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I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.
Others have posted their reports, so I’m indulging myself with impressions. There was a time when I might have scoffed at the false glamour of going to hear three literary giants read and talk. This year, I jumped at the chance.
After all, when Mario Vargas Llosa came to Yale when he was running for President of Peru, my Peruvian ESL students (dishwashers, new immigrants) went, but I stayed home and read.
And what do I remember of Umberto Eco’s visit? Only that his accent was hard to understand and, more vividly, that a fellow graduate student with a flamboyant style of dress and a Cantonese accent thicker than Eco’s Italian one, pushed herself to the head of the line of admirers, chatted with Eco, and returned, triumphant, to announce that she had secured the right to publish his talk in The Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. We--the other student editors and I--were amazed and impressed.
But in the spring of 1989, my professor for Anglo-Indian Narrative announced that, when we got to Shame, Salman Rushdie himself would be joining us to talk about his book.
The fatwa was declared a week later and I had never been in the same room with him until Friday. So, while Rushdie-spotting has become old hat to many, it was a really big deal to me.
His best work may be behind him, but I must say that I was really excited by what he read: not the rock stars and modernity of recent books but a turn back to the court of the great Mughal Emperor, Akbar. This is the kind of mythography that Rushdie excels at, and this fairy tale of the glory days of Muslim India seems really promising. He read a passage in which Akbar discourses with a young princeling who poses some interesting philosophical questions on kingship and what it means to rule--the kind of questions one’s philosophy professor might ask in a class on Plato. Akbar beheads him for his impertinence but then strokes his chin and wonders, hmm…, what if we did permit free speech?
I thought this was poltically pertinent and hilarious, moving and exciting. What more do you want in a novel?
And I thought the event overall was great: lots of fun to watch those giant egos on display, to hear the readings, to see them talk with each other. Like Dorothea, over at Books and Bicycles, I felt like the vibe was good from the get-go. My press pass worked magic and I got into the hall, the second attendee! I had a great seat on the aisle, Dorothea spotted me, we chatted, and I got to watch the anxious literary ladies of the 92nd St.. Y power-walk down to the front rows only to discover the seats were reserved. Eventually, a really handsome woman sat next to me and we fell into conversation: she is a high school English teacher in Madrid, visiting the city for a few months and drinking in the culture. We had a great chat about being a working mom and working to balance doing stuff for yourself and caring for your kids. (At 16, her daughter’s cool with her being away for two months; my daughters accept one late night a week, two max.)
Then, the reading began, and unlike almost every other event, the introductions were blessedly minimal. As in, the interim director of the Poetry Series thanked us, made some announcements, and then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Umberto Eco.”
He read, walked off stage. Rushdie walked on. When Rushdie finished, out came Vargas Llosa. No baloney. Just great, professional, funny, and beautiful readings.
At dinner with other bloggers afterwards, some expressed disappointment in the degree of narcissism on display. They were shocked--shocked!--to find that three male literary lions, coasting on the crest of their careers, still virile but no longer striving, had big egos.
Indeed.
I noted that not one woman writer was mentioned all night long, but Mary Reagan rightly corrected me: one was: J. K. Rowling (!), whom Rushdie mentioned with humorous, ironic approval as a good-bad writer who seems to have learned from Dumas how to fill up pages with delightful nothings. So we learned something else: Rushdie is a Harry Potter fan.
So is Keith Olbermann. So am I.
In any case, I think my point still stands: these are great big male egos. Woolf, Stein, Sarraute, Arendt, Morrison, Sor Juana, de Pisan, etc., do not loom--large or small--in their imaginations. Still, they are unabashedly liberal, cosmpolitan, educated, historicist and forward-looking. I admire them.
The three eminences then gathered for a loose and lively chat about why they liked to call themselves the “Three Musketeers” (Rushdie even mulled over “The Three Tenors”, which I had suggested in a blog post on Thursday, and I was also starting to think up other alternatives including “The Traveling Wilburys” and “Velvet Revolver”). With Alexandre Dumas pere now in play, Rushdie, Eco and Vargas Llosa now began batting The Count of Monte Cristo back and forth, debating whether or not such “bad writing” as this can also be great writing. All three seemed to agree that bad writing could be great writing and that this often happens (it’s not hard to guess that all three authors were thinking of their own excesses here, as well as those of Dumas pere).
The panel was great fun to listen to because the writers were loose and rambunctious, eagerly speaking over each other at times, fully devoid of the stiff politeness that too often mars these gatherings.
The only downside, alas, was the usually intellectually agile Leonard Lopate kept trying to get a word in edgewise. I’m with Dorothea:
I would have preferred that he just let the writers keep up their debate and their jokes because the minute he asked a serious question the energy fell and the mood changed.
The Dumas conversation was a highlight: if you’re going to watch anything online, I’d watch the first fifteen minutes of the roundtable. But later, when they talked about the role of the writer in public life, many interesting things were said, too. That was where a lot of my dining companions heard too much ego, but I’m inclined to be forgiving towards great novelists who are also political commentators or presidential candidates or objects of a global fatwa. They have achieved greatness in more than one arena and it would be strange if they didn’t know it. Looking past that, and past the fact that in their world women still mainly exist as muses, gorgeous fleeting visions of Selma Hayek or Scarlett Johansson or…, I heard some interesting things: most interesting to me was Eco’s point that the US lacks public intellectuals in part because our universities tend to be cordoned off from the city itself. I certainly have found that the change in my life from teaching in rural Indiana to teaching in midtown on a campus that is really just a single building has made me a more engaged citizen.
It’s a good idea for an author panel: round up a few writers and ask them to talk about Books That Changed My Life. It was an interesting variety of authors, too, from sex-book-author (The Secret Life of Catherine M.) Catherine Millet to Wolves of the Crescent Moon-author Yousef al-Mohaimeed, as well as Annie Proulx, Antonio Muñoz Molina (author of In her Absence), and Olivier Rolin (author of Hotel Crystal). (There were also translators—into Arabic, and from and into French—for the authors.)
NYPL impressario Paul Holdengräber was very much in the mix too, holding the reins of the conversation; given the number of people involved it was probably good to have someone (relatively) firmly in control, though his style may not be to everyone’s taste (i.e. mine).
The first ‘book that changed a life’ wasn’t actually a main selection, but rather one Muñoz Molina recommends to students: E.O.Wilson’s Journey to the Ants (see the Harvard University Press publicity page) —a science text that he feels shows students how something can be explained very beautifully and straightforwardly, without unnecessary embellishment, and showing self-absorbed students the potential in simply describing reality.
Surprisingly, this basic idea—of what a book and writing can offer—came up repeatedly over the afternoon.
As to the books themselves, this is what the authors came up with (with several wanting to suggest more than one and some thinking the idea of life-changing books a dubious proposition to start with ...):
Antonio Muñoz Molina:Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Catherine Millet:The Lily of the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
Yousef al-Mohaimeed: first the Arabian Nights, then poetry (including haikus), and then, of all things Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
Olivier Rolin:Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Annie Proulx:Before Adam by Jack London (which you can read here)
The surrounding circumstances and reasons for the choices were, of course, as interesting as the selections: Proulx discovering the obscure London as a seven-year-old child, or Yousef al-Mohaimeed listening to his sister read from the Arabian Nights (which seems almost too clichéd—but when he follows that with Zorba the Greek it all sounds almost bizarrely believable again), or Millet drawn to Balzac after coming to recognize his style from readings on the radio.
