Insidious: sneaky demons lead family "Further"

If “it’s not the house that’s haunted,” as the tagline promises, then why does director James Wan spend the listless opening credit sequence for Insidious doling out one conventionally creepy haunted house image after another (and solemnly fading to black after each and every one)? Perhaps under the persuasion of co-producer Oren Peli (creator of the mega-smash new-old school chiller Paranormal Activity), Wan’s affectionate deployment of tried-and-true creaky horror tropes is, in theory at least, more than welcome in the era of torture and mutilation as entertainment (an era Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell helped cultivate with their Saw franchise). The problem is that these tropes feel almost arbitrary in their placement. But then so many items in Insidious feel arbitrary.

The first member of the Lambert family we meet is Renai (Rose Byrne), the second Dalton (Ty Simpkins). Mother and son both rise early and wear matching pajamas. They seem to share a quiet curiosity and a connection distinct from those shared by the other members of the family. Renai, a struggling songwriter, is diminutive in figure and seems especially vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be the character most tormented by apparitions and inexplicable sounds (the haunted baby monitor makes its token entrance early on) that accumulate in the film’s slow burning first act. But it’s her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson, as always, looking like he’s hiding something) that intrigues. Hints are dropped rather heavily that there’s something untrustworthy about him. He doesn’t like to be photographed. He’s a schoolteacher but seems awkward with kids. He stays late at work when he knows Renai is stuck at home, deeply upset by the weird disturbances, minding three kids, and single-handedly nesting. Josh also snores loudly, and rubs some dandyish cream under his eyes before bed.

Soon Dalton has an accident in the attic and winds up in a coma that the doctors can’t make sense of. That his coma seems directly connected to the by now unambiguously paranormal activity (a premise that could almost resemble something out of a Haruki Murakami novel) is the thing that got me especially interested in Insidious. But a major switch in tone and tack occurs at the film’s mid-point. The Lamberts move house but the shadowy figures keep a-comin’. What was previously only suggested, sometimes rather effectively so, suddenly becomes all too visible and really, really dumb looking. Steam punk heavies, a red-faced boogeyman and many kooky, pancake make-up wearing, formally dressed phantoms turn up, looking like rejects from Carnival of Souls. A spiritualist is consulted, accompanied by a pair of bumbling ghost busters (one of whom is played by Whannell), and a whole over-complicated mythology begins to establish itself surrounding a normally invisible parallel realm called “the Further.” The aforementioned connection between Renai and Dalton turns out to have no consequence. Barbara Hershey arrives on the scene, conjuring horrorphile memories of The Entity, but ultimately for no special reason. Much of what’s set up during the first act gets shelved. Josh eventually is induced into an out-of-body experience and travels to the Further where he gets into an astral fistfight with a demon and wins, whatever that means. Insidious can’t quite decide what it wants to be, though the real problem is that what it promised to be might have been so much more satisfying.

Impossible constructions: murderous marital exit strategies manifest in Mr. Peanut

Escher's Relativity, 1953

“When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” The first sentence is already Hitchcokian, drawing us very calmly toward this floating idea, giving words to deep, dark, utterly common fantasies. The first chapter describes David and Alice Pepin’s marriage, 13 years old, childless, and affluent, thanks to David’s successful as a designer of video games, some of which share this novel’s debt to M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist who “invited and then thwarted you efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped.” Marriage, its potential for ecstasy, but more pointedly its looping traps, is the theme of Mr. Peanut (HarperCollins, $32.99), US author Adam Ross’ debut. Ross’ grasp of the pitfalls of marriage, of habit and blame, anxiety and miscommunication, is extraordinary and offers little comfort. The vow states till death do us part. Perhaps, sometimes, it’s only natural for one to want death to hurry up already. The walls are closing in.

