I’ve recently been reading the contemporary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and the 19th century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. I’m finding a marked contrast in the development of the stories that each tell. I am sad to say that I fail to understand the artistry of the contemporary novelist Murakami, while I am stimulated and captivated by the 19th century novelist Turgenev.
In the first chapter of Turgenev, there are four developing story tensions: 1) youth and age, 2) aristocracy and peasantry, 3) social grace and casual social insouciance, 4) science and art. All this is evolving through four characters. I can’t wait to see how these tensions play out. By contrast, I am half-way through Murakami and there are no plot tensions; there have been a long succession of characters who appear then fall out of the narrative; and the story is a succession of episodes with nothing driving them other than the main character’s fascination with a woman who has something wrong with her.
The New York Times likes Murakami, and that makes me think that I’m missing something. But I’ve read no critical commentary on Turgenev and I’m hooked. Am I witnessing a clash of aesthetics between contemporary art and 19th century art? Have my sensibilities failed to keep up with contemporary culture?
In my own aesthetics, a work of art commands attention by its own presentation. I don’t need to read a book of art criticism to admire a Rembrandt painting–or a Monet landscape. But I do, in order to appreciate Miro. I don’t need to read criticism to enjoy Hemingway or Turgenev or Shakespeare or Tom Wolfe. But someone needs to tell me why I should keep reading Murakami, because the author himself isn’t compelling my attention.
With so much art, I seem to leave off with early modernism. Perhaps I am living witness to the plot tension in Turgenev between youth and age. But then, that would commend Turgenev’s 19th century aesthetic.
David Fekete 