Roy Miller's Blog, page 261

The Writer As Public Figure vs. The Writer Who Actually Writes

I’m supposed to be writing a speech about my new novel, The White City. It’s a March morning, no sun. I’m standing by my secretary desk. I’ve shut the doors to the rest of the apartment and have been on the verge of sitting down to begin, but each time I tried someone called for me: my husband, my son, or one of my daughters. I can still hear them out in the hall.

It’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written. I’m supposed to be writing, but this is the only sentence inside me. There are mere days before the book comes out. A number of so-called “author appearances” have been scheduled at bookstores and libraries around the country. I have to figure out what to say—draft a talk about this novel that I can give not once but repeatedly. It’s paralyzing. I can barely bring myself to make even this tiny movement: my fingers tapping the keys as I write this text.

The kids are making noise in the hall again; the front door slams behind them. Silence. I breathe through my nose and think of the meditation techniques I should be practicing. I think about what Virginia Woolf said in her speech before the National Society for Women’s Service in London in January 1931: that all the great women novelists in England in the 1800s did not have children. Those words strike me occasionally.

I’ve written talks like this before; I’ve often agonized over the notion of having to speak about a book, especially before hardly anyone outside of the book business has had a chance to read it. To hold a talk, one could say, instead of the book. (I can’t get away from the fact that this is how it feels.) A talk that will never cover everything. How am I supposed to do that? Who am I even to do that? This attitude has been interpreted as stage fright or a desire to keep a low profile, but what frightens me isn’t the stage or the public eye but the risk of destroying what I understand the novel to be, that which is still open and not-yet-realized, as it must be for the reader.

Article continues after advertisement

When a book has just been published, the author is asked many questions. It’s usually difficult to respond, and there might not be any answers. One of the most common questions—and yet it always blindsides me—is “Why do you write?” When I was young I spent a lot of time trying to answer that question, but however I tried I couldn’t come up with an answer that I knew to be true. It made me feel lousy, like someone who’d never be a writer because I didn’t even know why I wanted to be one.

My image of the writer was the early Romantic idea of the genius who through divine inspiration expressed their unique self in their works and thereby said something universal about existence. The fact that this idea didn’t allow for a girl to be a genius filled me with deep sorrow. As I got older, I started to think that maybe the genius also couldn’t be a woman with children. I had begun to write, and my writing was already problematic to those in my immediate circle, a threat and a disappointment, an attempt to shape my life around my fears and my inability to participate in it. I didn’t have children then, but I had boyfriends and friends, and countless demands were implicit to the questions they posed. Why do you have to go away to write, why can’t you write here, why do you have to write?

Back then, I wasn’t surrounded by other people who wrote, and I wasn’t really surrounded by people who read, and my writing couldn’t have been considered work because the payment wasn’t commensurate with my efforts and the time it took. (I mean, it still isn’t, but nowadays that isn’t as clear.) Reading Virginia Woolf at the time, I didn’t see the glaring similarities between me and the women from the past about whom she was writing, who started writing because pen and paper were easy to get a hold of and writing was an activity that could be done discreetly. But later, when I got to know other women writers who tried to live with men—men, I should add, who didn’t share their values—I understood that I’d never been alone in being called sick because I’d rather write than live with and make love with them. These men hated that we wrote. They hated how the writing took us, hated it for its ability to bear witness to the world and for the fact that it would remain long after they themselves were gone.

I always wanted to be an author, but I also wanted to have children. How those two things fit together is another common question, and I’d wondered about it myself. How would that be possible? In equality-minded Sweden, it’s a given that women shouldn’t have to choose between work and starting a family, but I saw children as a potential threat to my writing. And motherhood with its demands is really a sort of antithesis to being a writer. But many women also live with the idea of being perpetually available to their men, and when I think about it now, it’s so clear that children were never the hurdle for writing—men were. I could only start writing books once I stopped making myself available to a man’s many ever-changing needs. But I can’t include this in a talk or make this my answer to how I became an author.

