The collection is eccentric, meandering, self-deprecating. This is no bombastic tome or loftily impassioned defense of fiction; it’s a generally charming excursion through the mind of one of the world’s most beloved novelists ... Murakami traffics in rather weakly analyzed platitudes about writers and their personalities ... The strongest essays are those that bring us into Murakami’s own idiosyncratic disposition, his unlikely career path, and his odd routines and requirements as a writer ... It isn’t a book that I’d assign to my writing students or use myself as a source of tips and tricks. It works best as a fascinating backstage pass to Murakami’s process and approach to creating fiction.
Assured, candid and often — never meet your heroes, they say — deeply irritating ... The sublime tension of Murakami’s work is that his writing is simple and open...while the world it depicts gets only more mystifying ... In its strongest passages, ably translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen, Novelist as a Vocation shares these qualities of transparency and deep thought ... But aside from these rare moments, the book makes for a weird, cranky document. Its chapters focus on subjects that should be useful...yet each somehow collapses in on Murakami’s experience, leaving only traces of practical advice, and a narrator who seems at once proud, complacent, tone-deaf and aggrieved ... The conundrum here is that Murakami’s generosity of spirit is such a central part of his fiction. Perhaps the difficulty is that this is a book full of prosaic explanations, unleavened by vision.
If an aspiring storyteller were to pick up Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation...expecting a step-by-step guide to putting a novel together, they may well be disappointed. However, what Murakami’s memoir does offer is certainly of equal value. It is one novelist looking back over his life and career in an attempt to better understand the many fragments that make up the whole of his success, with a great deal of introspection, self-deprecation, and dispelling of myths along the way ... Pensive ... The tone of the book is intimate, yet unadorned and straightforward in the style Murakami has come to be known for. He engages with personal disappointments, misunderstandings perpetuated by the public, and his own earlier hopes and dreams in an appealingly honest way. There are also a few curveballs ... Murakami has more than a few nuggets of insight to share.
They deal with all the things that you’d like to ask the author of Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore in the highly unlikely event that you were able to corner him at a book-signing session ... Murakami gives an extraordinary account of how, at first, he couldn’t produce a literary voice that he could bear to read ... You end this collection of beautiful essays vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again.
A fundamentally odd thing ... If it’s true to say that this is a book strictly for fans, then it’s worth pointing out that Murakami has legions of them around the world. He emerges from these pages as affable, certainly, but also as curiously blank, and you wonder why he bothered with this at all when each muted revelation seemingly cost him so much to make.
A very personal guide to fiction writing peppered with biography and opinion, contains a handful of strange, and strangely revealing, moments such as these, when his experiences read more like passages from his novels than fact. What’s more, they are recounted in a matter-of-fact way that echoes the deceptively simple, conversational style of his fiction, which often moves from the almost mundane to the mysterious without any appreciable shift in tone ... A very matter-of-fact delineation of the novelist’s calling. In it, Murakami lays bare his disciplined approach and personal rituals ... A series of intriguing glimpses inside the singular mind of Murakami. He approaches running and writing instinctively and intuitively, slowly burnishing his skills with a mixture of discipline and doggedness.
This book contains some startlingly banal observations on the writer’s world ... Set that aside and instead observe the idiosyncrasy of Murakami’s writing practices and beliefs about writing ... The aspect of the book I found utterly compelling are the stretches where Murakami accounts for what he says in his title, that novel writing is a vocation. I don’t think I’ve ever read someone who understands the almost horrible compulsion to his subject the novelist feels ... I can’t say that I learnt very much from this odd book, and a novelist as long-practising and often alluring as Murakami must have much more to say about the craft than he is letting on.
Part memoir and part informal advice guide, offers a glimpse into a personal life Murakami has long kept guarded ... A deeper dive into Murakami’s singular mind would be devoured by his millions of readers, but one senses he is not willing to fully breach the wall of privacy he has carefully erected. Still, fans will come away from Novelist as a Vocation with a clearer idea of what makes this elusive writer tick.
Novelist as a Vocation is most interesting when it is most introspective, when Murakami speaks of his own experience and doesn't concern himself with how other do it or feel ... An agreeably-written (sometimes too much so) collection that looks at many different aspects of being a novelist—hough mostly very much from Murakami's own atypical experience. This would seem to limit its usefulness as any sort of how-to guide, but in fact also helps make what might be Murakami's main point: that there is no one or right way to go about it ... Novelist as a Vocation is of greatest interest for the insight it offers into Murakami's own life and work(-processes), and, as such, is of obvious interest to any fan of his fiction. As to more general observations, lessons, or suggestions, it's probably less useful—but no less interesting for that.
Stellar ... Lighthearted yet edifying, the anecdotes make for a fantastic look at how a key literary figure made it happen. Murakami’s fans will relish these amusing missives.
What does it mean to be a novelist? How does one go about becoming one? How is a novel even written? All fine questions to pose, but the answers, as Murakami presents them in his new book Novelist as a Vocation, are somehow unsatisfactory. For one thing, the book doesn’t seem to know what it is. Is it a memoir? A collection of essays? A how-to guide? A setting straight of the record? No doubt books can and have been more than one thing, but Murakami is not exactly breaking new ground in the field of non-fiction writing. Nor does he want to, it should be added: he’s simply 'jotting down [his] thoughts' ... Some thoughts are interesting; some are better left in the notebooks they’re scribbled in. The author’s stories from his days as the owner of a jazz cafe in the earlier part of the book make for quite engaging reading, though one wishes that the 'master storyteller' (according to the back of my proof copy) might have used that mastery a little more in the telling of the rest of his story. Instead, the book devolves into a rather boring essay on literary prizes and how little the author cares about them (why, then, has he penned a piece on the matter?) ... The takeaway of these essays is there from the beginning: there’s no one way to becoming a novelist. My two cents? You might not even need to read a book on it.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
