There is nothing very sexy about hope. Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace. The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe. Hope has little aesthetic appeal. Hope is the awkward comic reversal, shoehorned in like the end of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, which rewrites the Greek myth to have the doomed lovers be reunited by none other than the soprano-singing personification of love itself. Better at least, according to Ivan Karamazov, to look at the horrors of the world straight on, to stare the absent and unloving God in the face, to take stock of the rapes and murders and terrors and quotidian derelictions that make up the whole of human existence, and to live—whatever that kind of living looks like—accordingly. Better to know that our life is inherently a tragic one—a conclusion no less inescapable than the fact that two parallel lines will never meet.
I’d come to the Pigeon Butte prairie one May morning in search of Fender’s blue because I wanted to see firsthand the particular beauty of this rare butterfly. But also, at a time when an estimated half-million insect species worldwide face extinction, and butterfly populations are shrinking at unprecedented rates, I wanted to witness the thing this creature represented—proof that amid such overwhelming loss, recovery, too, remains possible.
For all its vulnerability and tough beauty, Losing the Plot can feel challenging in places, its poetic inclinations thwarting a more straightforward reading. Yet those frustrations are eloquent in their own way, speaking to all that is destined to go unexplained – but not necessarily unfelt – between immigrants and the children they raise far from the place their heart still knows as home.
Ultimately, as with his earlier nonfiction book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (competing in marathons and deep listening to jazz, classical and rock are his other passions), Novelist As a Vocation is 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. “As I run,” he writes, “I feel that’s not all there is to it. There’s something more important deeper down in running. But it’s not at all clear to me what that something is…” Writing novels in which characters “naturally emerge from the flow of the story” is also a way of engaging with, and trusting in, that something more important that lies deeper down in the unconscious. For Murakami, it has paid dividends.
If Paris is a moveable feast, as Hemingway would tell every college junior on a gap year, then Rome is a stately banquet at which guests linger perhaps longer than they intended. The photographer, critic and salonist Milton Gendel was one. He arrived there on a Fulbright scholarship at 30, and more or less stayed for almost 70 more years.
Born in New York City (a … diner with clattering forks?) to Russian immigrants in the garment industry — his mother once clocked a nonunion worker with an umbrella during a strike — Gendel grew up to be perhaps the most cultivated person many of your cultivated friends have never heard of. “Just Passing Through,” a new book of his diaries and photographs elegantly edited by Cullen Murphy, the former captain of The Atlantic, thumbs its nose at that careerist New York party question: “What do you do?”
It’s harrowing and revealing about the juncture where extreme compound addiction collides with mega-celebrity. It’s a scream of authentic human pain, albeit one sprinkled with stardust. You end up admiring his honesty.