*

An author appearance is a meeting between the author and the readers who share time and a space and in this way it differs from our usual meeting, the one in which the reader sits alone with the text and completes it by reading. I like our in-person meeting best when it reminds me of the latter. But this latter meeting can occur when we’re in the same room, too, for instance during a Q&A in an auditorium when a member of the audience shares his reading of the novel in a way that allows us to glimpse our usual space of encounter: the true space of reading. I like when this happens; experiencing the closeness between strangers that arises when we recall the fellowship to which we are accustomed, but can’t achieve as long as we are in the same room speaking to each other.

It’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written. Marguerite Duras wrote this sentence in her penultimate book Writing. She writes that authors are contradictory and utterly incomprehensible and that “a book is the unknown, it’s the night, it’s closed off, and that’s that.” Until this novel, which I’m now supposed to “say” something about, all of my books were texts that I’d borne a long time. They sat inside me as if in storage or ran parallel to each other like long threads, in constant conversation about what should be written and how. This novel came to be in a completely different way.

*

It was the summer of 2012. I had just finished my third novel, Alltings början (The Beginning of Everything), my husband and I had gone out to our summer cottage with the children, and I wasn’t supposed to be writing. I was only meant to do interviews and be on vacation. The publisher’s publicity department had let me know that there seemed to be an early interest in the book. This delighted me, of course. Not only that, I’d received a few advances from foreign publishers, my youngest daughter was to start pre-school in the fall, I had a grant, and would be able to start working on something new.

Finding the time to write no longer felt impossible. I should have been happy. The novel was to come out in August, a little more than three years since the last one, which corresponded to the idea of a real author’s rate of production. Now and then, I walked around outside with the phone pressed to my ear answering journalists’ questions about the book, and I tried to say things that would be compelling and relevant and make it seem read-worthy. (Write-worthy?) Photographers drove out to the cottage to take pictures, I had brought lipstick with me and a blazer that I never otherwise had there and I stood in places around the garden and up by the bilberry sprigs in the forest and once in the middle of a lake atop a very leaky old wooden trampoline.

And in the same way that I put on the blazer, I dressed myself up in the role of the author, perpetually ready to speak about my book. I wasn’t supposed to be writing that summer, I was supposed to be having time off, going to the beach with the children, playing with them and cooking food and taking walks in the forest, and being available for the marketing of the book. That’s how the authorial split appeared for me. I had read about it and heard other writers discuss it, but now for the first time I could feel it. I had become the writer, but who was this writer? It cut through me with full force, the cleft that characterizes what we call the writing profession, and which has become so obvious it can be elusive. In one of the Empson Lectures in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret Atwood reminds us of the epigram that she keeps on her bulletin board, one that usually brings me as much comfort as it seems to amuse my audience: Wanting to meet an author because you like their work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. Atwood describes the cleft as a dividing line between the person who eats cereal at breakfast and drives off to have their car washed and the other much more articulate shadow-being who lives in the same body and “when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.” But the split that opened up in me that summer was between these two beings and the writer with a capital W, who appears when the writing is done. The duck, if you will.

If the writer-genius I once idealized was substantial and authentic, then the actual writer was a whole set of personalities that were constantly circling each other. The role of the writer is often not considered a “role” because performing as a writer is close to hand. The one who writes sits alone with her text and works hour after hour, year after year, alone with the words, searching for the word inside the word and the shine that will arise from them. It’s a solitary act, like reading, and that, like reading, might lead to a book. It’s difficult work that also isn’t really work, neither a part of working life or the market economy. But the question is whether the writer with a capital W, her body and life and experiences, have become more in demand than what she has written.

I became a writer in other’s eyes that summer and also a Writer. A person who appears on the covers of magazines, on TV-sofas or on stages to talk about the book she has written, just like I’m supposed to be preparing to do. Or like I’m trying to avoid doing?

I told one of the reporters that I’ve always wanted to write about what isn’t brought to the fore. That which is hidden. It was a statement I was able to make without feeling that I’d have to take it back in the next sentence or object to later. I had a hard time summarizing my authorship in the ways that I was invited to do in interviews—I understood, in spite of it all, that I was to think of it as an invitation—but with some reluctance I could see how the books were creating their own kingdom. They appeared, among other ways, in relation to each other.

