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A review by shrutislibrary
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
4.0
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
In the past, I've only had a passing acquaintance with Murakami and his work, having read 'Birthday Girl' and 'The Strange Library' but somehow I was drawn to his non-fiction.
'What I talk about when I talk about running' is too short to be a memoir and too loosely structured to be an essay. It's rather a meditation on the life Murakami lived before he embarked on the path to be a writer and the life he built after he decided to become a writer and took up running as a means to sustain his writer's life.
I have often wondered if when writing about their lives and placing themselves at the centre of a work of non-fiction, writers do not tend to imbue into their words a certain light of imaginative romanticism. Or else how could they remember a little kind gesture of a stranger passing by? Or the direction of the wind caressing their face when all seems to be lost cause in a moment of imminent failure and giving it a momentous value in the grander scheme of things to tell a personal narrative in a certain way. Well, Murakami does all of that, but he is painfully aware that there is no single grand life lesson or unified philosophy of living to be imparted at the end of this book. He is just an average writer and maybe a more than average runner (his words, I'm just paraphrasing lol) in a fiercely competitive world where there are many people with more talent than he has.
Murakami says that long-distance running has taught him a critical lesson in writing: the only person he has to compete with is himself, to achieve a personal best, and beat the previous time every time he puts on his running shoes and runs on the beaten track. The same holds when he writes a novel. He has to give it his all each time when he puts pen to paper.
To Murakami, running is then akin to writing. Being a self-proclaimed writer of middling talent who didn't even have particular ambitions of being a novelist one day until he turned 30 and decided one fine day while watching a baseball game that he had an intense desire to write a novel, Murakami ascribes that the only way he can write is the way he runs: he just does it every day, without a miss (well most days). Those 3-4 hours in the morning, he knows he gives his single-minded devotion to the task at hand: be it writing or running.
I am neither a runner nor a writer. But he is both of those things. Yet what could a renowned writer at 73 (though he wrote this book when he was well past 55) and a 24-year-old nobody has in common you ask? We are both flawed human beings trying to figure out life. And this short non-fiction was the perfect antidote to clear out things in my head as I find myself at a similar crossroads in life like Murakami did at 33.
In the past, I've only had a passing acquaintance with Murakami and his work, having read 'Birthday Girl' and 'The Strange Library' but somehow I was drawn to his non-fiction.
'What I talk about when I talk about running' is too short to be a memoir and too loosely structured to be an essay. It's rather a meditation on the life Murakami lived before he embarked on the path to be a writer and the life he built after he decided to become a writer and took up running as a means to sustain his writer's life.
I have often wondered if when writing about their lives and placing themselves at the centre of a work of non-fiction, writers do not tend to imbue into their words a certain light of imaginative romanticism. Or else how could they remember a little kind gesture of a stranger passing by? Or the direction of the wind caressing their face when all seems to be lost cause in a moment of imminent failure and giving it a momentous value in the grander scheme of things to tell a personal narrative in a certain way. Well, Murakami does all of that, but he is painfully aware that there is no single grand life lesson or unified philosophy of living to be imparted at the end of this book. He is just an average writer and maybe a more than average runner (his words, I'm just paraphrasing lol) in a fiercely competitive world where there are many people with more talent than he has.
Murakami says that long-distance running has taught him a critical lesson in writing: the only person he has to compete with is himself, to achieve a personal best, and beat the previous time every time he puts on his running shoes and runs on the beaten track. The same holds when he writes a novel. He has to give it his all each time when he puts pen to paper.
To Murakami, running is then akin to writing. Being a self-proclaimed writer of middling talent who didn't even have particular ambitions of being a novelist one day until he turned 30 and decided one fine day while watching a baseball game that he had an intense desire to write a novel, Murakami ascribes that the only way he can write is the way he runs: he just does it every day, without a miss (well most days). Those 3-4 hours in the morning, he knows he gives his single-minded devotion to the task at hand: be it writing or running.
I am neither a runner nor a writer. But he is both of those things. Yet what could a renowned writer at 73 (though he wrote this book when he was well past 55) and a 24-year-old nobody has in common you ask? We are both flawed human beings trying to figure out life. And this short non-fiction was the perfect antidote to clear out things in my head as I find myself at a similar crossroads in life like Murakami did at 33.