What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Opening with the quietly striking maxim 'Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional', this memoir from Haruki Murakami is a surprisingly intimate portrait of one of the world's most private literary figures. It's part personal history, part training diary, part philosophical ramble, and it works beautifully on all three levels. The story begins in 1982, when Murakami closed his jazz bar and turned to writing full-time. To keep his body in some kind of order while his mind did the heavy lifting, he took up running. What followed was a lifelong relationship with the sport, including a solo run from Athens to Marathon, and eventually dozens of long-distance races across the globe. The book centres on his four-month build-up to the 2005 New York City Marathon, weaving between locations with a quiet restlessness. Readers move from the leafy paths of Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens (where Murakami once found himself sharing a course with an Olympic athlete) to the windswept banks of the Charles River in Boston. It's a genuine travelogue as much as a runner's confession. What makes this so readable is its tonal variety. Murakami shifts between dry humour and genuine introspection, lightness and weight, often within the same paragraph. He draws thoughtful connections between the discipline running demands and the solitary endurance required to produce a novel. Fans of his fiction will find this a rare window into the man behind the books. Runners, meanwhile, will recognise themselves on almost every page. You don't need to have crossed a finish line to find it captivating, but it might just convince you to lace up and try.
- Author: Haruki Murakami
- Publisher: Vintage
- Genre: Science Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0099526155
- Pages: 192 pages