Rolin had the most doubts about any life-changing work (or at least was happy enough to be thrust into defending that position), and argued more for an orchestra of books; Proulx, too, had offered Holdengräber a longer list of mind-enlarging books (which she admitted wasn’t quite the same thing).
There was some discussion about why no one chose any non-fiction. Proulx argued that essays aren’t transformative—though Holdengräber suggested Nietzsche might be an exception that has occasionally captured a young mind (Marx, too, one would think—but then all that’s terribly out of fashion). And Muñoz Molina thought they should consider not only ‘books that changed my life’ for the implied better, but also for the worse .....
Still, the best answer came from Catherine Millet who, before choosing the Balzac, noted that obviously the book that had most changed her life was the one she wrote.
It was a decent, fairly entertaining discussion, with some decent cases made for these as (their) life changing works—though this is the sort of exercise that probably lends itself more to written essayistic exposition, and only gained a bit from the mutual reactions to the various choices.
The only Daniel Kehlmann-novel available in English is Measuring the World (though Ich und Kaminski is due out in translation in November); it doesn’t seem to have been quite as successful here as elsewhere (30-some-odd weeks on the Taiwanese bestseller lists, he mentioned—as well as topping the German lists for over a year), but at least that gave conversation-partner Jeffrey Eugenides a solid point of focus. And since Eugenides only has two (published) novels under his belt—Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides—they could concentrate on these few titles between them.
Eugenides noted that they had met on a panel last year, but an overzealous moderator seems not to have let them get too many words in edgewise (that would be this panel, where even the German newspapers complained about how much Michael Naumann liked the sound of his own voice ...) so for this event they were flying solo, just two writers talking about writing. But they did come prepared: they opted for a format in which they alternated questions for each other, which worked out quite well.
Eugenides began by asking about Kehlmann’s choice to write an historical novel, wondering whether he didn’t have doubts about the form and its inherent fraudulence. Kehlmann responded that he was, indeed, deeply suspicious of the historical form, and even had doubts about whether he could pull it off. The approach he chose was to try to to write the way non-fiction history is written, always maintaining a sense of distance—and using a lot of indirect speech (which is more obvious in the German original than in the English translation). He wanted to maintain a serious tone, even when writing about things that aren’t at all serious: he wanted to sound like a very serious historian who had gone mad .....
Kehlmann also mentioned that, because of the reliance on indirect speech, he doesn’t think a good movie can be made of Measuring the World (though they’re having a go at it—and he’s said he’s staying away from that).
Asked whether Kehlmann saw his Gauss and Humboldt as opposites or spiritual brothers, he said: both. He elaborated: it’s a book about two ways of doing science—but did admit that by the end Gauss had probably emerged as the ‘winner’ (not that he tried to set it up that way, or even felt that’s the way it was when he finished the book, but seeing all the reactions he’s come to believe that).
Noting that Ich und Kaminski is a very different novel, Eugenides asked about Kehlmann being a writer who changes with every book (which one would certainly think, considering also his other work). Kehlmann noted there are authors who write the same thing over and over again, but he doesn’t quite do that. Still, he finds his underlying themes are the same again and again (though often far from obviously so), and even where there are differences, his own voice does always come through. But he noted he fights to stretch his limitations; given how young he is (born 1975) it’ll be interesting to see how much more he can push his envelope.
Kehlmann’s first question for Eugenides was how much of an influence Gabriel Garcia Marquez was, with Eugenides acknowledging he was a great admirer, and that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was an influence on The Virgin Suicides. Kehlmann, too, considered ‘magical realism’ important—especially in showing an alternative to the European fiction of the same time. He mentioned how, to some extent, he had used it dealing with Humboldt in South America—though he had Humboldt react to the completely new and unbelivable things he saw there by ignoring them, a very German reaction of adapting them to his mindset.
Kehlmann asked Eugenides about the narrative-voice—the ‘we’—of The Virgin Suicides, and Eugenides revealed that at first he had had the whole town narrating the story, with an ‘I’-narrator popping up on occasion, but when he saw most of the heat of the narrative came from the teenage boys he went with that. He noted that, despite having a chorus of narrators he never thought of Greek tragedy—but gets asked that all the time (and wonders whether he would if his name were Abromowitz or something like that ...).
The by comparison prolific Kehlmann asked Eugenides about only having published two novels, noting that one could divide the world into authors who publish a lot and accept a range of quality, and those who only publish a few, trying to achieve perfection—and whether he thinks each necessarily envies the other; Eugenides did (and noted that he finds himself surprised that he’s not more prolific, since he works at it every day, and has accumulated tons of stuff (admittedly all just for the drawer ...)). Kehlmann also asked whether he agreed that, unlike novels, short stories can be perfect. Eugenides did, and said he found them much harder to write than novels—and notes it’s sort of misguided that in creative writing courses students focus on the short story, which he considers technically more difficult.
Both authors were in good form, and even if it was more of a question-and-answer session than a true discussion a lot of fairly interesting subjects were covered. Certainly it helped in introducing Kehlmann to an American audience—which didn’t seem very familiar with his work, but certainly knew their Eugenides.
After four World Voices events in as many days (scaled down from a perhaps overly ambitious six), I was about ready to hang up my spurs. Nonetheless, I dragged myself back into midtown’s London-style drizzle for Saturday afternoon’s “Tribute to Robert Walser” - and was glad I did. Twentieth century German-language literature produced some of my favorite novelists (Mann, Musil, Broch), but I’ve never read either the Swiss Walser (1878 - 1956) or the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the subject of another World Voices panel. (German-language cultural institutions like The Goethe-Institut, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and Deutsches Haus seem to have poured resources into this year’s festival.) I attended both events hoping to discover what the Wirbel was about, and though “Bernhard: The Art of Failure” struck me as uneven, the Walser tribute delivered.
Instead of a straight panel discussion of Walser’s work, the Morgan Library arranged for a set of short readings by writers who admire it. This may have been more risky than it sounds; even listening to authors read their own work (I was learning) demands a certain level of stamina. Walser, then, is lucky to have had novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, translator Susan Bernofsky, and especially polymath Wayne Koestenbaum and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg give voice to his fiction.
The sumptuous auditorium - an ideal space for this event - was packed with at least 100 audience members. Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics, introduced the readers - plus the German novelist Michel Krüger - and then Krüger took over. The author, most recently, of The Executor, Krüger is to German publishing roughly what George Plimpton was to American letters (or would have been, if Plimpton had run Random House in addition to his other activities)...and it was easy to see why. Working entirely without notes, in limpid English, he delivered a rigorous yet accessible introduction to Walser’s life and work.
Then Bernofsky, who has translated Walser’s novels for New Directions, read excerpts from The Assistant and the forthcoming The Tanners. Her delivery was crisp, and I was impressed by the way her translations captured the delicacy (to borrow one of Walser’s favorite terms) of his prose. The second excerpt was a bit long for my taste, but toward the end, it opened out into a radiant vision of the urban everyday, in which I caught a glimpse of a familiar-feeling, yet completely original, sensibility.
(Susan Sontag attempted to sketch that sensibility in her introduction to Walser’s Selected Stories: “Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons.” Hers include Paul Klee, Robert Musil, Leopardi, and Kafka (natürlich); I would add Frank O’Hara, Peter Altenberg, and Italo Svevo to the list. “But any true lover of Walser,” Sontag continued, “will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.")
