Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed the book as ‘a tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art — as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby’. Anyone familiar with Murakami’s 17 preceding novels can vouch for
Novels today do not want to be done. Thank Anthony Burgess and John Fowles for this, most immediately, but alternate endings, or the purposeful failure to finish, run long and deep in fiction in English, all the way back to Laurence Sterne and ‘I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s —.’ Modern novels shear
‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ Lord Henry Wotton said that. It is always better to read Bob Dylan than to read about him. I said that. Two new books by Dylan, and two about him, prove my point. Just out
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936. Fitzgerald may not have liked it, but he certainly let himself in for it. As he wrote, with a grin, in 1937: ‘Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short
