Multiple Reading Personalities

I don’t know what is wrong with me lately — I just don’t seem able to get into a book. I did make my struggling way through Antigone and I, and I’m slowly reading the first tome of Les Mille et une nuits (Arabian nights), but I keep postponing Sophocles and… pretty much anything else. Ironic, since for the first time in almost a year (well, ten months), I have enough time on my hands that I could pretty much tackle anything I’d like. I’m allowing myself the break, though, and letting myself waste time reading blogs and articles. Perhaps the blog-thirsty part of my brain has its reasons?

What I talk about when I talk about running was however an easy read, perhaps because of Murakami’s specific qualities. I am a somewhat conflicted Murakami fan – I can absolutely understand why one wouldn’t like him very much, but I always fall under the charm of his white sentences and his flimsy tales. I was a little cautious about this specific book – I don’t run, and this is ostensibly a memoir on running, though it touches on such themes as writing, aging, self-discipline and self-image. I was interested in reading it mostly because I am making my own efforts to adopt a regular exercising discipline. My sport of choice is swimming, which I envision as some sort of active meditation. I felt there might be some things Murakami had to say which would resonate with me. There were, especially in the early pages, and I would certainly recommend that book as a motivational tool for wannabe-healthier bookworms. I also found some reading pleasure in the book, though not as much as in the Murakami novels I have read.

There are two conflicting qualities which I very much enjoy in Murakami: one is a talent for silence (what he doesn’t write or just barely mentions always seems to be the most poignant and most ferocious part of what he has to say), the other is very personal, almost surreal perception of the world, with his knack to incorporate a devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch as the magical element of the world. By “devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch”, I refer to his treatment of a certain modern American iconography from a non-American perspective (witness the use of Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the shore, the title What I talk about etc., the use of music in his work, and so on. And note that I use “American” in the loosest sense – a sense which would for instance allow me to lump in Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky with “American pop culture”). It might be an obtuse conversation to Americans, a recycling of surprisingly-chosen American clichés strung together with masking tape and bubble gum; however, this distorted, childishly-naïve vision of the “outside” and the “beyond” speaks to the distorted, childishly-naïve vision I also developed through whatever American “cultural goods” (!) reached over the ocean and came into my life before I was old enough to process them rationally. It’s a pictorial, emotional rendition of a fantasy. Of course, Murakami’s vision and mine are very different (different ages, different locations; and to make matters worse, some of the oldest lessons I learned about the US were given by manga versions of classics such as Tom Sawyers), but there is a surprising amount of commonalities.

To go back to Murakami’s silences – they are plentiful in What I talk about when I talk about running despite his trying to push himself to articulate certain personal truths. Most of the time, I’m not very convinced by these efforts. When he writes about heading “towards a taciturn, unadorned maturity” or about his supposedly unlikeable personality, his modesty feels like an intermediary truth and disappoints compared to the moments when you are left to infer your own conclusions from a one-sentence description of his wife welcoming him at the end of a race in which he didn’t do well, or when he mentions that the frame of his triathlon bike is inscribed with “’18 Til I die’, the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen”. Killing the “joke” is an interesting way of creating a silence the reader can no longer easily fill (this is not the joke you were expecting from a middle-aged man reflecting on aging). It takes a mundane anecdote to a more interesting state of imbalance. All in all, the quiet, slightly disjointed collection of essays manages to create these empty spaces regularly.

The dreamlike quality of Murakami’s best writing, however is mostly lost here. By dreamlike I don’t mean “ethereal”, but his collage approach to fiction. That’s of course probably to be expected with a book that doesn’t want to be fictional, but I was still a little let down  – I felt Murakami had been trying to channel his writing too vigorously, that he had let go of the “use your imagination” explicitly whispered to him by his instinct. There are a couple passages when that innate fantasy is perceptible (for instance when comparing himself to “Danton or Robespierre eloquently attempting to persuade the dissatisfied and rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal, [trying] to talk each body part into showing a little cooperation”, before remembering what happened to Danton and Robespierre; or when he repeatedly refers to global warming as a “villain”); but all in all, his unique way to feel seemed diluted. The rhythm of the writing still felt right in its flair for the right detail, for snappy titles and in the dialogue feel of the argument (I know nothing about Japanese literature so cannot form any kind of definite opinion on this, but it seems to me that there is a rhythm to American-English dialogue that informs Murakami’s writing – adverbs used as a conclusion at the end of a paragraph or as a sentence introduction, a sort of concessive balance of sentences often starting in “but” or “and”, a relaxed “whatever-ness”…).

I realize what I just wrote might seem fairly negative – not that it was a bad book, but in that it was not the best Murakami… Of course! And yet the book got me thinking for a couple of days, and I even got a copy for a friend who is a runner. Isn’t it strange how the more you read and try to think about your reading, the more layered and inconclusive your thinking seems to get?