Deborah Eisenberg read next, weaving together three pieces from Jakob von Gunten. “I adore this novel,” she said, and it showed. As at Thursday’s “Something to Hide” event, Eisenberg proved to be as remarkable an interpreter of other writers’ work as she is of her own. She managed, with her idiosyncratic delivery, to capture the quality of dreamy bemusement in Jakob’s account of life at the Benjamenta Institute for Boys:
For me our classes in dancing, propriety, gymnastics, seem like public life itself, large, important, and then before my eyes the schoolroom is transformed into a splendid drawing room, into a street full of people, into a castle with old long corridors, into an official chamber, into a scholar’s study, into a lady’s reception room, it just depends, it can be anything. We must enter, make formal greeting, bow, speak, deal with imaginary business matters or tasks, carry out orders, then suddenly we’re at table and dining in a metropolitan manner and servants are waiting on us.
By this point, the audience was palpably spellbound.
Eugenides followed, tackling a short, feuilleton-style piece called “Trousers” with amusing mock-seriousness. ("I am thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers.") And Koestenbaum, who in both his passion and his urbanity seems like an ideal dinner guest, rounded off the reading. He began with a list of six reasons why he loves Walser, and then treated us to three more feuilletons. Like Eisenberg, he seemed harmonically attuned to Walser’s temperament.
In the question-and-answer session that followed, Bernofsky talked about the “microscript” - millimeter-high writing - Walser perfected, and about his eventual institutionalization. Eight and a half volumes of his work have been translated into English, she said, and nine and a half more remain. She suggested that the evening’s readings had demonstrated the diversity of Walser’s output, but I found exactly the opposite: I had been immersed, throughout, in a consciousness I found intoxicating. Twenty-four hours later, I’m halfway through Jakob von Gunten, and, grateful to PEN for introducing me to this most wonderful writer, I look forward to 17 more volumes.
"Presented by The Believer and hosted by actor and comedian Todd Barry, this year’s Believer event featured a musical performance by John Wesley Harding, a Vladmaster screening in which every attendee will simultaneously watch a “picture story” through their own personal View-Master, and a panel discussion with Scandinavian authors Halfdan Freihow, Christian Jungersen, Jo Nesbø, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir."
Todd Barry, comedian
Vladimir creates stories that are told through the use of ViewMaters.
The audience proceeds through the story via sound cues in the narration. Watching the entire audience clicking through at once was a lot of fun.
Sarah Deming reports on her time at PEN and has some great photos of the PEN World Voices party at the Cervantes Institute last Friday while Tayari Jones loved the cocktail Sarah made for the party.
The “Freedom to Write” cocktail:
1 1/2 parts Grey Goose la poire, 1 1/2 parts st-germain elderflower, 1/4 part lime juice. you have to shake it well over ice, then strain into a chilled martini glass. i enjoy flaming a lime twist on top, which adds a touch of danger… cheers,
Tayari’s been covering more events too for PEN. She had some interesting comments on the film Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is adapted from an Etgar Keret story:
The film was pretty amusing. The main character, Zia, kills himself out of love for his darling Desiree. And, you may not believe me, but his “offing” (as the film would say) is pretty darn funny. He finds himself in an afterlife where everyone around is also a disgruntled suicide. I won’t give a spoiler, but it turns into a buddy road-trip film and also a rom-com. All while being very smart. It’s quirky: There’s a blackhole under the front seat of the car; people can perform little miracles if you just don’t force it, and Tom Wait[s] is in the picture, for heaven’s sake! But not so quirky that the weirdness eclipses the characters. (I think Kelly Link would love this movie.)
I posted once or twice about the PEN blogs for the World Voices festival, but thought it time for a reminder because there’s a bunch more content there since they’ve recruited members to blog a lot of events. Here’s the opening of Marion James’ entry on the ”Mean Streets” event:
I could call it the bad boys panel, but that would seem glib not to mention reductive. Truth be told, you could almost feel this panel, all men except for the brilliant and spunky SJ Rozan sapping the testosterone from everybody in the room. The topic was “Mean Streets” and the writers, Jo Nesbo (Norway), Roberto Saviano (Italy), Christian Jungersen (Denmark) and Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia). Whether through non-fiction (Saviano’s blistering account of Neapolitan crime organizations), hard-boiled Scandinavian crime fiction (Jo Nesbo), a workplace hell unlike anything you’ve ever imagined (Jungersen) or a report from the dark days of Colombia’s recent history (Gabriel Vasquez), they have all written books that plunge into unflinching darkness, with boldness, candor, and sometimes even beauty.
Jane Ciabattari reports on the PEN World Voices “Believer” event at the NBCC blog, Critical Mass:
Noting the disconnect between “a light-hearted entertainment and a constant reminder of imprisoned Chinese writers,” Barry riffed a lot on chairs (the empty chair on the stage representing the imprisoned Tibetan writer, the empty chairs in the theater a “constant reminder of the 300 people who didn’t show up tonight...") He poked fun at the New School for having one toilet for 500 people and generally got the folks in the auditorium (which did gradually fill up) loose enought to follow directions on how to view Vladmaster Vladimir’s Viewmaster disk series “Actaeon at home.”
Posting at The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx reports on the Thomas Bernhard event that was part of the PEN World Voices Festival. This is how he began:
Who would have guessed that a writer who proudly earned the reputation as the Oscar the Grouch of contemporary literature would have so many loving fans? But there were few empty seats two nights ago at New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum, which hosted a PEN panel, proudly entitled “The Art of Failure,” on the Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), a man who turned his ferocious hatred of his native Austria and obsession with misery and failure into literature.
Among the core missions of International PEN is “the defense of writers and of freedom of expression around the world.” In the last two decades, as Salman Rushdie has been both its beneficiary and its champion, this mission has become increasingly visible. However, the artistic defense of freedom of expression is a tricky thing; political self-satisfaction can impinge on the creative writer’s various commitments to silence, cunning, exile, not to mention irony. There have been events in the past where the celebration of PEN’s core mission has seemed out-of-sync with circumstances. (Should we really be congratulating ourselves for mingling on a cruise ship?) And so, on Thursday night, when I headed to the velvet-draped precincts of Joe’s Pub for “Something to Hide: Writers Against the Surveillance State,” I was a bit nervous. I don’t want to be told what a hero I am for drinking my $7 beer, any more than I want to be told that I can do my part for the Global War on Terror by going shopping.
I needn’t have worried (except, perhaps, about my own incipient cynicism). Both in its intelligent planning and in the sensitivity and humility of its participants, “Something to Hide” focused attention on victims of the surveillance state, rather than flattering the good conscience of the audience.
The key to the evening’s success, I think, was that writers were asked to read from work other than their own. After quick introductions from PEN presidentFrancine Prose and ACLU director Anthony Romero, a surprise guest took the stage: Wallace Shawn. My pleasure at seeing a favorite writer perform quickly faded into absorption in the performance. Shawn delivered a dramatic reading of Acting U.S. Attorney General James B. Comey’stestimony before Congress, in which White House Council Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempt to harass a hospitalized John Ashcroft into signing off on the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. Shawn is as passionate and idiosyncratic an actor as he is a playwright, and the reading was surprisingly moving. It was a reminder that, despite the excesses of the last eight years, dedicated civil servants still remain the backbone of our government. (Or remained - Comey resigned shortly after the scene at Ashcroft’s bedside.)
