, wo der Erzähler in seinem japanischen Alltag zurück ist" - Franz Haas, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "To describe Murakami's characteristic mode of expression as childlike would be unfair to children: his clunky yet oddly weightless prose often seems to aspire to the banal. By the end of Sputnik Sweetheart in particular (...) we recognise an author who has taken faux naïvete to the next level. And yet there is something bold and exhilarating about Murakami's writing, and always has been" - Julian Loose, New Statesman
  
  
• "(T)he novel suddenly becomes a weird homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. Like that of Anna, who in the film vanishes one night while visiting a tiny Mediterranean island, Sumire's disappearance defies rational explanation. But unlike L'Avventura, which never unravels its central mystery, Murakami does hint at a solution. And that solution is breathtakingly freaky." - Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Murakami's novel is a slippery fish which consistently defies categorisation. He takes the bare bones of a narrative and fleshes it out with the trademark surreal, labyrinthine imagery that has won him legions of fans worldwide. The effect is a dreamlike, detached quality." - Zoe Green, The Observer
  
  
• "Sputnik Sweetheart is remarkable in its simplicity and its ability to present in distilled form a distinctly Murakamian narrative. Yet this strength might also be considered a weakness. Those who have read Murakami's other books might well see Sputnik Sweetheart as a concession: Murakami lite. (...) It is a lucid work of fiction that is more interesting and perhaps more complicated than it initially seems." - Brian Evenson, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "Murakami knows that the most haunting tales never have all their loose ends tied up by the last page, but unlike The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart doesn't leave too many of them unspooled and dangling. It's a tighter book, if less grand and captivating, and the point of this exercise in the uncanny feels more focused." - Laura Miller, Salon
  
  
• "For all its strange and touching beauty, Sputnik Sweetheart is not the best of Murakami's novels. Its flaws have mostly to do with the protracted end, which offers a single instance of hope and communication. Against the novel's darker canvas of abandonment and loneliness, it seems too quick, too easily destroyed." - Francie Lin, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Fortunately, the lunar imagery does not pervade Murakami's depiction of their scalene love triangle. Much of the writing is subtle, and conceits are seldom indulged at the expense of readability. All the same, the spirit of the lunar imagery is discernible in the novel's rather mannered pursuit of cosmic truths." - Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "This slender volume breaks no new ground, but it represents an invigorating synthesis of previous triumphs (.....) Murakami's distinctive voice -- unadorned, colloquial, companionable -- indulges in a few more flights of sustained lyricism than usual. The cosmic metaphor hinted at in the title -- the solitary orbits and enveloping darkness endured by space hardware -- is a little labored, but Murakami abandons it entirely in the bravura final stretch." - Dennis Lim, The Village Voice
  
  
• "The transition to an alternative, bizarre reality is abrupt, and may make Sputnik Sweetheart more of an acquired taste than some of Murakami's previous titles. Though it is just as full of his startlingly apt imagery and deadpan attention to everyday detail, there is a heavier than usual dose of philosophical musing." - Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Sputnik Sweetheart is a tale of unrequited loves and of those who, despite deep and close friendships, remain alone -- all of us, Murakami sometimes seems to suggest. There is the narrator, a young teacher whose name we never learn (beyond the cryptic, Kafkaesque initial K one of the characters uses when referring to him). There is Sumire, the young aspiring novelist he loves. There is Miu -- or a person called Miu (the narrator warns very early on: "I don't know her real name, a fact that caused problems later on") -- who Sumire falls in love with.
       The title is Sumire's "private name" for Miu: she mentions to Miu that she is reading Jack Kerouac, and Miu can't quite think of what kind of novelist he was, mistakenly calling him a Sputnik (instead of a Beatnik). Sputnik also means "traveling companion" in Russian, as Miu discovers, and this is how she feels about Sumire:

(W)e were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Vintage (UK) publicity page
• DuMont publicity page
• Tusquets publicity page

• Baltimore Sun
• Bomb
• Books, Time, and Silence
• Cronache Letterarie
• Daily Telegraph
• The Economist
• Entertainment Weekly
• Geek Culture (Danish)
• Good Reports
• The Guardian
• hack writers
• The Independent
• Ink 19
• JoV's Book Pyramid
• Kirkus Reviews
• Leselust (German)
• The Lit Bitch
• Mindjack Magazine
• New Statesman
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• Oh wait...I forgot.
• The Onion
• Onyx reviews
• The Oxonian Review
• Publishers Weekly
• Rain Taxi
• Running Downhill
• rzzzp
• Salon
• San Francisco Chronicle
• joel seath
• Sgt. Tanuki's Lonely Hearts Club Blog
• taz (German; scroll down for review)
• Tony's Reading List
• Trotsky's Book Club
• The Village Voice
• Wag
• Die Welt (German)
• The Whispering Words

• See the complete review's Murakami Haruki page
• Haruki Murakami - US site

• 1Q84
• After Dark
• After the Quake
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
• The City and its Uncertain Walls
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
• First Person Singular
• Hear the Wind Sing
• Kafka on the Shore
• Killing Commendatore
• Men Without Women
• Norwegian Wood
• Novelist as a Vocation
• Pinball, 1973
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• The Strange Library
• Underground
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• Wind/Pinball: see Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

• A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World
• David Karashima explains Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami
• Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

• See Index of Japanese literature at the complete review
• David Mitchell's Murakamiesque Ghostwritten

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About the Author:

       Japanese author Murakami Haruki (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949. He attended Waseda University. He has written several internationally acclaimed bestsellers and is among the best-known contemporary Japanese writers.

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