When my novel Flickvännen (The Girlfriend) came out in 2009, I was often asked if I was going to write a sequel. The question seemed related to a question asked of many Scandinavian novelists—if they might not be planning on writing a crime novel—and each time I answered that no, I absolutely was not. The idea was alien to me; I didn’t understand the point. I was also asked about my personal experience of life with a gangster and what it was like to wait at home for him to come back from a job, like the main character Karin. As if what I had written were a product of my life rather than a literary work. For instance, a TV producer called me several times in hopes of having me on his show to talk about what it’s like for those women. I said that I couldn’t, I could only speak on behalf of the protagonist in The Girlfriend. What I had written was a novel, it was fiction. On the other end of the line, the producer fell silent. “But,” he said eventually, “how else could you know that this is how it happened?”

This fixation on reality can be disheartening for a writer, but you could also look at it like this: it’s not that reality is so dominant, novels are. It’s the novel that perforates reality, and not the other way around. At the same time, it’s also a way of talking about—and with—the Writer. A number of journalists who called that summer also really wanted to come out to the cabin. One couldn’t possibly do the authorship justice unless one sat down with the writer and talked, they said. But why would that make it possible? I am not my novel. I can only do it injustice.

The more I tried to talk about my book, the more often I was struck by the impossibility of doing precisely that (an impossibility that differed from writing’s many impossibilities), the more irritated I grew with the Writer in me who insisted on trying (even though I knew she had her reasons).

But it was also something else. Was this a new way of talking about literature? In past interviews, The Girlfriend was called a “successful novel”, and I was called a “successful author.” The focus wasn’t only on the writer as a person, but the writer as a successful person. A big magazine article no longer seemed able to be about a writer’s books because they were good, they also had to have caught the attention of the media and be liked by many. This could be understood as a consequence of the changing conditions of cultural journalism and literary criticism, but also as the writer as a character being pulled into the neoliberal narrative of individual strength and independence, which has become the media-society’s big story and that lends itself, as literature does, to being about what it means to be human, but in this story weakness and ambivalence are only addressed in order to highlight strength and certitude. It was a lie that felt new and became particularly ridiculous when applied to the writer.

So I did the only straightforward thing. I started to write even though I wasn’t supposed to. Even though the point was for me to have “free time” and only do some interviews. I started writing because writing is something I can’t help but do, but also because I thought that it would save me from the Writer, save me from the role of the author and the human ideal that was beginning to flow into me like undrinkable water. It was also flowing into the person who was adjacent to writing and into the one-who-writes, who for all she knew about hardship and impossibility should have known to build a dam to keep the water out.

Right then I wanted to write something that wouldn’t be published, something for which I would never stand on a stage or a leaky old wooden trampoline in the middle of a lake, never try to talk about, never try to say. Because another recurring question is of course “What do you want to say with this book?” And the answer: “I don’t want to say anything; I wanted to write what it says in the book exactly as it is written there.”

And in the same way that I’d long had a store of books inside me to write, there was one I was never going to write. So I picked that one. I started writing the sequel to The Girlfriend, which in that moment I believed would never be published. I reached for that story as though it were a rope tossed to me in cold water, and it became something to hold on to so I could get back to what I wanted. When I stepped into Karin’s house again, she was still there, different to the person I had left behind in The Girlfriend. Her worst fears had come to pass—everything that everyone, those closest to her, but also the reader with a voice of reason, and me with mine, had warned her about. What we expect to happen to girls who get involved with gangsters. She lost everything. I was asked if I did this to punish her.

*

For the one who writes, the writer is far away. The writer is expected to have answers, the one who writes is dedicated to writing and sitting alone with questions. It’s a cleft that runs between the quick and the slow. The profitable and unprofitable. What everyone is waiting for and what no one is asking for. What wants to come out and that which shirks. To write is to turn to face the world while turning away from it.

Like the writer, readers come later, when the writing is done. The book materializes in the reader’s hands, in her gaze. Letter by letter, word by word, it carved out a space inside me and through my body, it emerges in the space inside her. The reader can point out what the writer has forgotten or didn’t realize was in the book, perhaps something that provided the first impulse to write it and that belongs to our shared world. And in her reading, she creates the text, but only through reading the book can the reader have it and only through writing it, exactly as it is written, can I “say” what I want to say with it. We can’t get around the solitary and unnecessary act of all these words.

Of course the question comes up again. Why do you write? But to whom do I owe the answer? There is no answer, and I probably knew that all along, but maybe I didn’t dare say it until now: I write to write.

