Day 1,272, Quasi-Quarantine: Disjointed "Novelist As A Vocation" Lacks A Unifying Theme

 

"What I want to say is that in a certain sense, while the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel as well."

A collection of essays compiled over a number of years, "Novelist as a Vocation" is Haruki Murakami's effort to share his back story and any insights it may provide writers seeking to think about audience, originality, prizes, and other topics.

"For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative."

While a few intriguing concepts are shared (the "E.T. concept" was definitely interesting), the book suffers a bit from repetition, and overall, lacks a cogent throughline to connect these various essays. Making matters more difficult, my version of "Novelist as a Vocation" was missing four pages in two different locations in the book.

I should say that I "won" a hard copy version of this book through Goodreads and received it more than a year after getting notice of that "win." Considering that fact and the missing pages, I wondered if I was belatedly given some sort of rejected galley copy to fulfill a promise.

"I wanted to do more than just take images inside me and express them in words in a fragmentary, instinctive way; I wanted to come to grips with the ideas and awareness inside me and in a more comprehensive, three-dimensional way set them down in writing."

Any aspiring novelist can benefit from any level of advice offered by a writer of Murakami's stature. However, "Novelist as a Vocation" could have benefited from the connective tissue needed to turn this from a compendium of disparate essays into a more focused and helpful work.

"Only the author knows for sure if enough time has been invested in each step of the process: completing the initial preparatory work, giving the ideas concrete shape, letting them fully 'settle' in a cool, dark place, exposing them to the natural light when they are ready, carefully inspecting them, and then tinkering."