Adam Ross

There are three marriages—actually four, once we count the stories within stories in Ross’ Escher-esque design. There’s David and Alice, but David’s secretly writing a book, imagining his life as a crime novel, so there’s also “David and Alice,” and this second Alice may or may not have been murdered by David. She’s found on the kitchen floor, having died from anaphylactic shock after eating—or perhaps being force-fed—peanuts. Investigating Detective Hastroll is convinced Pepin’s guilty, perhaps because he understands the matricidal impulse. Hastroll’s wife is, not unlike Alice, nightmarishly passive-aggressive. She hasn’t gotten out of bed for months and won’t tell him why. “Men dream of starting over,” Ross writes. “They dream of a clean slate, of disappearing, of walking off a plane on a layover and making a new life for themselves in a strange city… Sitting in the living room, in his favorite chair, with his wife sobbing in her bed for hours on end, Hastroll understood this dream. Sit alone in the dark long enough, he thought, and it seems worth killing for.”

Hastroll’s partner is Detective Sam Sheppard, as in Dr. Sam Sheppard, who in 1954 may or may not have murdered Marilyn Sheppard, whose case may or may not have inspired the television show The Fugitive and its subsequent film version. Sheppard was convicted, imprisoned, and then later had his conviction overturned and was released. He died in 1970. In Mr. Peanut, he’s alive and well and on the NYPD payroll, yet still shares his real-life counterpart’s tragic past. In Ross’ most evocative narrative strand, the events leading up to Marilyn Sheppard’s death are described in great detail, especially Sheppard’s philandering, which Sheppard at one point considers part of some horrific karmic equation: “…at times he saw her death as being inextricably intertwined with their love, the terrible and logical conclusion of their togetherness, the culmination of a pattern of behaviour on his part that he’d been conscious of but waited too long to put to a stop.”

There are also characters like Nathan Harold, the sensitive, wise, possibly telepathic “disaster liaison” for United Airlines. Like Mobius, the dwarfish wifekiller-for-hire who prompts Sheppard to tell his story from his holding cell, Harold resembles a character out of Haruki Murakami at his most fantastic, not quite of this world yet vivid, and serving a clear narrative purpose. Both are surprisingly compelling, and their perspectives feel integral to the novel.

Dr. Sam Sheppard

Here’s what doesn’t feel integral: a number of overwritten passages, such as the one describing David and Alice's fateful hike in Hawaii, and the two university professors who turn up at the end to hold forth at considerable length on Hitchcock, marriage, and feminism, needlessly announcing themes Ross repeatedly implies elsewhere. Mr. Peanut is comprised of a rich and eerily resonant pair murder mysteries in service of an even better meditation in marriage. It threads its multiple narratives in a manner that’s intricate and fascinating, though its references to Hitchcock are excessive and simplistic, and it seems to want to be a closed circuit and offer a conclusion simultaneously. I’m willing to forgive everything because Ross’ prose is so precise, his observations so insightful, and his ambition is as laudable as it is overextended. The author is, for the record, happily married with children, and living in Nashville, Tennessee.

2000s: the decade in books

For the moment at least, most of us still read books that take up physical space. Scanning our libraries to recall a decade’s reading requires movement. We walk from shelf to shelf in search of that terrific title that nearly slipped our minds. I’ve always sensed a kinship between walking, writing, and reading, the steps taken from one word to the next, the meditative spell we’re placed under, the small choices that lead us farther from home, or deeper into story. I’m going to write about my most treasured books of the century’s first decade as I find them, slip them off the shelf, flip through the pages, and remember.


Austerlitz
The late W.G. Sebald was very much the walker/writer, crafting unclassifiable books we’ll call novels for ease. He meets a man in Antwerp, an architectural historian concerned “with the shape and the self-contained nature of discreet things.” Their friendship develops over decades of accidental encounters. Slowly we learn Austerlitz’s story. He was an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. He was raised by a Calvinist preacher in Wales. Slowly Sebald unravels one of the most singular of Holocaust narratives, an immensely engrossing tale of memories recovered. And Sebald’s prose moves not ponderously but one step at a time, stopping to take note of faces and places, objects, voices, hidden spaces, the palimpsest and residue of history. As you read him you sense that the book could go anywhere, yet in the end it only goes where it was meant to all along.