Maybe I didn’t dare say this before I became a writer. But as I write this now, I’m overcome with the feeling that there’s something improper about it, in how I started writing just to be the one who writes, giving thought to nothing but the writing. The Writer’s logic is so strong that it makes me disqualify what my own writing knows—and what I know deep down—is the greatest freedom. The real work of a writer.

 

Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.

Source link

The post The Writer As Public Figure vs. The Writer Who Actually Writes appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Conversations With Himself: Sam Shepard’s Narrator Takes Stock of His Life

Photo


Sam Shepard



Credit

Brigitte Lacombe

THE ONE INSIDE
By Sam Shepard
172 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

“You can’t go home again.” Thomas Wolfe’s famous phrase has long served as a dictum for writers and analysands, but it needs an addendum: You can’t stop trying. Sam Shepard has acknowledged the compulsion — and also the futility — in interviews and dramatized it in plays where protagonists return to the place that’s supposed to take you in, but doesn’t. They come home not for comfort but to settle scores, demand respect, even elicit an acknowledgment of their existence. Family members in extremis shout and holler, hoping, like the father in “Buried Child,” that the sounds they make will signal an affirmative reply to the question, “Are we still in the land of the living?”

This question floats over Shepard’s novella of short-burst imaginings and conversations with himself, as the aging narrator ruefully takes stock. He’s in the land of the living, but only just, hanging on by his fingernails, his memory, his imagination, his never-ending obsession with his father, his blue thermal socks (nicked from a movie set) and his ongoing arguments with women, including a sometime-girlfriend 50 years his junior. She’s called the Blackmail Girl because she’s recording their conversations for a book that will launch her literary career. Maybe. There’s a wry poetic justice in the spectacle of a writer, that scavenger of others’ lives, helplessly furnishing material for another. The voyeur voyeured.

“The One Inside” is less a stand-alone performance than Shepard’s short story collections, but it takes its place as a satisfying chapter in the autobiographical stream of consciousness that flows through his plays. Masculinity and its perils, the primitive drama of sibling and father-son rivalry, are the wellsprings of Shepard’s work. Here the narrator realizes he’s a year older than his father was when he died, but the man still looms over the present. The bomber pilot of World War II figures in hallucinatory portraits, vignettes that are the son’s way of steer-wrestling him to earth. In a scene that reprises Shepard’s striking story “Tiny Man,” the father is not only dead but shrunken, a minuscule corpse in Saran Wrap. In the presence of the mourners, or mobsters, who’ve delivered him, the son reveals the old man’s wizened face.

Photo




Credit

Patricia Wall/The New York Times

At times the narrator’s own body seems to be disintegrating. There are thoughts of suicide even as Eros struggles to assert its sway over Thanatos. We are taken back to a primal scene, shocking and vivid, when the young boy walks in on his father making love with Felicity, a girl hardly older than he is. While the father lies silent, he hears her “scream like a trapped rabbit.” Far from retreating in fear, he is fascinated, even turned on. In the aftermath, Felicity still screaming her pleasure, the boardinghouse landlady wonders if there’s a murder being committed, calls the cops. Felicity winds up on the sidewalk, clutching a sheet over her voluptuous front, as his father is hauled off to jail. They’re kicked out of the boardinghouse, marking the boy’s expulsion from innocence if not paradise.

In the son’s acting out of the Oedipal triangle, he will continue to see Felicity, talk to her, have noisy sex with her, wonder about his father’s reaction. He will recapitulate the old man’s fondness for young flesh in his coupling with the Blackmail Girl, enjoy the disapproval of cast and crew when he takes her with him on a set.

Not many Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights are also heartthrobs, but one of the things that have made Shepard so attractive on the screen is our sense of his reluctance to be there. He has a natural antipathy for the movie star life. Here the narrator wrestles with phony parts, dons costumes in an agony, as if they were medieval torture instruments. He seeks authenticity, even as he creates art and artifice as a métier. He’s a man of the West, of feedlots and ramshackle cabins, of a silence punctuated only by the sound of crickets, but a man of words as well. He’s conflicted, the intellectual versus the Marlboro man, or, as Patti Smith says in her introduction, “he’s a loner who doesn’t want to be alone, grappling with the incubus.”

