Haruki Murakami Review Part Five- A Wild Sheep Chase

Looking over other reviews on the internet, this appears to be a highly respected Murakami work. In previous reviews, the works that I've found most frustrating have still been highly paised, unfortunatley this is not the case. Unlike a lot of Murakami fans I do not have unlimited patience with surreality. If this type of writing works in the plot, or makes some earth shattering point, then it is accessible, or even preferable. However, when it fails to do this it just becomes boring. Discussons over why the cat has not been named because it is just a lump, is plain boring and sometimes almost unbearable. Unlike other works in this case the surreality does not jar with the earlier realist work in the first 100 pages or so, because the opening failed to attract my interest equally. In fact, for the first time in a Murakami work I had to fight to persuade myself to continue early on. The dialogue in much of this work is frustrating and tiresome. Equally the section on Pan Asian history was so dull that I was not sure whether the author was now joking, though even if he was it was an annoying pratical joke only the author could enjoy. Overall, the only Murakami work that I'd consider a total failure and one to which I will not return.