Novel

Podcast • May 28, 2009

Booker Prize Winner Marlon James

Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road ...

Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second novel, The Book of Night Women, has conjured a teen-age female narrator, also a green-eyed black-skinned heroine named Lilith, and a blood-curdling conspiracy of female slaves in Jamaica in the year 1800. Their mission is to burn, kill and destroy a merciless slave plantation with the same rapacious cruelty that the British masters (and a very Irish overlord) use to run it. The Book of Night Women is not so much a historical novel as a very modern elaboration of violence that strips the souls of people. You feel you’re not just reading it; you’re becoming a witness to sexual, verbal and physical ferocity that scars and reduces everybody; and then you’re a witness also to love — unnamed, but exquisitely articulated — where you least expected it. “I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this book, including the victims,” Marlon James remarks in our conversation. There’s a writer here with a book and a “dynamism of spoken language” that are very much for us and our world.

One of the concerns from critics was why in such a forward-looking time I was writing a backward-looking novel? You know: “Black is the new president,” “we’re post-racial” and all of that. There are a lot of answers to that, and not just the very typical one, that you need to know your history and so on. But I wasn’t writing a historical novel. There are many ways, I hope, in which this novel is in dialogue with the President. The first is the ownership of language. The story is old, but the idea of telling a story in the voices of the people who went through it is still a pretty new thing. The idea of a slave’s story or the story of urban poverty being in the voice of the people who experienced it is new, and it’s pretty radical when you look at the British West Indies. The first publisher to see The Book of Night Women was a British publisher who turned it down. And her request to me was to reconsider writing it in the third-person in standard English. And what struck me there was that even in 2007, people still refuse to have stories told by the people who experienced it, in a language that breaks standard English, that accepts lyricism, that breaks words here, that joins words here. It is a slavery novel but it is also a novel that acknowledges the dynamism of spoken dialect English. And owning it…

I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this novel, including the victims. And I think that it is something that had to be said. It’s too easy. I always say it and I say this sometimes when I lecture: if blacks accuse whites of denial, then blacks could accuse themselves of myth-making — that that there were all oppressive whites and all oppressed blacks. So that is why the idea of slaves owning slaves is so painful for some people to read. It’s a fact; it happened. Slaves themselves became the masters after the rebellions. I knew I could have written a very black and white story and probably still have been praised for it, largely–it must be said–out of guilt. I know I could have written about horrendous white masters beating poor slaves and have gotten away with it. To me that is intellectually dishonest. I think the more humane thing, but also a dialogue that has more to do with what is going on now, is one that recognizes all the ambiguities: that even such a dark world is still pretty gray…

It is not just a matter of knowing history so that you don’t repeat it. It is that you are headless without history. And I don’t think it is being taught enough. If I thought it was being taught enough I wouldn’t have written the book… Toni Morrison has said she writes the books that she wanted to read but could never find. And I agree with that totally. There is certainly a rich tradition of slave narratives and so on, but it is still not enough. Even the most enduring and the most lauded works about slavery tend to be about American Slavery– like Beloved. And Caribbean slavery was such a radically different thing: it was so violent. You can’t help but be hyper-violent when you are talking about West Indian slavery. And it is not even the violence itself, but the uncertainty that makes it even more violent…the slaves were not beaten into submission, they were very proud warriors from kingdoms who were just defeated in war. They were prisoners of a war of sorts, not necessarily victims who were waiting to be captured. And when you put that in a mix with people who come from Britain, mostly men, who are being thrust into this world where anything goes, it is bound to be explosive. And I think that story hasn’t been told enough.

Marlon James in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Podcast • May 21, 2009

Aleksandar Hemon: through bi-focals, darkly

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3)

Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales

What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon is a deeper Slavic kinship that readers have noted — the same kinship that Nabokov felt with Chekhov and “the subtle humor” of “this Chekhovian dove-gray world,” as Nabokov put it. Hemon writes “sad books for humorous people,” he says, and perhaps “humorous books for sad people” as well.

Our conversation is with the novelist of The Lazarus Project, the story-teller of Love and Obstacles. Hemon is a favorite of The New Yorker magazine for his very typically bi-focal new-century identity. He is about equally rooted in Sarajevo and Chicago by now – about equally drawn, for example, to gaudy gangster histories in either place. The Lazarus Project made a surreal link between a historic murder in Chicago in 1908 and the carnage in Sarajevo at the end of the 20th Century. He writes a very stylish immigrant English for one part of his audience, but the interesting thing in the Internet age is that Aleksandar Hemon also writes a political column online in Bosnian, not just for Sarajevo but for Bosnians in the US who wouldn’t – maybe couldn’t – read him in English. Like the Bosnian man now living in St. Louis who watches pictures of the snow falling in Sarajevo, on the Web. He’s not writing about exile, Hemon says, because he can and does go back to Bosnia. Rather he’s writing the stories and moral discoveries that come with displacement. I asked him to surface his theory about the continuities of violence in the world.