Here is Where We Meet
Did John Berger ever run into Sebald on one of his walks? It could still happen. In the first chapter of Here is Where We Meet Berger encounters his mother while wandering through Lisbon—he recognizes her by her walk. She’s been dead for 15 years. Now in his 80s, Berger remains one of literature’s great nomads. Moving from city to city, meeting or remembering people from his past, this is his most visionary writing of the last decade. To read him is to feel as though you're touching something, smelling something. He gives us back the sensual world like few writers can.


The Body Artist
“You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.” Don DeLillo ended the 20th century with a mammoth masterwork. He started the 21st with this compact, fragmentary novella. I for one think it's been vastly under-appreciated. The first part describes a domestic morning with startling clarity, a couple, moving in the same space, sometimes listening to each other, sometimes blinded by routine. Someone dies. Soon after a ghostly visitor appears. The titular protagonist interprets the whole experience into something essentially wordless, yet her performance is hauntingly described through DeLillo’s prose.


Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson’s the patron saint of fuck-ups. He renders lyrical the depths of human folly. This sprawling epic about Americans embroiled in grotesque misadventures at home and abroad is a blackly comic history of Vietnam, among other things. A CIA operative whose uncle is some goofy 20th century Colonel Kurtz; the Houston brothers, familiar from Johnson’s Angels; a Canadian aid worker and Seventh Day Adventist: these are our sherpas along the mountain. Misunderstandings, dubious ambitions, and fraught friendships forged with Southeast Asians line an unruly tale both hilarious and appalling.


2666
What to make of the posthumous English-language celebrity of Roberto Bolaño, so eerily in keeping with the morbid enigmas buried in his stories? The Savage Detectives would have been enough to cement his reputation, but then we got this. He wanted this last work divided into five novellas, so as to accumulate more royalties for his children after his death. This request was thankfully denied—I hope his kids are eating well. The colossal power of 2666 lies partly in its sustained tonal focus, which tethers together the stories of adventurous young European scholars, an American journalist, an elusive German novelist, a lonely single father, and a number of disparate Mexicans linked to the murder of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictionalized Ciudad Juarez, into a global geometry of trauma, longing, and obsession. It’s one of the most exhausting and harrowing books I’ve ever read. At times I felt nausea. I can’t wait to read it again.


Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell’s eloquently structured Russian doll novel cradles within it science fiction, a Grishamesque corporate thriller, and letters, spanning the 19th century to the post-apocalyptic future. Tales within tales, each one read by a character in the next, build upon one another until they pass through the mirror in the book’s centre. The individual narratives are mostly simple to describe, but the book as a whole defies synopsis. Sorry.


The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s best work since his truly sublime jazz chronicle But Beautiful is a paragon of associational rigour. (Mostly) American photography is his vast subject, though it's wonderful when he makes room for Hiroshi Sugimoto, say. A disciple of Berger, whom he wrote about when very young, Dyer’s guided from image to image by impulses founded in history, biography, art criticism, conjecture, and the labyrinth of magnetic details in the photos themselves that catch his magpie eye.


Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami is always fun, always extravagantly imaginative, always sequestering his heroes in some sort of wilderness—that’s usually when the weirdness starts. A teenage runaway and an aging simpleton share a destiny. Guidance is gleaned from cats and rocks. There’s a murder mystery enveloping this coming of age novel, among the most ambitious in Murakami’s oeuvre.


The Fortress of Solitude, Then We Came to the End
They came from Brooklyn, but only the first, Jonathan Lethem’s quasi-fantastical, pop culture-addled, semi-autobiographical epic, is a remembrance of Brooklyn past, a story of interracial friendship founded in music, graffiti, art, comics, and broken families. Oh yeah, and a super-powered ring. Joshua Ferris’ insightful, very funny novel, a terrific debut, written in first-person collective, is actually set in a Chicago advertising agency. It’s about work, but it’s also about fleeting forms of togetherness.


