Monday 18 May 2009

Busy - running+writing

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is another writing surprise of Murakami. He wrote about Beatles songs, many adventures of imaginations, as well as about the case of Aum sect. The title is a rephrasing of Raymond Carver's book What We Talk When We Talk about Love (the conclusion: my use of the word "love" is different of yours; the senses are different and sometimes it is not much to do about this, once we try to translate our feelings into words).

I both have the experience of running and writing. The first as a daily exercise, plus reading plus infinite wondering of observing the world around (humans including). I cannot establish exactly when it started as I cannot imagine either living without. The running hobby is no more than a hobby, practiced from time to time.

In a way, they are some similarities between the two, but at various levels. Running is about setting yourself physical limits and practicing how to reach it. Writing is a more complicate business, dealing with the capacity of translating into words various - and sometimes chaotic personal and intellectual experiences -, needs practice too, but you never know exactly what your limits are and the standards are rather diluting and diminishing your creativity. (If your stake is to write as Proust, probably your performance will be to be a perfect pastiche of Proust, your perspective on the world being nothing more, nothing less than Proust's; nothing else to ad on this). Writing is about the capacity to share your own translation of the word, as in any artistic demarche. I can live one day, one month, one year without running. Without writing one day, it is hardly to live with.

One of the advantages of a good writer is to have the capacity to tell stories about everything, to share it with the others. When I first saw the book, I was curious how Murakami sees this. That's the business of the writer. I am curious what his next book will be about.

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