AH: I don’t believe in human atavism, that we’re savages waiting to be activated. I think what turns people into killers on a vast scale is a kind of misguided historical project. These things are well organized. The Nazis, obviously, were not savages. Genocide is a technology, it is a very complicated operation, and they needed a vast, well trained force to do that. Similarly, in the Balkans. A lot of people have represented the conflict in the Balkans as, you know, tribes at each other’s throats, which was a lie in so many ways. But it also misses the point of genocide, the technology of genocide. To kill seven thousand men in Srebenica, you need a large number of buses to transport people from Point A to Point B, so they can be shot. Someone has to organize those busses. There is an army hierarchy and so on. So, for the worst in us to be brought out, there has to be a historical project. In that vein, not quite a genocidal project obviously, the Bush administration, for example, brought out the worst in Americans. They had a misguided horrible project which somehow we’re still at. We’re still doing it, in many ways. And this brought out the worst things in America, and I hated that experience. Which is also to say that opposing such projects becomes a necessary ethical position for each citizen, including writers.

CL: There is a moment in The Lazarus Project that many have noted, where Brik is in a fight with his wife. She is American and she’s kind of defending the innocence of the kids at Abu Ghraib. And the Brik character, who has a lot in common with you, tells her: “I hate the normal people, in the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave… I told her that to be American you have to know nothing, and understand even less. And that I didn’t want to be American…” What has happened to that anger in you, what has happened to that in us?

AH: Well, I have had my anger. It never quite reached that point. Brik is very, very angry with the whole notion of being American. So I could write him, because during the Bush years I had a hard time being American. I was more of an American in ’99, when I wasn’t even a citizen, than I was during the Bush years. Because it seemed to me that if you were an American, you had to sign up for these projects, and I didn’t want to sign up.

CL In The Lazarus Project, Chicago in 1908 is the site of a kind of nativist hysteria. 100 years later, precisely, it became the seat of the new almost transnational American politics. What has happened to us, what has happened to Chicago?

AH: Well, Chicago, like America, was never one thing. It is not a monolithic thing, absolute and primitive… You know, as long as there has been a history of racism in this country there has been a history of opposition to racism. As long as there was an injustice, there were people fighting that injustice. The question is who has a higher hand. That is what I love about America: that vitality. And it can never be reduced to one thing, and the Bush regime tried to reduce it to one thing, we can stand united and question nothing. But it is too big, it is too complicated, it is too democratic. And what happened in Chicago and the United States is this: people like myself, who were playing defense, moved over and started attacking the opponents goal to score. And we scored.

Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 15, 2009.

Podcast • May 12, 2009

Reif Larsen: the Making of the "Spivet" Legend

Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business -- the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother's art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston.

 

Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins!

Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. His assignment, apparently, is to do with his story-telling, illustrations and marginal commentary in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet roughly what Yo-Yo Ma, with his tangos and Appalachian tunes and the Silk Road Project on top of his Bach cello suites, did for classical recording. This is Reif Larsen, the hope of an industry.

The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother’s art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston. We are sitting in front of one of his mother’s images: black-and-white female figures with slides projected onto their skin. “You can see,” he says, deadpan, “how I became fascinated with scientific diagramming.”

This Larsen is the child, as he says, of “an extraordinary collision of naturing and nurturing,” whose devoted parents and teachers have been getting out of his way all his life to let him be who he really is. This is the boy who drew ant anatomies for the sociobiologist and preeminent ant scientist E. O. Wilson. He’s the boy who never forgets the 7th grade teacher, Lois Hetland, who instructed him to draw his own detailed map of the globe; the same boy who hasn’t forgotten the coastlines of all the continents. The wonder of this Reif Larsen, you sense, isn’t really that he emerged so young. It’s rather that he took his time and poured all 29 years of his life so far into producing the Spivet yarn, about a 12-year-old mapmaker on a ranch in Montana who wins a grown-up prize from the Smithsonian Institution and wends his way to Washington to claim his victory. Spivet is a multi-media journey through a young man’s multiple intelligences. Here is Reif Larsen, the experimental story-teller, who would have found his own way, no matter what.

