New Yorker Fiction Reviews #242 & #243: Stories by Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami
The arrival of a New Yorker "Fiction Issue" always kind of fills me with mixed emotions. On one hand: awesome. It's an issue of The New Yorker filled almost completely with the very content for which I mostly read The New Yorker anyway: the fiction. On the other hand, it's always a bit of a challenge to pick out which stories to read and I also know I'm going to end up leaving a lot of good fiction on the table (not that that should bother me too much anyway, after having lost at least 18 months worth of issues here and there). This time, however; it was very clear which two stories I would read.
It's not often that two of my favorite authors appear in one issue of The New Yorker. And, in the case of Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami, I have to imagine it doesn't happen often in any context, because I can't think of two authors whose work shares less in common. Except, perhaps, in their thift with words (and Murakami doesn't even write in English) I can't think of much that binds these two authors.
Ernest Hemingway was an American man born in 1899 who took part in two World Wars, hunted and fished for big game all over the world, and wrote in a gritty, stripped-down, realist style about things like love, struggle, death, and war. Haruki Murakami is a Japanese man born in 1949 who writes magical realism about complex characters living -- almost exclusively -- in urban or suburban Japan, and his stories deal heavily with love, nostalgia, memory, perception, and regularly upends reality in a way that Hemingway probably never even considered, let alone attempted. That said, I enjoy reading both of their writing, immensely.
My fascination with Ernest Hemingway flared up when I was in my teens and has since cooled considerably as my tastes have branched out, but there is and always will be a major place for Papa Hemingway in my literary heart of hearts. In his heretofore unpublished story "Pursuit as Happiness," he relates the story of being on marlin fishing boat in pre-Castro Cuba and nearly catching a world record marlin, before losing it because of a mistake by one of the ship's crew. Fans of Hemingway will recognize some of the same kinds of details from The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream, which makes sense, because in writing stories like this one, Hemingway was probably practicing -- with or without realizing it -- for those later novels. Reading this story did not change my life or shed any new understanding into Hemingway's writing except just to serve as a reminder of what I knew already: Ernest Hemingway was a master prose writer and one of the greatest story-tellers that ever lived. Full stop. It's nice to get a reminder of that once in while, and the story was a pleasure to read.
The Haruki Murakami effort, "Confessions of a Shingawa Monkey" could not be more different -- or more absurd -- but equally and even more entertaining. Unlike my Hemingway fandom, my mini-Murakami obsession is burning brightly these days. I'm in the middle of reading his first novel -- Hear the Wind Sing -- right now. This story is a continuation of a story he wrote in 2006, about a talking monkey who works in a hotel. I'll just leave it at that. Only to say that Murakami is, in his own way and in his own style, just as much of a master as Hemingway. He may not have served in World Wars or been on the cover of Life Magazine with a dead Cape Buffalo and a .500 caliber hunting rifle, but he can make a talking monkey sound as interesting and full of depth and dimension as any Hemingway character. I'll stand by that, even if it would probably make Papa Hemingway turn over in his grave.
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