Who prepares the macaroni dishes at Murakami?
BarcelonaThe Maria Nicolau wrote a fantastic article a few months ago in which he told us about the working day that Haruki Murakami had described in an interview for the literary magazine The Paris ReviewMurakami gets up early in the morning, works for five or six hours, and in the afternoon, runs or swims, reads, listens to music, and finally goes to bed at nine at night. Nicolau wonders, quite rightly, how the author stays alive without macaroni, that is, without someone to cook for him, wash his underwear, pay his bills, buy his groceries, and the long list of vital logistics a writer would need to be able to work on his fiction or not die of cold, inani. We know that Harry Potter could dedicate himself exclusively to magic thanks to Dobby and the rest of the house elves. Nicolau reveals to us that Murakami can do so, surprise to everyone, thanks to his wife, Yoko Murakami.
Columbia University researcher Maren Hoff and colleagues have demonstrated the existence of the "vicious cycle of status insecurity": when someone feels insecure about the respect and admiration they receive, they tend to view status as a limited resource and avoid giving credit. But what appears to be protecting one's reputation turns out to be self-destructive, since sharing credit or expressing gratitude often strengthens our image and that of those around us. Thus, the lack of gratitude ends up fueling the initial insecurity and creates a vicious cycle.
Mario Vargas Llosa and his wife
A writer who seems to have appreciated the invisible logistics was the recently deceased Mario Vargas LlosaIn his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he acknowledged that it was his wife who did everything, and that she did it well: she solved problems, managed the finances, brought order to chaos, kept journalists and intruders at bay, defended his time, arranged appointments and trips, packed and unpacked his suitcases. He also thanked her for putting up with his manias and neuroses, and for the three children they had. So far, it seems ideal, were it not for the fact that, in the same speech, he takes the opportunity to sneak in several of his political ideas, such as a "cosmopolitan and universal" Barcelona, that is, de-Catalanized, and how nationalisms that aren't his thing are little less than the seed of the devil. The author prides himself on defending freedom, but we know he always showed support for fervent political figures of dictatorships. A few years after the speech, and following that same line of little coherence between deeds and words, he left his wife by letter, after half a century of marriage (and secretarial service), to run away with another woman.
He who isn't grateful is a son of a bitch, the saying goes. But gratitude must always, always, be sincere (and not a clumsy attempt to disguise the whitewashing of fascism or infidelity). Otherwise, as the studies warn us, our reputation will end up like Murakami's macaroni: invisible.