Continue reading the main story

By implication, the battle with the father comes down to words — or lack of them. Is that great wall of paternal silence the “real” man? Is the fancy-pants artist the wimp? In the end, it’s David slinging volleys of words at the mute Goliath, and we know who won that battle.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post Conversations With Himself: Sam Shepard’s Narrator Takes Stock of His Life appeared first on Art of Conversation.

‘The Schooldays of Jesus’: Coetzee’s Teasing New Parable

“ ‘Do you have passions, Inés?’ asks the boy.

“ ‘That is none of your business,’ says Inés.

“ ‘Why don’t you ever want to talk to me?’ says the boy. ‘Simón talks to me.’ ”

Photo

Simón and Inés are neither married nor coupled. Simón concedes that Inés and he could “do sexual intercourse,” as Davíd puts it, without being married, but they don’t. Simón (to the best of his recollection) took charge of Davíd only when the boy became separated from his mother amid the confusion on board the ship that was evacuating them to the new land, where he has drafted Inés as madrina to his padrino. Whether or not she can recognize herself as Davíd’s lost birth mother, Simón is adamant that she must somehow assume maternal responsibility for him.

Will Davíd ever accept either guardian as a true adoptive parent? Their love for him grows separately, but whenever the three make a new acquaintance, the boy disconcertingly announces that Davíd is not his real name (all immigrants are assigned names upon arrival) and that these two adults are not his real parents. Inevitably, Simón and Inés fall into a kind of rivalry for priority both in the boy’s life and in his heart, and he waxes and wanes in his attachment to each. The couple’s own relationship, meanwhile, is roughly that of joint custody after divorce, but in this case joint custody has not been preceded by either love or marriage. Might it proceed to one or the other?

Continue reading the main story

Simón — the pilot character in both novels, present on almost every page — seems passionless even to himself. Inés he finds stolid and humorlessly conventional. Yet in “The Childhood of Jesus,” Simón has a brief, inconclusive affair with a neighbor; and when he learns that Inés is flirting with the idea of having a child by another man, he bluntly volunteers to provide her with a brother for David, as the name is (correctly) spelled in the earlier novel. She receives his offer in stony silence, but does not reject it outright.

A more powerful forward movement comes from the fact that David/Davíd is a gifted but difficult and explosively willful boy. In “Childhood,” the authorities judge him unteachable in any normal setting and transport him to a kind of reform school. His escape from that institution leads the three central characters to go underground and flee, as “The Schooldays of Jesus” opens, to a new city. Will they be caught? What will now become of the boy?

Kindly spinster sisters fund his matriculation in a dancing academy near a museum where he grows friendly with Dmitri, a security guard who is publicly and histrionically smitten by the icy beauty of Ana Magdalena, the mystagogue of the cultlike academy. “The Schooldays of Jesus” may stand as a riposte to the common charge that Coetzee’s approach to fiction is cerebral and his prose dry, since Dmitri is the passionless Simón’s antithesis: a supremely flamboyant vocal performer and, despite his Russian name, a classically melodramatic Latin lover. He put me in mind of lyrics from a song by Eliades Ochoa: “qué boca más linda, ésa que yo vi / besarla quisiera y luego morir” (translated a bit freely as “How lovely the mouth, that mouth that I saw / I would so love to kiss it, and then die”).

Davíd, a dancer of previously unsuspected talent, thrives under Ana Magdalena and is mesmerized by the grandiloquent and demonstrative Dmitri, but the novel draws the boy into a ghastly crime of passion involving Dmitri and Ana Magdalena, then into a dark courtroom drama and still later into a prison break. Yet in the denouement, as the boy reaches the age of reason, he is celebrated at a sweet and reassuringly normal birthday party organized by Inés. As for Simón, he has saved his son once again and perhaps won new respect and a measure of friendship from Inés. If not yet quite a family, these three now have that destination implicitly in view.

