Short Takes
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
By Haruki Murakami
Translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel
Knopf, 175 pp., $21
Where does he find the time? It turns out that the acclaimed Japanese novelist and former jazz club owner Haruki Murakami, now in his late 50s, is also a distance-running fanatic who has competed in marathons and triathlons the world over. This roundabout memoir, begun while he was preparing for the 2005 New York City Marathon, also serves as a fleeting travelogue, as the author pounds the pavement across Greece, around Tokyo, through Hawaii, and along the Charles River in Cambridge, where he's muscled aside by college girls putting in their training time.
Running is a lot like writing, he reflects (the solitude, the self-discipline, the . . . well, that's about it); marathons are tiring, age slows you down, and Boston gets cold in the winter. As banality after banality plops into place, we're left pondering the misfit between the strenuous subject matter and the slackness of its presentation. It's possible, one supposes, that more artful language got diluted in translation, though it seems more likely that all the "kind of"s and "sort of"s and "pretty"s (the adverb, not the adjective) accurately convey the (lack of) flavor of the original.
Walk the Blue Fields
By Claire Keegan
Black Cat, 168 pp., paperback, $13
These short fictions by the Irish author Claire Keegan haven't a style so much as a microclimate, a chill mist blowing in on a hard wind off the sea. Her rural Ireland is a timeless place where superstition walks so close on villagers' heels that past and present, real and surreal merge, as in the title story, in which a country priest who has lost his way morally and spiritually finds it again in the hands of an itinerant Chinese healer.
Keegan's men often play brute earth to women's restless wind and fire. We see this in an understated story in which a country girl packs up in tight-lipped silence for America and escape from her sadistic father. And we see it in two longer tales laced with Hibernian magic realism, one in which a "quare," solitary woman enjoys a temporary arrangement with a man whose only companion is a goat, until the call of wildness lures her away again, and another that tells of a misbegotten marriage between a country man and a woman from town who gains local renown as a spellbinding storyteller.
The author's own storytelling powers have darkened and matured since her first collection, as she takes confident command of her craft.
Iodine
By Haven Kimmel
Free Press, 223 pp., $24
Advancing and retreating, revealing and concealing, this inventive novel by the gifted Haven Kimmel unfolds in straightforward third-person narration intermingled with snatches of nightmarish first-person recollection, including journal fragments describing the bizarre dream visions that assault the consciousness of Trace (short for Tracey Sue) Pennington, the protagonist-narrator.
The rural Midwestern girlhood home she recalls - if her memories, unrepressed, can be trusted - is a haunted house of trailer-park gothic: incest, ignorance, child abuse, drug addiction, violent death. Calling herself Ianthe, this unstable violet-eyed beauty has fled her roots by enrolling at a community college. Seeking to deconstruct the turmoil in her troubled mind, she has read more Freud and Jung than her professors, one of whom - a man with secrets he does not wish to share - becomes her possessive lover. Slowly, chillingly, Trace's truth begins to emerge.
Kimmel, who has teased us with the notion of the unreliable narrator in her own memoirs, elevates the device to a new level of complexity and sophistication in this novel, which remains strikingly original and deeply disturbing from its opening sentence ("I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed") to the end.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 