Paul Fulcher's Reviews > What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I finally reach the end. Strangely, have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to runread this book anymore.

I started this book with two prejudices.

First, that the most tedious dinner party conversations typically start with your interlocutor telling you they are in training to run a marathon.

Secondly that an author’s work should stand alone from the author - I am with Elena Ferrante here - and that writers writing about themselves or even, perhaps particularly, their writing habits add nothing to their works. The rare exceptions tend to be authors who are a) extraordinary writers and b) whose write their autobiographies in the style of their novels (Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Thomas Bernhard).

This book did nothing to dispel either view.

Murakami is also no prose stylist, at least as rendered into English. In his novels this doesn’t entirely matter as his prosaic sentences are enlivened by his fantastic imagination, but writing non-fiction one loses that. Take away the talking vanishing cats, girls with pointy ears and the bottom of wells and there is little left.

So here for example when discussing his return to Cambridge (the lesser version) and the Charles River we are blessed with the insight that “I’d aged ten years, and there’d literally been a lot of water under the bridge.” Or that the profound thoughts he has while running include “on cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days.”

There are a tiny handful of interesting nuggets in here about how Murakami became a novelist, perhaps just about enough to make a good New Yorker article, but it doesn’t make for a compelling book when one has to wade through running logs (why would anyone else care how many miles he ran in August 2005?! Or what time he did in the New York marathon?) to dig them out. And even with the nuggets it is more interesting to read the versions of his life as represented in his fiction (e.g. loner starts a jazz cafe) than here.

He may have been better writing a book about his bowel habits. More universal and of greater relevance to books (reading at least). And imagine if he had done so and we were greeted by comments such as - books are like bowel movements: sometimes one rushes out of you while others are only squeezed out with lots of time, effort and even pain. Genuinely that is the level of the 'running is like writing a book' insights we get here.

Tedious and not at all illuminating.