Reif Larsen speaks about literary influences, early and late, from Tedd Arnold’s No More Jumping on the Bed to Salinger’s stories, to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, to Conrad and Garcia Marquez, to Tolstoy and Gogol, and now the Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon. He speaks also of the modern writer’s inescapable entangements with technology, and in particular of his resistance to the “hypertext” fiction that Robert “The End of Books” Coover was advocating when Larsen was a student at Brown a decade ago.

Of course the great irony is that [Spivet] is really an exploded hypertext book. I’ve come back. Thank you, Coover, is the moral of this. So, yes, I wanted the tenets ot narrative and character to be in place, but within that format I found… Originally all of the subtexts were in the footnotes. I had almost no images in the first draft. I have a love-hate relationship with footnotes… With some writers like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker and some of David Foster Wallace’s stuff, it really works. But often it’s an authorial intrusion where the author is saying “I know so much more about this.” There’s almost a pompousness in the writer saying: “you’ve got to do this, reader.” And as someone who’s interested in narrative and how we read, how we form stories in our head, the footnote didn’t feel right. Also T.S. wouldn’t have liked it. T.S. is a spatial thinker. He would have seen the page as a sort of map. So at some point in the process I made this really key breakthrough: They’re not footnotes! They’re going to be marginalia! From a reading point of view, the real breakthrough was the arrows, because suddenly you’re following a kind of diagram, you’re following a map, but you’re also doing a lot of lateral movement which mimics (at least in Western culture) the eye reading, how the eye reads. So I quickly found there was a key relationship between the main text and the subtext, or the sidebars. In that T. S. is almost most comfortable in these exploding diagrams, or in these annotations; and he’s willing to make observations, or risk a sort of emotional literacy that he wouldn’t in the main text if it’s tucked away. He dips his toe into the pond of adultness, often in the last line of a sidebar. So seeing how these two things react to each other was really interesting from a writer’s point of view. And pretty early on I wanted the reader to know: I can’t skip the margins!

Reif Larsen in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 8, 2009.

His next book, Reif Larsen says, will be “about an underground troupe of puppeteers, traveling around to places under siege, performing strange shows about particle physics, for the masses!”

Podcast • May 7, 2009

Paul Harding’s Magical ‘Tinkers’

What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he’s the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as “Cold Water Flat” was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time ...

Paul HardingWhat is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he’s the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as “Cold Water Flat” was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time with his own hands and feet on drumsticks and pedals. He was listening to hear how sound works, how the world works, how he works. He may have been composing a contrapuntal bit of narrative that turns up on paper in this exchange between an itinerant mule-and-cart peddlar named Howard Aaron Crosby and his customers in the backwoods of Maine, circa 1900.

Where’s the soap?

This is the soap.

The box is different.

Yes, they changed it.

What was wrong with the old box?

Nothing.

Why’d they change it?

Because the soap is better.

The soap is different?

Better.

Nothing wrong with the old soap.

Of course not, but this is better.

Nothing wrong with the old soap. How can it be better?

Well, it cleans better.

Cleaned fine before.

This cleans better — and faster.

Well, I’ll just take a box of the normal soap.

This is the normal soap now.

I can’t get my normal soap?

This is the normal soap; I guarantee it.

Well I don’t like to try a new soap.

It’s not new.

Just as you say, Mr. Crosby. Just as you say.

Well, ma’am, I need another penny.

Another penny? For what?

The soap is a penny more, now that it’s better.

I have to pay a penny more for different soap in a blue box? I’ll just take a box of my normal soap.

From Tinkers by Paul Harding, pages 13 – 14. Bellevue Literary Press, New York, 2009.

Paul Harding’s prose in that moment can remind you of Marshall Dodge’s old “Bert and I” Maine stories. It can also sound like music: “Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets…” We hear light percussive sounds of a human voice, repetitions finding a rhythm. We hear a musician becoming a writer — not a wild a leap, he observes in conversation.

The differences between being a rock drummer and writing are superficial. The obvious ones: you’re playing with a couple of other people on stage, and you’re doing it at an ungodly volume. I’m clinically half deaf and I have tinnitus and a ringing in my ear all the time. But writing scratches the same itch… Having been a drummer I write by ear. I write by rhythm, you know. I just think of the rhythm of the sentence, and there’s a certain number of beats in a sentence, in a phrase, in longer passages. So there’s a kind of arranging. And then certainly in all these multigenerational things going on in Tinkers, I’m just fascinated by the experience of time, of being in time, and all these characters thinking about time and all that. As a drummer… you can futz around with all sorts of time signatures and all sorts of beats. You can play a time signature within another time signature. You can do all that sort of stuff. It’s all narrative, and narrative is all about time. So that’s what you’re doing with the writing, too.