All the same, “Meeting Dmitri (whom I dislike and indeed from a moral point of view despise) has been an educational experience, for me,” Simón has written, confessionally, in a Spanish composition class. “I would go so far as to list it among my educational qualifications.” The adopting father rather than the adopted son is perhaps the real Christ figure and the real learner in these Jesus novels in which Jesus is nowhere mentioned. “Schooldays” ends with the self-appointed savior taking the first, halting dance lesson of his life.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post ‘The Schooldays of Jesus’: Coetzee’s Teasing New Parable appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Mystery Woman: A Novel Explores the Story of Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’

Photo




Credit

Agnes Lee

A PIECE OF THE WORLD
By Christina Baker Kline
309 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

Christina Baker Kline sets herself a stark challenge in her new novel — giving flesh to the back story of the woman who crawls across a desolate field in Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting, “Christina’s World.” Anyone who has seen this work, a landmark of midcentury realism, already knows that in the course of this novel Anna Christina Olson is unlikely to scale the peaks of high society or discover the source of the Amazon. In “A Piece of the World,” Kline must dig deeper to find meaning in her heroine’s circumscribed existence, in a life played out against the backdrop of a stern, unyielding landscape.

Kline’s previous novel, “Orphan Train,” also emphasized lives forged in hardship. But that plot was kept spinning through the perils endured by thousands of orphans transported to uncertain fates in the rural Midwest of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “A Piece of the World” signals from the beginning that stasis will define Christina’s outward existence. “I think of my own life,” she says. “All the years, all the waiting that led to nothing.”

Photo

From childhood, a progressive disease hobbles Christina’s mobility, yet she stubbornly refuses medical help and even the use of braces or a wheelchair, choosing to lurch in pain across the fields of her family’s struggling farm on the salt-misted coast of Maine. No one seems to feel much pity for her, nor does she pity herself. Her parents dash her hopes of finishing school, relying on her to cook, clean and mend for them and her brothers. Meticulously, Kline documents the sheer physical toil required to survive in a home without electricity or running water, knocking the sheen off the nostalgic myth of an idyllic rural past.

Eventually the others die or drift away and only Christina and one brother are left to hold bitterness at bay. Christina longs for more: not just an education but the love of a summer swell whose life in Boston might as well take place on the moon, so foreign is it to her country ways. She treasures a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems, a gift from a teacher who tries to reassure her: “Your mind — your curiosity — will be your comfort.”

Continue reading the main story

The arrival, in 1939, of the painter Andrew Wyeth, summering nearby, provides relief from isolation. He rambles through the dilapidated property, capturing in paint the cracks in a white teapot, “the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house.” The novel evokes the somber grace of those paintings in language as earnest and straightforward as Wyeth’s brush strokes, laying out a story as uncomplicated as his composition. Both painter and writer have a fine-grained feel for the setting, and both would seem to reject the irony, humor and abstraction of modernity. Christina’s yearning, her determination, her will to dream, occupy the emotional center in both the novel and the painting.

Yet in expanding on Christina’s story, Kline defies what some might see as the strength of Wyeth’s work, its undercurrent of mystery. Wyeth observes Christina only from the back. In fact, he once said he might have preferred to depict the field alone, leaving just the sense that Christina had been there. Despite the naturalism of his style, Wyeth asks viewers to exercise their own imaginations.

In contrast, Kline sometimes over-explains, spelling out thoughts and feelings already apparent from the action and dialogue. This approach serves readers who want to fill in the blanks, to experience the daily grind of a way of life that often has been burnished by the passage of time, to honor the rectitude of people who stoically shoulder their burdens and get on with their chores. “A Piece of the World” is a story for those who want the mysterious made real.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post Mystery Woman: A Novel Explores the Story of Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’ appeared first on Art of Conversation.

A Once-Forgotten Novel Unites Turkish Readers in Troubled Times

Published in 1943 and written by Sabahattin Ali, a leftist intellectual jailed for his political writings (much like his contemporaries under today’s government), the book’s newfound success has become a rare point of common cultural experience for a deeply polarized country.

“It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults,” Maureen Freely, who translated the book for the first time into English last year (with Alexander Dawe), wrote in The Guardian. “And no one seems able to explain quite why.”

If he were alive today, Mr. Ali would be shocked to see “Madonna” had become a best seller, his daughter, Filiz Ali, 79, said in a recent interview at her Istanbul apartment. (The book has sold nearly a million copies over the last three years, according to the publisher, YKY, and was recently published in English as a Penguin Classic.)

Photo


A police photo of some of Sabahattin Ali’s belongings in 1948, after he was killed.