The evening’s poets, Chenjerai Hove of Zimbabwe and Irakli Kakabadze of Georgia, recited poltical poems by friends and colleagues, and perhaps because of the translation, the work itself seemed more strident than beautiful. That said, these are two writers who have felt first-hand the corrosive effects of government surveillance, and their introductory remarks provided a much-needed international context for the evening’s theme.
Conceptual artists Hasan Elahi and Jenny Marketou explored the dimensions of surveillance at home. Elahi, who spent time on the FBI terrorist watch list, showed slides from a project in which he keeps the FBI constantly updated on his whereabouts. “If they want to know what I’m doing, that’s fine, but they’re going to know everything. If I go to the toilet, they’re going to go with me.” Marketou read an FBI transcript in which two G-men follow Andy Warhol to New Mexico for the shooting of a porn film. They complain about lascivious dancing cowboys and the lack of character development. Thirty-odd years later, audience laughter at Joe’s Pub was both loud and anxious. La plus ça change...
The Hungarian Peter Esterhazy reprised Wednesday’s triumphant appearance at Town Hall, here reading from the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal. It’s a testament to Esterhazy’s charisma that his reading, in a language I don’t speak, was more evocative than the reading by his translator that followed. Ingo Schulze of Germany (whose latest novel, New Lives, will be published this fall), read from Through the Looking Glass, making Lewis Carroll sound positively Orwellian.
Finally, the evening’s second surprise guest, Deborah Eisenberg wrapped things up with a reading from the Argentine writer Humberto Constantini’sThe Long Night of Francisco Sanctis I’ve heard Eisenberg, one of my two or three favorite living American writers, read from her own work before; what was remarkable was the way she inhabited the sentences of another writer. I was half-convinced she’d written the excerpt herself. (I would have the same feeling on Saturday afternoon, hearing her read from Robert Walser’sJakob van Gunten).
Eisenberg and Shawn have for years been vocal critics of the excesses of the American defense establishment; it speaks to the power of their artistry that each is able to write explicitly about political themes without sacrificing aesthetic power. In the end “Something to Hide” served not only as a primer on the iniquity of state-sponsored surveillance, but as a reminder that art and politics need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, given sufficient humility and tolerance for ambiguity on the part of artists, each can be made to further the interests of the other.
“Short Stories” was a discussion held at the Scandinavia House for the PEN World Voices festival of International Literature on Friday, May 2nd. The participants were Etgar Keret, Young-ha Kim, Ingo Schulze, and Abdourahman Waberi. The discussion was moderated by Radhika Jones.
If Radhika Jones, managing editor of The Paris Review, is the most elegant person at the PEN World Voices Festival, then Etgar Keret might be the least. That contrast could be representative of their writing as well, she of the refined literary journal, he of the “badly written good story” mold whose own work is often brutal and abruptly short. While there were many contrasts on this panel on the short story, with speakers from Korea, Djibouti, Germany and Israel, they all agreed, save one, that no matter the value of the short story form to the writer, the market barely acknowledges them.
Surprising everyone, Young-ha Kim told us, through his exuberant translator, that the short story has been the dominant form in Korea and that every year the papers publish prize winning stories on January 1st, making mastery of the form a significant factor in becoming known. Although now, he says, Korea is looking out more to the U.S. so the novel is becoming more important than in years past. Abdourahman Waberi said, reflecting on the French market, write whatever you want, “just put novel.” Keret uniquely described the situation in Israel were the short story form is unwelcome: “People live a fragmented reality,” he says, “they have to check the clock every hour to see if they can go home. They want to read epic stories to escape.” For his part, he says, every story he thinks will be an epic, but he gets to the second page and “it suddenly ends.”
But if there’s any truth to the much discussed demise of the short story, someone should tell the writers. Jones asserted that the short story is alive and well, and said her journal alone receives over 1,200 submissions per month. The best evidence of the health of the form is the terrific stories read by (or for) the writers here during the discussion. I had already read Keret’s haunting piece, “Hat Trick” and found it even more unsettling hearing it read by Keret himself with his thick Israeli accent. All of the stories read were odd, magical, haunting in a way, and varied; a perfect demonstration of the flexibility of the form and it’s potential for power (unfortunately they were out of Schulze’s book that his story came from, but he’s now on my ‘must read’ list).
I’ve long felt that Keret’s work is a window into the everyday tension and ennui arising from the ever-potential for violence in Israel, and the fact that he accomplishes that in such short gulps is indeed a testament to the short story form as well as his own writing (I got to tell him so after the event too, or actually, I told him that I find myself reading his work aloud, in which he replied that that is the highest compliment).
Fortunately, there was not too much time for questions at the end because this day’s was no different than most where questions tend to be either banal (see Dorothy’s notes on the Three Musketeers event) or more about the questioners. One woman wanted to make a ‘statement’ about the short story, she being a writer herself, and another wanted to announce his own literary acquaintances without really making much of a question. It was an “advice to aspiring writers” question that got the panelists talking though, and Keret derided the idea of well crafted yet boring or “sterile” story epitomized often in The New Yorker. He said there “is no way to write a story. Think about the story and not how it’s formed.”
MetaxuCafé was shut out by the 92nd St.Y from taking any photos or video from Friday night’s Three Musketeers Event. They wanted us to pay “several hundred dollars” to exercise our right to free speech. Ironic given that we were there to report on a PEN event whose raison d’être is free speech. At any rate, our photographer Mary did get some photos from after the event [see them here]. And all is not lost because the people at PEN did take some photos of the event (and backstage) and have posted them on Flickr. Click on the photo below for more.
Incidentally, the photo here is of Umberto Eco reading from Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian, which for me was the highlight of the night, listening to the rhythm of the original while reading the English behind him.
Despite the heavyweight-panel—Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove, and Abdourahman Waberi—African Wars was the most disappointing of the events I’ve been to so far. It’s also the first (of the ones I’ve attended) where the audience was charged for their tickets (though my press pass meant I didn’t have to pay).
Farah and Hove are from countries very much in the news—Somalia and Zimbabwe, respectively—and between them one might have expected—if nothing else—some insight into the volatile present-day situations there. There was a bit of that, but overall things ranged far too far afield in what was an unfocussed and ultimately pretty messy sort of discussion.
Moderator Violaine Huisman’s introduction of the panelists was informative if somewhat drawn-out, but in trying to jump-start discussion with a quote from Ryszard Kapuscinski, that ‘Africa does not exist’, she definitely got off on the wrong foot. "Where is that man coming from ?" Hove asked (and noted then that he had once met Kapuscinski and told him that he was mixing fiction and journalism—and should put a disclaimer in his books).
Waberi sensibly tried to put the proper spin on the contentious words, noting that by the same token one could say ‘Europe doesn’t exist’, and that Kapuscinski’s statement is obviously a simplification, and that cultural differences exist in all these areas (Greece and Lithuania are both part of Europe, but very different, and it’s the same with the African countries, etc.). But from there it was still hard to rein in the conversation.
Farah and Hove have apparently jousted frequently, and Hove smilingly said early on that they disagreed on a great deal. Their very different personalities—Hove tends a bit to anecdotal rambling, and readily offers up his opinion at any point, while Farah is more of an elder (literary) statesman type, his speech much more measured and carefully worded—could probably play well off each other, but it didn’t work out that well here. (Among the interesting potential in the personal dynamics: Waberi wrote his thesis on Farah and Hove recounted wanting to write his PhD on Farah as well.)