I saw Elvin Jones of the famous Coltrane quartet several dozen times and had the opportunity to sit right in front of him and watch what he did with time. He could tap into the depths of the universe… Drumming is multi-tasking, it’s orchestration. You think of it as a string quartet — in the way you can play counterpoint with yourself, with your own different limbs, that kind of thing. I think of that as the way of making narrative, too. Any given scene has different strata. You can have things moving very nimbly, very quickly in one level of the writing, with larger, deeper cycles going on beneath. And you can work all that contrast and counterpoint. It’s the way you actually pull depth and dimensionality out of things.

Paul Harding in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Essex, Massachusetts, May 5, 2009.

Paul Harding is also a self-taught modern New England transcendentalist, out of the Thoreau and Emerson school, who read his way into an original inner life. Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop eased his transition from the drums to the keyboard. He’s read everything — been touched by Henry James and Proust and Carlos Fuentes and Michael Ondatje, among others — and he’s taught writing at Harvard.

Tinkers — as in country peddlars between the 19th and early 20th centuries — is an almost plotless novel, constructed as carefully as a clock, about fathers dying, thinking about their sons, and their fathers. It is a marvel on every page.

Podcast • April 23, 2009

Carlos Fuentes: FDR to BHO: the New Deal Revisited

“What a pleasure,” Carlos Fuentes was saying, “to speak praises of the United States again.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Mexico’s statuesque novelist, the handsomest, best-tailored ...

“What a pleasure,” Carlos Fuentes was saying, “to speak praises of the United States again.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3)

Mexico’s statuesque novelist, the handsomest, best-tailored writer in the world, sounds euphoric in spite of The Crisis — maybe because, as Brazil’s President Lula has said, “we didn’t start it this time. It was the blond guys with blue eyes.”

On Fuentes annual sojourn at Brown, he is riffing with us on changes we believe in, and a few we don’t.

Carlos Fuentes: stroke of genius [PM photo]

CL: Carlos Fuentes, the world has changed, rather in your direction since I have seen you. Take stock.

CF: Well, I spent eight years of my wasted life with George Bush.

CL: You weren’t alone.

CF: I am glad that is over because I have a deep feeling for the United States since I went to school here as a child during the era of Franklin Roosevelt. So my ideal is the Rooseveltian ideal: the New Deal. When I see it as left behind, corrupted, violated as it was in the Bush years, I feel extremely sad about the United States. People say I am anti-American. No, I am pro-Roosevelt…

CL: Mexico’s politics have changed [since the PRI got thrown out ten years ago]. When does the economics catch up?

CF: I am afraid it is not catching up at all, because in Mexico we need to put the people to work. We have a great reserve of labor, which we are not using. We are thinking that if private enterprise takes up the slack of this crisis, we will go through it, but I don’t think that is true. I think that basically in Mexico we have to renew our infrastructures and modernize the country with the abundant workforce that we have. It is not a question of trickle-down capitalism, we have to build from the bottom up, as Roosevelt did in the United States in the ‘30s…

CL: The news, of course, is about the fear of Mexico becoming a narco-state: that both the guns and the drugs are making their way through these tunnels into the United States and Mexico. Put that into perspective.

CF: Let’s say that the narco-wars in Mexico cause around 100 deaths. 90 of those deaths are between the capos of the gun cartels—like Al Capone in Chicago—they are gangs fighting, and murdering, each other. About 8 are police and army personnel and about 2 percent are civilians, so that is the way that cookie crumbles. Besides, it is localized in the north of Mexico, in Ciudad Juarez, Baja California and Tampico. But it is not a universal problem in Mexico, it is not nationwide. But that they are infiltrating governments, that they are infiltrating politics—that is also true. The reverse of the coin is that the origin of the problem is in the United States. And as long as the United States does not know who creates demand for drugs, who are the banks that clean the money that comes from the border, who are the people who are manipulating, using the drug business in the United States, we will never know the truth.

There is the great thing from the Obama administration, which is to accept that this is a bilateral problem that requires a bilateral solution. It is not only a problem of Mexico, it is a problem of the United States demanding the drug, supplying the arms and making the money. Let’s see if this is cleared up by the present administration in Washington.

