The novel as autopsy: Alexander Ahndoril's The Director dissects Ingmar Bergman circa 1961

Ingmar Bergman with cinematographer Sven Nykvist

Speaking of Ingmar Bergman... Swedish author Alexander Ahndoril’s The Director (Portobello Books, $15.95) concerns Bergman and the apparently tumultuous creation of his 1962 film Winter Light. The Director is a novel, though it is a meticulously researched one that reads very much like an impressionistic biography, leaving the frontiers of what constitutes fact and fiction ambiguous for all but those few in the know and still alive to testify. It was written and published in Sweden while Bergman, who died in 2007, was still alive and was initially given the legendary filmmaker’s approval before he changed his mind and publicly condemned it. Regardless, the Swedes made it a bestseller.

Joyce Carol Oates, who last year published a decidedly unflattering collection of novellas about episodes in the lives of Poe, Twain, Henry James and Hemingway, wrote that Ahndoril’s book “arrests our attention like an autopsy performed on a living man.” It’s a very astute observation, even if I’m not sure many readers, especially non-Bergmaniacs, are likely to feel all that arrested by this poetic and image-laden yet deeply ponderous tale of an artist still grappling with his crippling need for a stubborn father’s approval. The Director is indeed morbid, narrow, a little cruel, and as sequestered from the larger, messier world as a pathologist’s quarters. I love that the English translation was performed by someone named Sarah Death.

A scene from Winter Light

Bergman was often very articulate about the enigmatic images that would obsess him until they finally yielded a complete idea for a film. In keeping with this, The Director begins with a vision, caught within a glass jar, that carries inside of it the germ of Winter Light: “A man of his own age walks toward him, quivers and al at once is twenty paces closer. He seems to be dressed as a priest.” Bergman’s father was a priest, and this film—a major turning point in Bergman’s work, largely putting to rest the filmmaker’s interest in dealing directly with religious faith—was conceived as a hypothesis as to how Bergman would have felt by this point in his life—he was in his early 40s—had he followed his father into the clergy. His father never considered the cinema a suitable career for Ingmar and much of the novel finds its protagonist childishly preoccupied with earning his father’s praise, even while the old man falls ill and is hospitalized.

Alexander Ahndoril

The most impressive bits of writing here find Ahndoril, in a concise, very Bergmanesque style, allowing fantasy, dream and memory to slip into objective reality, with ghosts from the past entering and strange discoveries being made, such as a missive from Bergman’s troubled mind that’s somehow been inscribed onto the sole of an artificial foot. The more captivating fully-fledged scenes in The Director however concern the film’s production, even if Ahndoril emphasizes the tension between Bergman and certain actors and crewmembers who considered the project too dreary. When interviewed, Bergman’s collaborators have resoundingly testified to the general cheerfulness on Bergman’s sets, though such generalizations no doubt fail to supply the whole picture, and in any case liberties must be granted when a writer’s intentions are made explicit. The larger question here is to what purpose all of this slippage between fact and fiction has been crafted.

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.