Miracles of Life
J.G. Ballard is the third author in this little library walk to have died sometime in our new century’s first decade. (Oddly enough he had a special kinship with Jean Baudrillard, who also died, back in 2007, and whom I’m still getting around to reading someday. And speaking of kinships, that David Cronenberg chose to adapt Ballard’s Crash for the screen surely marks one of the most uncannily apt collaborations between two complimentary sensibilities in the history of art.) Whether through science-fiction or merely something like it, Ballard did so much to make us look differently at our minds and bodies, at our memories and our social strategies, at our technologies as extensions of ourselves, at our cities and buildings and boundaries, at our fantasies, perhaps most of all. But his final book was a memoir, and while he published a number of excellent novels in the 2000s, all of them variations on the same, deeply compelling narrative, this memoir somehow seems to me the greater accomplishment. (Is this the case as well with David Thomson? I treasure his writing on film more than almost any other critic, and The Whole Equation is now among my favourite books about Hollywood ever. But Try to Tell the Story, in which he recalls his postwar London childhood and his father's double life, awakens his readers to something altogether different in his prose, something to do with his ability to connect with the sense of loss and wild ambition he writes about with regards to Orson Welles, for example.) From Miracles of Life, I remember especially how he wrote about the corpses he would dissect in medical school as palimpsests of experience, how he wrote about Saskatchewan, where he spent some time in his youth, how he wrote about coping with the loss of his wife and the mother of his children, whom he had to raise on his own while trying to maintain a career as a writer. It’s so strange when writers die. They only existed for most of us on the page, and on the page they live still. Somehow I can still hear Ballard’s voice.


Invisible
Paul Auster—another Brooklynite!—has been on fire as of late—seven novels in ten years. He works diligently on stories that tumble into other stories, testaments to the fact that every one of us is a storyteller. Invisible may be the best of his recent work—in any case it’s the latest. (He’s but one of a number of novelists who churned out one solid book after another in the 2000s. I think of so many good ones from César Aira, Cormac McCarthy, Horacio Castellanos Moya, José Saramago… But I’m trying to draw this to a close here.) A man recalls a turning point in his youth, when he met a Satanic scholar and his lovely, younger wife, who endow the youth with knowledge of eros and death. This story, the first part of the book, is sent to an old friend, a professional writer, who then assumes the authorship of what we’re reading, and delves into still more perverse secrets in the first man’s past. Both of these men, the authors of the first and second parts, have much in common with Auster, but these commonalities highlight the trickster in Auster above all. Divided into four parts, Invisible shifts from place to place, from author to author, from first to second to third person, and then to the form of a diary. Some of these shifts seem designed as coping mechanisms; some imply crucial discrepancies. These discrepancies prompt the question: when does the past become fiction? Is it not happening every moment? And is storytelling not the most durable balm against our histories being swallowed into the fog?

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

Make mine a double: Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances

This is probably not the right place to talk about how I once saw my own double, many years back, and about the usual trauma such events wreak, but maybe you’ve seen your double, too, or thought you did, or looked for it in a moving crowd reflected in some shop window. In any case you too might harbour some persistent fascination with doubles, especially if you’re a reader of fiction, where they crop up in the damnedest places, generally as harbingers of doom, sometimes as shocked by seeing their supposed original as the supposed original is by them, stunned by that pit-of-your-stomach feeling and that little voice that whispers, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

In the canonical works of Hoffmann, Dostoyevsky, and Poe, in the great crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, Frederic Brown and Boileau-Narcejac, in contemporary novels and stories from the likes of Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro and José Saramago, doubles loom forbiddingly, (over-)populating a great number of my favourite books. So I confess that when I picked up Rivka Galchen’s debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances (HarperCollins, $29.95), I was sold on the first sentence: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” That was pretty much all it took. That and the strange ink drawings that enveloped the book. But this admittedly thru-the-back-door entry into a book review is my way of trying to impart just how refreshing Galchen’s approach to a certain beloved trope is. Atmospheric Disturbances is much more than a simulacrum of the old double myth. It’s a very sly, and very entertaining spin on the blurring effects of modern life and the heights of panic that afflict those who find themselves troublingly in love.