Getting the conversation back to the ostensible subject repeatedly proved difficult, but Farah at least spiced things up by suggesting more context must be allowed in considering war in Africa: after all Africa did not have civil wars at the time when you had them in Europe or America. The natural development in Africa, he said, was interrupted for over a hundred years, by colonization; cultural development (in its broadest sense) was frustrated by the arrival of other people, with other interests. And he suggested that, for example, the Thirty Years War in Germany was remarkably comparable to the situation in the Congo.
Hove disagreed, arguing against the idea that it was just Africa’s turn to go through such a war-cycle (and, presumably, sort of get it out of their system). He said: "Wars in Africa are simply about the distribution of power and its benefits."
(The two positions, at least as to the limited extent they were expounded on, don’t seem entirely irreconcilable, and Farah did agree that economics and power drive all wars.)
Another interesting aside of contention was a project that Waberi took part in but Hove declined to, where authors were sent to Rwanda to write, in some form, about what had happened there. Hove worried generally a great deal about the danger of authors being co-opted on the side of the victimizer, and he did not think the Rwandan project offered the necessary guarantees of independence; Waberi disagreed—and while an interesting issue in and of itself, it also got the discussion off track. Still, Hove’s points about the ease with which the author can be co-opted were interesting, and he recounted that he had been offered the position of Minister of Culture in Zimbabwe some years ago; he turned it down, saying he’d only accept the Ministry of Finance (because that was something he knew nothing about and could learn a great deal at, while he already knew everything about culture ... certainly, it’s hard to imagine he could have done any worse with Zimbabwe’s economic policy than the current regime).
The question-and-answer session was a complete disaster, with Huisman losing any remaining control over the proceedings, as audience members failed to grasp the basic concept of succinctly directing a (possibly relevant) question at the authors. A few stray comments of interest came up, and Farah did manage to stir things up by saying that they were not fighting for democracy in Zimbabwe right now (because democracy is something only arrived at at the end of a very long process, which begins with regaining one’s dignity and one’s integrity—Farah also noting that while the US was much farther along on the road to democracy, it was also still far from truly achieving it), but things were far from neatly tied up.
Not too much about any specific African wars, and what generalities there were also strayed far too far, making for an unsatisfying afternoon. Too bad, because all three writers did seem to have some ideas worth exploring—but under Huisman’s moderation it remained an oil-and-vinegar combination that just wouldn’t mix.
Ingo Schulze and Eliot Weinberger got together to discuss Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives at the Goethe Institut, in front of a good-size audience. It turned out to be pretty much an introduction to Schulze, covering his career trajectory and especially his recent (2006) novel, which will be coming out as New Lives in the fall from Knopf, in a translation by John E. Woods, from which he also read an excerpt.
Schulze was born in what was then still East Germany, in 1962, and did not publish until after the fall of the wall; the East-West contrast was a recurring subject in the conversation. Schulze actually went east in the 1990s, to St.Petersburg—his business-man (as newspaperman) years—and noted generally that the East German 1990s seemed to him much like at least the European 1950s, a time of rapid change and rise of living standards (with the new-found possibilities of discretionary spending, travelling abroad, etc.). Still, when Weinberger suggested that his books were like a documentation of private lives (in keeping with the festival theme ...) in East Germany, he said he never thought of that (though he seemed inclined to agree).
Among the points raised were the English-- or rather German-versions-of-English-words of some of his titles: Simple Storys (’Simple schtorries’ as he gave the ‘Saxon’ pronunciation, published in English as Simple Stories), or his new novel, Handy (which, as a bemused Weinberger noted, is the German term for cellphone—allowing, he observed, English-speakers to go around asking folks in Germany if they have their handy handy, etc.)
Of interest, too, the German authors Schulze praised—most notably Wolfgang Hilbig, whom he holds in particularly high regard. When asked to named other authors he though highly of he named: Hans Joachim Schädlich, Katja Langen-Müller, and Marcel Beyer .
Overall: a decent, fairly informative introduction to the author.
Writing Genocide: a discussion between Christian Jungersen and Lieve Joris took place Thursday, May 1st at CUNY’s Elebash Recital Hall.
Genocide is as vast a topic as it is an intractable problem, yet fortunately, our two speakers on Thursday’s “Writing Genocide” panel brought a particular viewpoint that is not often enough discussed: the psychology of the perpetrators.
Lieve Joris’s novel, The Rebels’ Hour, traces the life of Assani, a young cowherd who “learns that he is ethnically Tutsi; though uninterested in politics or military life, he is forced to take sides in the bloody conflict rocking the Congo in the wake of the Rwandan genocide.... he becomes a fearsome rebel leader. With his cadre of child soldiers he traverses the war-ravaged country...”
The approach for this discussion was for each author to begin by commenting on the other’s book. Christian Jungersen, the Danish author most recently of The Exception, was a bit shocked, it seems, at the empathy he felt with this character Assani, and with good reason. How can we feel anything for murderers? “When I read this book,” he said, “I thought, this could be me!” A nuanced view is important, but sympathy is dangerous territory where we “risk not condeming as we should.”
But it turns out this is territory Jungersen is familiar with. His novel explorers the ironic position of employees of a think tank who, while researching and writing about genocide, turn against one another, thus exposing the potential for multiplicity and evil that all of us may have within. In fact, later in response to a question about those normal people who resist the pressure of becoming someone like Assani, Jungersen asserted that it’s not the sweet-hearted people you might think; those are the very ones that the genocidal process nourishes because of its emphasis on emotion in order to motivate people. It is often, according to what he found researching his novel, those people on the margins, a little off of society who are most apt to not fall into the trap.
An underlying issue in the emotional tug towards violence is racism, and while not addressed here by name it was certainly a theme in the discussion. In Joris’s book, the character Assani grew up in an area where tribes were kept apart because of their marriage practices. It is this sort of exclusion (racism in my vocabulary) that creates an environment that can lead to violence, in part, Ms. Joris explains, because it makes perpetrators feel like victims. This is a particular emphasis of hers as she felt it was important to go back in her character’s life to when he was innocent.
Jungersen’s novel, while set in the workplace and not in the killing fields, explores similar terrain where one’s environment can change them. He said that with this novel he wanted to explore how the dynamic of the office “makes me mean.”
These complexity of emotions are probably best conveyed in art, which is why this discussion, spilling into an extra half-hour from schedule, was so intelligent: both writers knew their topic from research, yet if there were “experts” on the panel we would have been wrapped in definition rather than exploration. At one point, Jungersen demurred from answering the question of just what genocide is by pointing out the specificity and legality surrounding the term (issues that probably don’t serve the problem very well anyway).
There was also some discussion of writing. Joris, who characterized her book as a baby, spent years (6, I believe) researching the novel, yet found it very difficult to write. She ended up spending 9 months working in a monastery to get it finished. Jungersen was very curious about whether or not Joris was exhausted from such arduous research and if she’d be writing more about the Congo (about which this is her third book). She’s moved on, it turns out, to Asia, but still exploring similar topics.
Jungersen, for his part, declared that he was done writing about Genocide. While admiring greatly those who devote their lives to making the world a better place, he, as he said early on, is driven to write.