“My father didn’t really give so much importance to this book,” she said. “And his friends told him, ‘Sabahattin, you shouldn’t have written such a romantic book. It doesn’t look good on your reputation.’”

An erudite man of letters during the early years of the Turkish republic, and a devoted Communist, Mr. Ali wrote novels, stories, poems and articles that repeatedly got him thrown into jail. The parallels between what he endured as a dissident intellectual and the ordeals faced by modern Turkish writers arrested for speaking out against the current Islamist government help explain Mr. Ali’s newfound popularity among the Turkish public.

Continue reading the main story

“The same things are repeating, much worse,” said Ms. Ali, referring to the current arrests of journalists speaking out against the current Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Ali was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1948, at age 41, at a lonely outpost near the Bulgarian border as he tried to flee to Europe.

The death of Mr. Ali remains, almost 70 years later, as mysterious as his newfound popularity. A smuggler who was “helping” Mr. Ali cross the border admitted to his murder and did a short stint in prison. But it is widely suspected, his daughter said, that he was actually killed by state security agents after he was interrogated. She believes that somewhere deep in government archives the truth could be found.

With the success of “Madonna,” Mr. Ali is now the rare literary figure who is embraced with equal ardor by teenage girls and intellectuals.

Sabri Gurses, a Turkish poet and novelist, said he was moved when he learned that Mr. Ali was carrying a German translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin,” when he was killed. Nowadays, he said, when he sees young people carrying “Madonna” on the streets of Istanbul he imagines many of them feel for Mr. Ali what the Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov, famously wrote about Pushkin: “He rose against the world’s opinion, and as a hero, lone he fell.”

The sudden success of “Madonna” — attributed to word of mouth, an interest by some Turkish teachers and social media — has become an opportunity for Ms. Ali, late in her life, to help reacquaint Turkish readers with her father. She has spoken at schools and conferences to promote the book, and says she often meets young readers, including boys, who come to her with tears in her eyes.

Photo


“Madonna in a Fur Coat” by Sabahattin Ali, which was translated to English by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe.

“They want a love like this,” she said.

“Madonna,” she said, is part autobiographical, as Mr. Ali spent time as a young man in Berlin in the 1920s. A letter to a friend that surfaced later revealed he had a friendship there with a woman, Maria Pruder, which inspired the novel. In the book, Maria was half Jewish, a revelation that foreshadows what was to come in Germany. Ms. Ali said her family has never tried to track down the real Maria or her family.

“Maybe she died in one of the death camps,” she said.

In a country so deeply polarized between secularists and Islamists, between urban elites and the rural poor, “Madonna” and the legacy of Mr. Ali have become something to unite over, at least for those who love books.

Sevengul Sonmez, an editor and literary historian, said that Turkish readers who love “Romeo and Juliet” are “now reading Maria and Raif, as the modern impossible love story.”

Continue reading the main story

“We needed a classic as well,” she said. “I think that readers have needed, for a long time, a book they could love unanimously. ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ finally emerged as the common ground.”

If one can glean insights into a society from the books its citizens read, then one thing the popularity of “Madonna” may underscore about Turkey is the eagerness, among the country’s youth, to break free of the traditional gender roles and machismo pushed by Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan.

In the book, gender stereotypes are upended: Raif comes off as vulnerable and emotional, while Maria exudes independence and a lack of sentimentality for matters of the heart.

Kaya Genc, a young Turkish novelist and writer, quoted Susan Sontag, the critic, when asked about “Madonna’s” resonance: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

“This applies perfectly to Sabahattin Ali’s ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat,’” he said.

Back in her apartment, Ms. Ali recalled memories of her father, calling him a man with a quick wit who loved music and was devoted to his family, who did everything with her and her mother, and who in his younger years was a hopeless romantic.

“He fell in love all the time when he was young,” she said.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post A Once-Forgotten Novel Unites Turkish Readers in Troubled Times appeared first on Art of Conversation.

A Drifter Gets Rerooted in a Novel of the New West

Photo

JOURNEYMAN
By Marc Bojanowski
247 pp. Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint. $25.