They tell us that, at the atomic level, we supposedly regenerate ourselves every seven years or so, which means that by middle-age we’ve somehow died and been replaced, or replicated, if you will, about seven times. Somebody says to their spouse, “You’re not the person I married fourteen years ago!” Buddy, you don’t know the half of it. In Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, the source material for the four and counting film versions, the entire populace of a Marin County town seems to suffer an epidemic that causes everyone to believe their loves ones are actually imposters—which, as it turns out, they are. In Atmospheric Disturbances, 51-year-old New York psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein finds himself in a similar scenario, yet you get to feeling that there’s probably not any alien and/or communist conspiracy behind it all. You get to feeling that Leo, for all his insight into the mind’s machinations, isn’t seeing things straight, that his own anxiety about love’s instability, about his deservingness of a woman’s love, about the incessant unknowability of others—and perhaps, his unresolved feelings about his parents, now both deceased—is clouding his ability to see Rema, his beautiful, younger, foreign-born wife, for who she is, that all he can see is a döppelganger that doesn’t correlate to his idealized or nostalgic vision.

Galchen’s prose style is concise, humorous, buoyant and inviting, but what really lifts it up off the page and lights the reader’s imagination is how daringly she eschews any of the customary distance from Leo’s apparent neurosis, writing the entire novel in first-person, so that Leo, educated, sober, skeptical and highly reflexive, can speak directly to us in relatively jargon-free language, giving us no privileged perspective. Hardly just another unreliable narrator, Leo so often seems exactly like someone you might rely on under other circumstances, and here comes some near spoilers. It’s why he can so thoroughly convince Harvey, a patient who believes he’s a psychic agent for a meteorological society who takes his orders through hidden messages on page six of The New York Post, that Leo, too, belongs to the same order and communicates regularly with it’s leader, Tzvi Gal-chen, who it turns out actually is a renown meteorologist with some fascinating theories about weather. Or rather, Gal-chen was all of the above. Turns out he died in 1994. Additionally, though it’s not made explicit anywhere in the novel, Gal-chen is also the author’s father, which begs the question, just who can we rely on here? You might be best to place your bets on the double.

Atmospheric Disturbances is funny, perplexing and full of unexpected adventures, including a journey to Patagonia, “the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina,” which in some ways feels like Galchen’s equivalent to Murakami’s Hokkaido. And at certain moments, the novel is tremendously moving. Leo reasons his way through his conviction that the woman who appears to be Rema is not his wife by focusing on the sort of minutia that cohabitating lovers hold dear, and by holding to a predetermined idea of all the little things Rema wouldn’t do. Meanwhile, Rema, or “Rema,” is wont to do whatever she needs to of her own volition, replicated or not, and she tries very hard to follow Leo into his neurotic odyssey and bring him back to safety. Their struggle to cope with alienation and to return to and/or rediscover each other as individuals destined to change in a changing world is at the core of this story that bridges the seeming fantastical with the most ordinary absurdities.

At one point, Leo is communicating with Tzvi Gal-chen—I won’t bother explaining this little phenomenon here, and I don’t think I can, actually—and they begin to discuss Dante and his relationship to the dead in The Divine Comedy. The dead, Gal-chen explains, seem to know everything about the past and perhaps even the future, but nothing about the present, and for such knowledge they turn to Dante. “And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the present, to be suspended in time.” Atmospheric Disturbances generates some superb storytelling on the basis of this realization, the understanding that we are stuck always in the now, and that taking anything in this life for granted, even the love of that one nearest to us, requires nothing less than a huge, crazy leap of faith.

The shoes are a dead giveaway; the monkey, I don't know what that's about

In Paul Cronin’s enormously entertaining book of interviews with Werner Herzog, entitled Herzog on Herzog, the legendary Bavarian filmmaker confesses that he’s long considered opening a film school, one where the entrance exam would consist of nothing more than traveling alone on foot—the suggested distance is 5000 kilometres—and writing about the journey. Upon examining the notebooks, Herzog, a proud autodidact, would then be able to discern who’d walked the full distance and who hadn’t, and thus who would make the cut. “While walking,” Herzog explains, “you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom.”