As the title should have alerted me, this session was a collection of short readings rather than a discussion of some literary or political topic. My attention span for being read to is limited – I go to readings more to see what the author looks and sounds like, and for the Q&A, rather than for any particular nuance in the reading itself – but this group was varied enough (and each one brief enough) to keep me focused.
My favorite segment, though, was Janet Malcolm’s reading from her new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. I’ve always found remarks about Stein much more interesting than reading Stein herself (though wasn’t it Stein who said “remarks are not literature”?), and Two Lives contains some juicy remarks, some of them about the difficulty of reading her. Malcolm’s subject, at least for this part of the book, was a Stein scholar named Ulla Dydo, the author of a 659-page work over which, Malcolm says, hovers the question “Is Stein worth the effort to read her?”
Dydo had studied a Stein work called “Stanzas in Meditation,” of whom someone wrote that it was perhaps the dreariest long poem in the world. Dydo noticed that throughout the manuscript of the poem the word “may” had been crossed out, often violently, and replaced with “can,” or in different contexts with “today” or “day” – often to the detriment of the sound and sense. The reason came to Dydo in a dream while she was staying in a spartan hostel near the Beinecke Library. “May” was the name of Stein’s lover in an early and forgotten autobiographical novel called QED, and a vindictive Alice B. Toklas had forced her to take out every “may” in the long poem.
Startling as it is in itself, Malcolm noted that it lends credibility to the passage in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast when he recounts a visit to Stein’s home in which he hears Toklas speaking to her in a way he had never heard a human being speak to another. Some have assumed that this was Hemingway’s revenge for snide comments by Stein, but in fact may have been (whatever Hemingway’s hangups about gay people) evidence that lesbians can be just as sadomasochistic as anybody.
I read several books on the genocide in Rwanda while I was working on A Basket of Leaves, and Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld was one of the most striking. Instead of interviewing the survivors (as he does in another book), he talked to the killers themselves — the men who had spent their days tracking down Tutsis in the papyrus marshes near a town in the south, and killing them. Like all books on the genocide, it never adequately answered the question of how seemingly ordinary people become capable of atrocities — but it was a brave attempt to do it.
Writing Genocide was the first panel I attended in this year’s PEN World Voices festival, and when I got there I was disappointed that Hatzfeld couldn’t come. But I soon found that Lieve Joris and Christian Jungersen had more than enough interesting and disquieting things to say to occupy the time. Joris, a Belgian writer living in the Netherlands, has spent years in the Congo and has written three books about the country, including The Rebels’ Hour. Jungersen is a young Danish novelist whose new book is a psychological drama called The Exception.
Before describing their own books, each author began by giving his or her impressions of the others’ work. Jungersen said the protagonist of The Rebels’ Hour was the strangest character he had ever felt sympathy for: a young man whose feelings of ostracism drive him to power and violence. Joris said The Exception, which she read in Dutch, reads like a thriller. It tells the story of four women working in a human rights organization in Copenhagen, where office politics come to mirror the paranoia and vindictiveness of the crimes they are researching.
Both writers, they noted, were (like Hatzfeld) writing about the perpetrators of genocide rather than the victims. Joris’s character was based closely on a real-life person whom she had gotten to know over several years. “I’m not going to put him on a Wanted poster,” she said. “I had to find a novelistic way to tell the story.” The risks in telling his story, she said, were that she might blow his cover, or that she might burn her own wings (whether physically or psychologically she didn’t make clear). This was a difficult book to write, she said. She lives near a canal in Amsterdam, and at times she was tempted to throw the manuscript into the canal, and herself with it.
Though Joris had come closer to witnessing genocide, Jungersen had thought deeply about how it works. We are always told how important it is to feel the pain of others, for instance, so we might suppose that warm, empathetic, well-socialized people are less likely to participate in genocide. Not so, he said. Genocide thrives on emotion and togetherness, on feeling part of the group and dwelling on the suffering of oneself and one’s people. According to one expert he interviewed, it is the misfits who are most likely to resist the pressure to do evil: those who are “half weird,” who wear two different shoes, the computer geeks, those who aren’t part of the group.
When I saw that Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Mario Vargas Llosa were to appear together at the PEN World Voices festival, I bought tickets immediately, and I’m glad I did — the event was fabulous. Even before the event itself began, good things were happening; I ran into Anne Fernald from the blog Fernham and got to chat with her for a couple minutes. Then Hobgoblin pointed out that Richard Ford and Jeffrey Eugenides were sitting two rows in front of us. I also had a nice conversation with the elderly woman sitting next to me; she told me about her book that had been published years ago and her successful career and her great-grandchildren who are too busy to visit very often.
Then the event began; first there was a general introduction, and then Umberto Eco appeared. He explained that each writer would read from his work in his native language, and then he began to read a section from Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian, while the English translation was projected onto a screen. It was thrilling to hear Eco read in his native language; the Italian was beautiful to listen to, and I soon stopped following the words on the screen and in order to pay more attention to the way the language sounded. When he finished he left the stage and Rushdie came out to read from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. It was a funny passage (or maybe it’s just funny when you’re listening to it in a crowd) about the Emperor Akbar who has built a “house of worship” in honor of reason, which turns out to be a tent because rationality is an impermanent thing. Then Vargas Llosa read from his 2007 novel The Bad Girl, in Spanish. This time I followed the English words to see what I could understand from the Spanish; the passage was about the narrator falling in love with the flamboyant Lily, a girl newly arrived in his town of Miraflores. The passage had the same light and humorous tone that I saw in the one work of his I’ve read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a book I read with enjoyment.
After the readings, all three writers came out on stage and were joined by Leonard Lopate (a WNYC talk show host), the moderator for their discussion, and things really got going. They began talking about the “Three Musketeers” theme — this was the title of the night’s event — and the story of how the three writers had met a decade earlier and had such a fabulous time they gave themselves the name from Dumas. Now they were here for a reunion. This story quickly turned into a discussion of Dumas himself, and how badly The Three Musketeers is written — Rushdie and Eco took great pleasure in describing just how sloppily Dumas could write and how wordy he could be, and one of them said, “The magic of The Count of Monte Cristo is due to the fact that it is badly written.” These two had the audience laughing uproariously; they both have fabulous senses of humor — Rushdie is dry and witty, and Eco exudes energy and expressiveness in that stereotypical Italian way, complete with hand gestures. He was utterly charming. Then Vargas Llosa, who is funny too but in a more dignified way, stepped in with a defense of “bad writing”; he argued that if the writing draws you in and moves you then it can’t be bad writing and that good writing isn’t merely a matter of good grammar and pretty words. This drew hearty applause from the audience.
Then Lopate stepped in started asking them serious questions about the clash of cultures in their novels — I would have preferred that he just let the writers keep up their debate and their jokes because the minute he asked a serious question the energy fell and the mood changed. But the conversation was good, of course; they talked about how writers in the U.S. don’t have any meaningful political role, which is often not the case in other countries, and why this might be so, and they debated whether writers flourish more in dictatorships rather than democracies (because they are the only ones speaking truths the country wants and needs to hear). They all seemed to agree that the U.S. is a special case because of the way its writers are seen as entertainers rather than as important political figures. In his deadpan way, Rushdie claimed that this problem is entirely due to movie stars, which then turned the conversation to Rushdie’s own experiences acting in movies, and he quipped, “I’m so glad you’re asking me about my best work.”
