Last weeks were busy, and besides work I also had some great art related experiences: a choir night at Exeter College's Chapel, visiting the National Gallery and an exhibition of Dali drawings and etchings.
But the latest one is that I have finally finished a book again, a book that is not related to my professional work. It is Harumi Murakami's book What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.
As usual the book is written in a very accessible and easy to read style. The vocabulary serves the authors' purposes well, it is not too repetitive. Although, I'm a bit doubtful about the role of the overtly conscious highlighting of the inter-connectedness of the main topics. We are constantly reminded of what the author is at present talking about, why he is doing so, why he thinks he should do so. As if he would need some sort of justification from us to do so. Or as if he would offer aids to the slower readers. I had the hunch that this might be a way of creating a certain atmosphere, but I'm nearly sure that he doesn't retort to such a cheap rhetorical devices. There are better ones, after all.
Murakami handles his topic with care and keeps the discussion of running sufficiently personal not to scare away non-runners. An interesting element is that he stresses many times the lack of stretching in his training, and experiences a gradual speed loss at the time of writing. Of course it is very possible that the speed loss is not the result of the lack of stretching, but one might wonder whether it couldn't do some good for those times.
Now back to the book: I'm always a bit puzzled by Murakami. I read his Norwegian Wood a couple of years ago. At that time I didn't like it. It was a very sad book, about young people lost amid cynics, amid the unexpected cruelty of the world and their own torrent of teenage feelings. Later I learned to like the book. It has a seriousness which I appreciate now, and often when thinking or talking about death, depression or loneliness scenes from that book come back to me as perfectly capturing instances of how ruinous such phenomena might be.
This is ever more puzzling for me, since Murakami's style seems very distant to me. Compared to English, French or American writers I know well - and also Hungarians - he is not personal. No matter whether he is talking about the way his characters feel or about his own transformation from bar owner into novel writer, he still keeps a distance one can feel.
This does not make the book less enjoyable. Maybe one doesn't establish the sort of relationship in one's imagination with the author as one does at other times. (I have a very special relation with Borges: I often imagine him, walking the streets of Buenos Aires, or how he reads, or listens to a reader) But then again, maybe Murakami doesn't want us to establish such a relationship with him.
I mentioned that the language the book uses is fairly simple. This is usually good, but sometimes it is overdone. Evidently, he could use more colorful descriptions, better allegories, symbols. After a time suspicion creeps in that he couldn't. This style is not the result of the influence of minimalism (Murakami translated some of Raymond Chandler's works into Japanese). This style seems sometimes to be the result of not being able to spot interesting connections between phenomena, not being able to tell which details of the world, which stories to tell about. It seems to be the very limit of Murakami's artistic talents. He cannot talk about certain things.
I felt this limitation very sharply when I read Coelho. Murakami is of course a much more interesting and refined writer, but on certain pages one meets the lazy-mans confusion about ordinary psychological or scientific phenomena. The lazy man covers this up with folk psychology, or cheap wisdom. Not that this happens often in Murakami. But it does, and this is bad enough. Coelho, on the other side, is even worse: he has nothing to offer but confusion and shallowness, and then he terms this 'sense of wonder' or 'magic'. Well, it is the sort of magic one might experience while watching the new episode of a sitcom every week.
Murakami is also confused about human nature: at points he emphasizes that we are the collections of character marks, which are our dispositions and cannot be altered. At other times he stresses the importance of using our will to achieve things. We could employ an extremely charitable reading to understand this as meaning that those of us who are disposed to use their willpower should do so. But this is still a bit confused: what else could they do, after all?
What struck me as great in the book were the parts where Murakami describes actual races, days from his life, hints at his complicated but deep relationship with his wife and talks about the phenomenology of running and swimming. These parts are the salt of the book: here Murakami has material to tell us about, here he shows that he is great at giving a taste of real experience in a condensed style. His story about running his first full-length marathon from Athens to Marathon, under the scorching Sun, or the way he summarizes what he feels to be the gain of engaging in long-distance running are great pieces of writing.
These parts of the novel are the ones that show the greatest likeness to those haunting moments of Norwegian Wood. Stark, clear scenes, where what is captured most forcefully is how a person senses a challenge, that some things are against him or her, and has to face them alone.
If one is the type of person who is concerned with the difficulties his or her life keeps in stock for one, if one likes long-distance running, or if one is a fan of Murakami one can like this book. Maybe I'll like it more later, like it happened with Norwegian Wood. Right now it was just a quick, nice read at the start of my holidays. I'm looking forward to enjoy the famous international chamber music festival of Kaposvár (Kaposfest), visit the Rippl-Rónai villa (and read a book about his paintings by István Ghenton) to visit Budapest for a few days and to go for some wine tasting in Pécs.