CL: Your friend and mine, ex-president Ricardo Lagos from Chile, was worried that all of the discovery of these fifty-plus tunnels has been on the Mexican side. The United States, for all of its alarm, can’t seem to find the other end of the tunnel.

CF: It has to be because the United States and the Bush administration refused to accept that this was a bilateral problem shared by Mexico and the United States. [Under Bush,] it was only a problem created by Mexico against the United States. When you accept that it is a bilateral problem, you see the other end of the tunnels.

CL:: What do you think is unfolding in the [United States] relationship with Cuba?

CF: I think that more is happening than what meets the eye. I think that there is an agreement, basically, between the United States and Cuba to go step-by-step. I mean, after fifty years of cold war, it is natural that the steps be taken cautiously. But I think there is an agreement basically for both Havana and Washington to take the steps, hesitatingly, Hillary Clinton makes one declaration, Raul Castro makes another, Fidel intervenes, Obama intervenes. We are going towards a normalization of relationships. Now, will this affect the internal politics of Cuba? At the meeting in Trinidad, everyone demanded that Cuba be readmitted into the Organization of American states, but there is a proviso there, and that is that the governments must be democratically elected, which is not the case of the Cuban regime. How do you get through that hurdle? Come on.

The present situation is an anachronism. It was built on the fact that Cuba was a satellite of the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union anymore. What danger does Cuba represent? None whatsoever. It has a regime that is distasteful, it is not democratic, but you can have relations with an authoritarian capitalism, which is the way that I guess that Cuba will go, following China and Vietnam…you have good relations with them under the system of authoritarian capitalism. You can live with it.

CL: You’ve been watching the United States your whole life. Send us a postcard, about us.

CF: I am extremely optimistic. You know I’ve always said that the American presidential election should be universal. We should all have a right to vote for the President of the United States because it affects us all, and I think that 80% of the world would have voted for Barack Obama. I think he represents hope. It’s a novelty, it’s a good novelty, he’s a good man, an interesting, an intelligent and generous man — for me its great news to have such a man in the White House, it’s very good news.

CL: Zadie Smith says that he has, on some level, the mind of a novelist. He is a great man for writing dialogue, for hearing other voices, for multiplicity of perspectives.

CF: He ends his sentences, which Bush never could… Politically, he is very good news. He is in the right direction for the present crisis. It was genius on the part of the American people to elect such a man at this time.

Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, April 23, 2009.

Podcast • March 3, 2009

Blindspot: Lepore and Kamensky in Olde Boston

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Kamensky & Lepore: 2 madwomen, 1 attic Blindspot is a lark, with lessons. First, about sex and slavery ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3)

Kamensky & Lepore: 2 madwomen, 1 attic

Blindspot is a lark, with lessons. First, about sex and slavery in 18th Century Boston, where you didn’t expect to find so much of either. And then, about the writing of serious history as delicious fiction.

Blindspot was undertaken as an experiment, something of an email joke, by ranking professionals who’ve been friends since grad school (Yale): Jane Kamensky, now at Brandeis, and Jill Lepore, of Harvard and The New Yorker magazine.

Told in letters and journals, Blindspot, set in 1764, is a borderline kinky love story about a Scots portrait painter (think: Gilbert Stuart) who’s fled his London debts to Boston, and a passionate, downwardly-mobile 19-year-old daughter of the Boston ruling class who presents herself as a boy so as to get a job as the painter’s assistant. Get it? Frances Easton goes to work as Francis Weston for the portraitist Stewart Jameson. She falls in love with him, of course, and he with her — or him, as he supposes through most of the narrative. Fanny writes: “I felt full prepared to open myself to him, in whatever direction he wanted, Easton or Weston.”

But Blindspot is also an argument about history and the writing thereof:

18th Century novelists called their books ‘histories.’ You know, Tom Jones is “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.” Fielding insisted that Tom Jones was a history and that what historians wrote was made up, that it was so contrived to be answerable to the surviving set of facts that could be lined up and arranged in any which way that its reliability is fundamentally questionable. It comes from Aristotle’s Poetics to make this claim — that to make something up that has universal truth because it’s about humanity was the true reform of historical writing. And it wasn’t just Fielding who made this claim. This was the argument of 18th Century novelists from Defoe on; and it was an argument they had with historians like Hume… That is a piece of intellectual work that Simon Schama took up when he called for a return to narrative history in the 1980s and 1990s…

Jill Lepore in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

I think our agent was hoping that Blindspot would generate the kind of controversy that Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties generated in the 1990s. I remember Gordon Wood writing an extremely angry brief in the New York Review of Books called ‘Novel History‘ — about how dare a historian do such a thing. To the extent we’ve had reaction from our colleagues — and we didn’t write it for our colleagues — it’s been very positive… I’ve been asked by a graduate student: is this something that every historian should try? And I’ve said: I don’t know, maybe every historian should take up tennis.