Then Lopate asked a couple questions solicited on index cards from the audience; the first question, asking the writers to describe their writing methods, got only boos from the audience because of its banality, and I was delighted to see Richard Ford yell out “Next question!” Before they moved on, though, Eco, looking inordinately pleased with himself, explained his writing method — he starts on the left side of the page and works his way over to the right. This got a laugh.
The next and last audience question got them talking about the virtues of the English language; Rushdie described it as “a bendy language,” and one of the others, I can’t remember who, argued that its flexibility is both a virtue and a risk — its openness and adaptability have led to some of the world’s greatest literature, but these same qualities can possibly lead to its dissolution, as people from all around the world make English their own.
And that was it — afterwards was a book signing, but we didn’t stick around, as we hadn’t brought any of our books and needed to run off to catch the train. I left vowing once again to take advantage of opportunities like this more often than I do; living within easy traveling distance of NYC can be a wonderful thing.
Late Thursday night, after several PEN events and many drinks, a European friend and I succumbed to the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about the state of literature in America and abroad. Most of our aperçus wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in the sober light of morning, but I liked his epiphanic declaration that one of the worst things a piece of writing can be is “harmless.” By that standard alone, the work of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931 - 1989) is high art. As Horacio Castellanos Moya put it at “The Art of Failure,” an evening panel on Bernhard at the Austrian Cultural Forum, “Bernhard is a snake. He has rattles. He has poison.”
Castellanos Moya knows whereof he speaks. He is the author of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, as well as the recently translated Senselessness, which adapts Bernhard’s long, rhythmic sentences into a Spanish-language idiom. The other “Art of Failure” panelists - scholar Fatima Naqvi, LIVE from the NYPL impresario Paul Holdengräber, and novelist Dale Peck, - had their own insights into Bernhard’s misanthropy. Naqvi has made a career out of studying it, Holdengräber is the scion of a Viennese family forced into exile during World War II, and Peck has raised hackles with his poison-pen reviews of fellow writers.
It was odd, then, that “The Art of Failure” started off on a lethargic note. Moderator Jonathan Taylor, author of a recent Bernhard article in The Believer, was a soft-spoken, even phlegmatic host, and the panel’s format - in which each guest spoke for ten to fifteen minutes before conversation begins - seemed ill-suited to its subject. Both Naqvi and Peck seemed to have over-rehearsed their opening remarks. And though Castellanos Moya - “This guy is writing because he doesn’t want to go out killing people!” - added some verve to the proceedings, Holdengräber concluded the first part of the discussion with an apt question: What would Bernhard think of us?
Not much, apparently. Bernhard, according to Naqvi, was a strident opponent of bourgeois cultural institutions like PEN World Voices and the Austrian Cultural Forum. He looked contemptuously on all forms of dilettantism and groupthink. Indeed, part of what Bernhard meant with his frequent invocation of the word “failure” and its synonyms was the condition of dilettantism. Like his countryman Wittgenstein, (whose nephew appears in one of Bernhard’s novels), he held himself to standards few writers are capable of observing.
If the Bernhard panel failed to achieve rigor or purity, though, it did, in its second half, grow into something more involving. As monologues gave way to actual discussion, the panelists began to explore Holdengräber’s proposition that “there is something hygenic in [Bernhard’s] misanthropy.” Postwar Austrians, according to Naqvi, worked so hard to efface the strain of National Socialism in the culture that they often risked harmlessness. In novels such as The Loser and Correction, Bernhard made a place in postwar Austrian literature for a modernist aesthetics of opposition.
Dale Peck, whose critical writings I find both embarrassingly self-involved and hostile to the seductions of literature, proved to be surprisingly eloquent on Bernhard’s aesthetics. He spoke of the importance of “[giving] yourself over” to Bernhard’s totalizing sensibility and the anxiety it produces. And perhaps Bernhard didn’t always live as he wrote; Taylor offered evidence that Bernhard listened to Prince.
Ultimately, questions about the merits of Bernhard’s Weltanschauung remained unresolved. Those panelists who have flirted professionally with dilettantism seemed almost intimidated by Bernhard. And perhaps the novelist’s shade was hovering above us, watching in disgust. Still, in an age when literature too often flirts with harmlessness, the value of a room packed with Bernhard enthusiasts (and neophytes like myself) seemed beyond dispute.
Participants: Juan de Recacoechea, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Francisco Goldman, and Joshua Furst. Moderated by Matt Weiland.
The Secret Lives of Cities brought together authors whose work has focused on particular city: Recacoechea on La Paz, Al-Mohaimeed on Riyadh, Goldman on Guatemala City, and Furst on Minneapolis.
Though Al-Mohaimeed (who spoke with the help of an interpreter) and Recacoechea made striking comments, they were handicapped by lack of fluency in English, so Furst and Goldman tended to dominate the discussion.
Furst, though a native New Yorker, had set his novel The Sabotage Cafe in Minneapolis, a city he had never lived in. Recacoechea objected that this couldn’t be done, but Furst maintained that he knew enough from many visits there to catch the personality of the place. In fact, he found New York the hardest place to write about. Like the narrator of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, he would have to give a hundred different versions of New York to convey what he knew.
Furst knew Minneapolis at least in part because of the “many ex-girlfriends” who have lived there. A city is made up of the mindset of those who live there, he said, and there is a psychological war between various factions to be “the mood, the mode, the idea” of that city. “The kids in my book,” he said, “are anarchist fuckups, who see the possibility of creating a space of disruption to keep the city alive.”
Furst’s book is set in the Dinkytown neighborhood near the university, and through the eyes of a woman returning there after twenty years away, he describes how the vegan whole-wheat pizza joints and the head shops where you could buy a feather-tipped roach clip have given way to boutiques with cute names and Japanese restaurants with bland teak walls.
Goldman was a volcano of fluent description. I haven’t read his fiction so I can’t comment on the way he draws characters, but he describes Guatemala City like an investigative journalist. A beefy man with a plain face, Jenn thought he was the kind of harmless-looking fellow that people might spill their secrets to. His latest book is a work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder, which Lieve Joris (at the panel on genocide) had mentioned having read.
One of Goldman’s riffs began when the moderator, Matt Weiland, made a comment about the experience of someone who lives in a city, a “city liver,” then cocked his head, realizing that sounded odd.
“Guatemala City is hard drinking, so city liver is there,” said Goldman. “It’s a lawless city,” he went on. Seventy percent of the cocaine that reaches the US is transshipped there. Squatter slums have grown on the horrible muddy inclines around the city: a pulsing, perverted life. There’s space for enormous creativity, effervescence, “criminal busyness.” Crib houses are packed with stolen Indian babies from the highlands, being fattened up for the US adoption trade. Chop shops are dug into the ravines, Goldman said, and cars stolen in New York City may end up there. The city is extremely murderous. More people were killed there in 2006 than in Afghanistan. The gangs are medieval in their arcane structure and fervor. The city is pulsing with a very, very dark life.
“Frank is working for the tourist board of Guatemala,” Weiland said dryly.
Participants: Young-ha Kim, Etgar Keret, Abdourahman Waberi, and Ingo Schulze. Moderated by Radikha Jones.
Tall and striking in an elaborately figured dress or robe, Radikha Jones of the Paris Review began this session with a spirited defense of the health of the short story, noting that her own magazine receives 1,200 submissions a month. But the short-story authors on hand quickly undermined her position.