The irreverence of this statement is hardly lost on me, yet the truth is it strikes me as an utterly solid idea. Anyone who truly engages in a creative act, however reliant on the imagination, however ostensibly sedentary, knows perfectly well that to create is physically demanding. I’d even propose that the more restraining the activity, the more strenuous the physical discipline needed to counterbalance it. By this logic, if making films requires walking, something as contained as writing requires an activity more aerobically demanding. But then, I’m totally biased. I’m one of those people: a running writer.

To say the least, I’ve never been athletic, but, to the surprise of many of my friends, running seems to suit me. It’s basically free, keeps me outdoors (where I’m often happiest), allows me to wander and daydream, to meditate or, just as importantly, wipe the slate blank and think of nothing. It’s also a form of preparation, of focusing, of testing one’s endurance, something you need a lot of when you’re sitting alone in a room with this arguably rather strange task ahead of you. (With any luck it’ll also, you know, keep me from getting fat.)

Writing and running both being essentially solitary acts, I only realized how relatively common running writers were when I found them by accident, like my dear friend Saskatoon novelist Shelley Leedahl, who, to my astonishment, I caught diligently doing her daily morning run in the staggering, sticky heat of Mérida, Mexico, where we met during an artist residency. I then discovered some writers who actually wrote about running, like Joyce Carol Oates in her memorable 1999 essay for The New York Times. And now, most satisfying of all, I’ve been able to read Haruki Murakami’s new memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Bond Street Books, $27.95), its title a re-working of Raymond Carver’s most well-known story collection, which Murakami translated into Japanese. (I'm pretty sure Carver wasn't a runner.)

Even if you didn’t know Murakami was a runner, if you’ve read a few of his novels you probably wouldn’t be too surprised. In Kafka on the Shore, to draw out an obvious example, Murakami’s titular protagonist experiences a transcendental state after hiking at an increasingly rigorous pace through wilderness while listening to John Coltrane’s rendition of ‘My Favorite Things’ (Murakami’s as obsessed with jazz as he is with running). This sort of transcendence is described in Murakami’s trademark everyman’s prose when he recalls running the final stretch of an ultramarathon. It was, he writes, “like my body had passed through a stone wall… I don’t know about the logic or the process or the method involved—I was simply convinced of the reality that I’d passed through.”

Most of the time however, the experience of running chronicled in What I Talk About is of a perfectly banal sort—and I mean that in a good way. Murakami not being a competitive sort, or by his own confession even a sociable sort, treasures running as a way to meet his own private goals: 36 miles a week, six miles a day, six days a week is the routine he describes from his desk, which at various points is located in either Massachusetts, Hawaii or Hokkaido. He runs at least one marathon a year and, perhaps more difficult to comprehend since he doesn’t seem to like cycling, has also tried to squeeze in an annual triathlon to boot. He talks about fun incidentals, like what music he listens to (mostly rock, from Beach Boys to Beck), and shares anecdotes about running in exotic places and under diverse, sometimes humorous conditions. He’s frank about facing the realities of aging—he’s now approaching 60—and he reveals a keen eye for the eccentricities of running culture, even inventing a term for something most long-term long-distance runners probably know well: “runner’s blues.”

But I suspect that the tread running through What I Talk About that will appeal to the most readers, especially those who write, run, or both, is Murakami’s conveyance of the relationship between running and writing, both of which, not coincidentally, he took up around the age of 30. Analogies between running and writing allow Murakami to weigh the relative merits of self-destructive versus healthy behaviour—exercise junky he may be, but Murakami also loves beer and Dunkin’ Donuts—of talent and discipline, of pacing versus pushing one’s limits. He also offers some interesting techniques for both activities, such as quitting for the day when you still have some juice left in you, a sort of necessary reserve to utilize tomorrow.

At one point Murakami also mentions how the act of writing fiction releases “a kind of toxin that lies deep in all humanity.” As with that stone wall I mentioned earlier, he writes of this mysterious toxin without ever breaking his average guy, down-to-earth tone, as though it were the most acceptable notion in the world. This matter-of-fact treatment of the mysterious if of course something Murakami fans adore about his work, and even in non-fiction, it’s hard to imagine a Murakami book without a splash of it.