Jane Kamensky in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

The itch that Blindspot scratches for me is the appetite for history in the manner of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hugo’s Les Miserables or, in our own day, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies — which is to say, grand, teeming, historically informed but imaginative narratives that speak to the contemporary national and global crisis.

What Dickens, Tolstoy and Hugo have in common is that, like a Breughel painting, they’re crowded with life. I can’t think of things in the 19th Century American literary tradition that do that. Maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe. But that sort of teeming, crowd-centered urban history that tackles a political event from below is not for the most part an American tradition.

Jane Kamensky in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

Why is that? … Where is our Dickens? It’s a really interesting question…

Jill Lepore in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

Blindspot can be taken as a shot at answering it.

Podcast • May 5, 2008

Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version

The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of ...

The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of meeting him in the flesh on a campus visit to Brown.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Etgar Keret here (24 minutes, 11 MB MP3)

etgar keret

Etgar Keret: “a Jew in a diaspora of Israel”

Edgar Keret’s bizarre, violent, popular short stories (in a collection The Girl on the Fridge) are cited as a register of Israel’s consciousness, post-Intifada and post-peace process. Crowbar beatings, sledge-hammer murders and other grotesque happenings abound in these fictions. In one, a kids’ party magician reaches into the hat and pulls out, first, a rabbit’s bleeding severed head and, later, a dead baby. He concludes: “It’s as if someone was trying to tell me this is no time to be a rabbit, or a baby. Or a magician.”

Keret’s Israeli characters are caught in states of mind and spirit between love and suicide, between boredom and brutal anger. As in this story, “Asthma Attack,” reproduced here in full, the writer keeps fighting through the frenzy, for words:

When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones — those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

Etgar Keret, “Asthma Attack,” in The Girl on the Fridge, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.

In our conversation, Etgar Keret and I were both trying (and failing!) to remember the source of the notion that art, including fiction, is the layer of the human record (unlike the monuments of warfare and politics) that does not lie.

CL: Imagine a hundred years from now people are reading this red-hot popular Israeli writer from 2008, Etgar Keret, for the truth about Israel. What would they learn?

Etgar Keret: Well, I think that they would learn that people in Israel know a little bit less than what they pretend to know; that they’re a little bit bit less confident than they want their neighbor to think; that there’s a very strong ambiguity and confusion among the Israeli people — the same ambiguity and confusion that all human beings tend to share.

CL: Can you explain how you became the rage among young Israelis in the last few years? Not the familiar image of the Israeli writer, you’re anti-epic and anti-macho, a cuddly, eccentric vegetarian who writes about people who are beset with perplexity and pain and fearful violence and, as you say, confusion.

EK: Well, I think that growing up In Israel, I think the one thing that’s not allowed is to be confused. Being surrounded by so many enemies who want to attack us, the last thing you want to do is to raise more questions, or to be more confused and uncertain. But at some stage you realize it’s actually the fact that you live in such an unsafe situation that makes all those questions that you are supposed to postpone more urgent. Because if you know you are going to die for something you want to know what you are going to die for. You don’t want to postpone it for later.

CL: Are these stories written from the perspective of a writer who’s worrying what he’s going to die for?

EK: Well, yeah… It’s not to die for, or live for. There is something about life, especially when you come from Israel, in a region where everything is so extreme, there’s something very overwhelming about life, you know. And it leaves you with your mouth open, with your jaw falling down, you know. And this is the situation I wanted to write about. Because there is something about Israelis that whenever you speak to people they give you this feeling that they are certain about all those answers. And they have all those answers, but those answers don’t seem to be working all around us.

So if there’s anything I want to say about this reality, it is maybe: take some sort of Socratic position and just say that we may know less about what’s right, and what we are feeling at a certain moment and what should be done. I’m saying I feel it’s important to admit our limitations and our confusion just so we can start finding the real answers, and it’s much better than kind of doing that than settling for some fake answers that seem to be going around in circulation for the last 60 years.

Etgar Keret, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 1, 2008.