Ingo Schulze noted that his publisher didn’t want the word “stories” on the cover of one of his books. Etgar Keret said that the fragmented nature of reality in Israel caused readers to avoid short fiction and bury themselves in epic novels. Abdourahman Waberi said he was encouraged to write whatever he wanted, so long as he called it a novel.
Only Young-ha Kim reported that he comes from a country – Korea – where the short story is held in high regard. An annual prize of $10,000 goes to the best short story, and writers must show prowess in that form to be taken seriously. There are four Chinese characters, he said, that refer to murdering someone with a very short weapon, and that’s the challenge of a good short story. Keret put it a little differently: a short story that works is like killing someone with a toothpick rather than an atomic bomb.
The titles of these authors’ collections were irresistible: 33 Moments of Happiness by Schulze, The Girl on the Fridge by Keret, and The Land Without Shadows by Waberi. (Young-ha Kim had also published a novel called I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.)
I was especially happy to see Waberi, who is the first author from Djibouti whose work I’ve been able to find in English. He read from a story called “The Seascape Painter and the Wind Drinker.” I bought his book after the reading and chatted with him a bit as he signed it.
“You’ll notice an empty chair has been placed next to the podium on stage. This is too symbolize those writers who could not be here today due to political oppression.”
Thus intoned Leonard Lopate at New York City’s uptown 92nd Street Y, introducing a major PEN World Voices event featuring Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa and Umberto Eco. Ironically, at just this moment I was caught in a chaotic crush in the back of the auditorium along with several other late arrivals and second-tier press-pass attendees who couldn’t find a seat in the packed house. A particularly stern usher was hissing at us to leave, another was telling us to walk forward, and I was starting to wish I had the nerve to walk onstage and sit in the damn empty chair myself.
Yes, there was a big sellout crowd for the “Three Musketeers”, and in fact it’s encouraging to realize that New Yorkers will pack a room just to hear a postmodernist from Bombay and London, a postmodernist from Italy and a postmodernist from Peru read stories to us, and despite the clumsy start the Rushdie/Eco/Vargas Llosa reading delivered rare literary pleasures in a sophisticated, harmonious arrangement. It was a reading to remember.
Umberto Eco read a passage from Foucault’s Pendulum in original Italian as the words scrolled on a screen behind him. While this may have made some attendees feel they were at the New York State Opera and others wish they had worn their contacts, I personally found it easy enough to follow and enjoy the text’s cosmic psychological wanderings as Eco’s gravelly voice rumbled in sympathy. I tried to follow along and transliterate (not that I know Italian, of course, but I can always try) and then gave up when it became clear that the text scrolling had lost track of the live reading. No matter, I loved hearing the piece.
Salman Rushdie was next, reading a passage (in English) about an Indian commoner in audience with the Mughal emperor Akbar from the new novel The Enchantress of Florence, just released in the UK and scheduled for release in the USA soon. I could not get a good sense of Rushdie’s overall intention with this novel, though descriptions of the book suggest a scope similar to Orhan Pamuk’s great My Name Is Red. Rushdie didn’t “wow me” like he did last year, though I am intrigued by this new novel’s historical setting.
Mario Vargas Llosa read from his latest novel The Bad Girl, again in the original language, though this time the text scrolled in perfect time with the author’s reading, and the audience responded with much enthusiasm. The three eminences then gathered for a loose and lively chat about why they liked to call themselves the “Three Musketeers” (Rushdie even mulled over “The Three Tenors”, which I had suggested in a blog post on Thursday, and I was also starting to think up other alternatives including “The Traveling Wilburys” and “Velvet Revolver"). With Alexandre Dumas pere now in play, Rushdie, Eco and Vargas Llosa now began batting The Count of Monte Cristo back and forth, debating whether or not such “bad writing” as this can also be great writing. All three seemed to agree that bad writing could be great writing and that this often happens (it’s not hard to guess that all three authors were thinking of their own excesses here, as well as those of Dumas pere).
The panel was great fun to listen to because the writers were loose and rambunctious, eagerly speaking over each other at times, fully devoid of the stiff politeness that too often mars these gatherings. An after-event hangout with several bloggers and book critics and one photographer (Mary Reagan’s photos of Eco, Rushdie and Vargas LLosa should be up soon) suitably capped the evening.
Asli Erdogan could not make it to the festival, due to illness, so Bookforum: Political Engagement was a two-man show, with Nuruddin Farah and Elias Khoury, moderated by Albert Mobilio.
Farah and Khoury come from perhaps the two places in the world that have been most seriously and violently unsettled for the longest, Somalia and Lebanon.
Farah has lived in exile for decades, while Khoury—though he currently teaches at NYU—says he has never been an exile. For Khoury, Beirut has always been central to his writing, while Farah said he found exile helped his writing: "distance distills", he said, allowing him to get at the pure essence of the place, as he has continued to live in the ‘country of his imagination’.
For Khoury the language to write in was never a political choice: he only knew how to write in Arabic he said (though he completed his graduate studies in Paris (i.e. is presumably fluent in French) and certainly speaks English well enough). For Farah the situation was more complicated: raised in the Somali-speaking part of Ethiopia, he learned a number of languages but faced various hurdles—most notably, at least with Somali, the fact that the Somali language had no written script until 1972 ..... With Somali, Amharic, Arabic, and English to choose from—and trying his hand at it seems like all of them—he claimed that it was the typewriters that decided it: English had the strong, dependable Royal typewriters. Later he also wrote in Italian, but those Olivettis kept breaking down ..... (He also noted that he wrote the first seven chapters of Maps in Somali and published them in serial form, only to be hauled before the censors, who demanded changes he was not willing to agree to; publication was suspended, and he switched to English.)
Politics seems almost inevitably to play a role in these authors’ writings, but there was also some discussion of their activity beyond just writing—including Farah’s role in trying to help broker peace in Somalia, and Khoury’s opposition to a Holocaust-denying event and then his response to an Israeli ambassador lauding him for that action (he did not particularly appreciate it, suggesting that denouncing some of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians would be the better response).
Farah, in particular, has a nice way of mixing anecdotes into his answers to make his points, but both authors were in good form, making for a fairly interesting event.
You may find some PEN reports at the National Book Critics Circle blog ”Critical Mass.” Jane Ciabattari reports on the Public Lives event. She ends her report with:
Ian McEwan, whose last book, the brief and lyrical “On Chesil Beach,” was launched with a documentary, not an author reading tour, brought down the house by reading what he called the advance work on a novel he was writing about global warming. He and a group of scientists, artists, and writers are stationed aboard a ship on a fjord near the North Pole, venturing out in waves. Within days, the boot room, where these instant colleagues donned and shed the multiple layers, the balaclavas and protective gear, ha
But if there’s any truth to the much discussed demise of the short story, someone should tell the writers. Jones asserted that the short story is alive and well, and said her journal alone receives over 1,200 submissions per month. The best evidence of the health of the form is the terrific stories read by (or for) the writers here during the discussion. I had already read Keret’s haunting piece, “Hat Trick” and found it even more unsettling hearing it read by Keret himself with his thick Israeli accent. All of the stories read were odd, magical, haunting in a way, and varied; a perfect demonstration of the flexibility of the form and it’s potential for power (unfortunately they were out of Schulze’s book that his story came from, but he’s now on my ‘must read’ list). 
Jungersen’s novel, while set in the workplace and not in the killing fields, explores similar terrain where one’s environment can change them. He said that with this novel he wanted to explore how the dynamic of the office “makes me mean.”
