Having now read all of Murakami’s books thus far, I wanted to like this more than I did. Something about the structure of the story seems rickety and unbalanced—the various layers of narrative a little misaligned. It could be that the main protagonist is a bit of an unbelievable 15-year-old runaway (seeking the mother who abandoned him when he was young) or that a supporting character introduced halfway through the book seems to have more resonating revelations.
It also could be that the mystical metaphors are never really grounded. There’s an old man who was the sole victim of a mysterious wartime incident and can’t read or use pronouns consistently but can speak to cats. Somehow he can make fish and leeches fall from the sky, yet follows a mission without seeing farther than his next step. A few characters take the shape of marketing mascots for no relevant reason that I can discern. While I like a little open-endedness, a lot of major points of the story are frustratingly vague.
I’d like to hope that some nuances just didn’t make it into the translation, but the last few chapters felt overwrought and unfinished.
Just after I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves a friend recommended this book, as another take on the funny grammar book. It’s more about linguistics than grammar and namely how English came to be such a world dominant language. The history of how English evolved is certainly the best part, especially learning why there are so many inconsistent spellings and pronunciations. It gets a little less hilarious and interesting in the late chapters of the book, but it must have been better than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as it was due a few days ago at the library and I’ve been racking up a fine while I finished it up.
The weird thing is how much I enjoy reading the HP books and how little I have to say about them. Though in this case, it’s partially that everything I want to talk about would be a spoiler. I can say that this book seems to exist primarily as a set-up for the grand finale—which kind of sucks since it will probably be a couple of years until we see it.
Any grand theories can be addressed via email.
Starting off with the question of whether gardeners could be “human bumblebees,” essentially goaded into spreading plants around much like bees assist in pollination, Pollan continues on to examine the histories of four key cultivated plants under the shadow of this question. He organizes them into categories of desire: sweetness (the apple), beauty (the tulip), intoxication (marijuana), and control (the potato). In the face of the sheer enormity of plants in the world, his choices can seem arbitrary to the degree where he could have picked the plants that most readily prove his point, but at the same time they seem fairly representative of the extensive different motivations for growing plants.
His arguments and questions are persuasive, and he has plenty of intriguing plant facts to interest the fairly unread, casual plant grower.
