A Japanese movie based on the Haruki Murakami story “Tony Takitani” will get a US release this summer, according to this report. The film will have its North American debut at Sundance this Sunday. Meanwhile the Village Voice says Murakami’s new book Kafka on the Shore “is so strange that even its chestnuts take on an air of mystery.”
An excerpt from Campo Santo, a travelogue of Corsica by the late WG Sebald, is up at the Guardian. The book will be out in the US in March.
I’m still curious about the two novels coming out this year that will have illustrated or photographic components: Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. How will these illustrative elements be presented? Will they add to or take away from the reading experience? A blogger reading the German translation of Queen Loana describes the book as “over 500 densely printed pages sprinkled through with images, reproductions of art, old magazine covers, pictures of everyday household objects from the 30s and 40s, etc., etc. Basically, a sort of menagerie of Eco’s childhood.” For what it’s worth, 137 pages in, she isn’t very impressed with the book. I know that review copies of Extremely Loud are circulating, so maybe we’ll hear more about that one soon.