It’s been over a dozen years since Marc Bojanowski’s acclaimed debut novel, “The Dog Fighter.” A first-person, highly voiced, minimally punctuated tour de force, it displayed both a bevy of literary influences and a youthful brio all its own. His second novel, “Journeyman,” retains the keen eye and sensitivity to language but dispenses with the linguistic pyrotechnics in favor of a more measured tone, one that thoroughly suits its reticent protagonist.

Nolan Jackson, the titular journeyman carpenter, doesn’t like to spend too much time in one place. For years he’s been crisscrossing the Southwest in his 1976 Ford Ranger, going from job to job. At 31, he’s self-reliant, with everything he needs packed into his customized Airstream trailer. Rarely without his cowboy hat, he might be taken for a contemporary update of the archetypal Western hero, only with a nail bag on his belt instead of a six-shooter.

But something’s off with this “Lonely Ranger” — he has a tendency to admire the cut of his own shadow, and we learn early on that he wasn’t raised among men who wore cowboy hats.

When he leaves a good job and a good woman in Las Vegas at the beginning of the book, it’s not because a co-worker accidentally immolates himself on a job site, but because Nolan can’t bring himself to comfort the man’s wife. He subsequently lies to his girlfriend about this loss of nerve, and his shame is redoubled. Too emotionally rigid to confront even this minor entanglement, he scribbles a goodbye letter and hits the road.

Honoring his mother’s request to check in on his brother, Cosmo, a journalist and inveterate pothead in the midst of a post-divorce meltdown, Nolan turns up in the idyllic Northern California town of Burnridge. There, a somewhat convenient accident destroys Nolan’s truck and camper, leaving him with little choice but to shack up with Cosmo in his underwater-mortgaged tract house.

The brothers are thesis and antithesis, their personas forged in a childhood overshadowed by their father, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Each brother avoids reality in his own way: Nolan’s focus is so narrow that he resists recognizing the tract homes he builds are destroying the landscape he loves; Cosmo’s is so wide that he’s come undone chasing everything-is-connected conspiracy theories.

Their collision makes for a compelling central narrative of masculinity, family and the legacy of war, hampered only by Cosmo’s not being as clearly drawn as Nolan. His pot-fueled mania feels generic at times, and his rants too often veer into either gibberish (“The story is dark matter, autism, binary, the Great Game”) or grand pronouncements (“We live in a disposable culture”).

Continue reading the main story

Meanwhile, in Burnridge, a serial arsonist is burning down old heritage houses, and a movie shoot has taken over the historical downtown. It’s a bit much all at once for the small town, and for the novel, whose potency is diluted in the attempt to address one too many contemporary issues.

Bojanowski’s writing shines in the vividness of his minor characters, especially those Nolan works with on a renovation in Burnridge. And the book abounds in sharp description — of landscape, the built environment, the play of light — from Nolan’s point of view, illuminating the sensitive soul under the Western hat. The distance between that soul, attuned to beauty and craftsmanship, and the shell Nolan has created for himself is deeply felt throughout. Watching him close the distance is the novel’s greatest pleasure.

At one point, Nolan thinks: “We maintain narratives, however false, to survive.” “Journeyman” profoundly traces the cost of hanging on to those narratives long after they’ve ceased to be beneficial.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post A Drifter Gets Rerooted in a Novel of the New West appeared first on Art of Conversation.

The Shortlist: Y.A. Crossover

New young adult crossover books include a novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, a fantasy about a sinister magic carnival, and more.


Source link

The post The Shortlist: Y.A. Crossover appeared first on Art of Conversation.

My 10 Favorite Books: Isabelle Huppert

Photo

For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is the actress Isabelle Huppert, who is nominated for an Academy Award for her role in “Elle.” She shares her list exclusively with T.

“Since I’m being sent to a deserted island I think I would bring books that I have not read yet and that I cannot wait to discover,” Huppert says. “At the same time I would not want to leave behind books I’ve loved. What a torture! O.K.… here is a list of the books I would bring with me. I would not have made the same two weeks ago and I won’t be making the same in a month.”

“The Grass Is Singing,” Doris Lessing

I always read this book again just to experience the delight of my first reading. I fell madly in love with everything in that book, the two main characters, Mary and Moses, and Africa not only described but conveyed through the writing. A true writer makes a continent come to life. I met Doris Lessing once in London while I was performing, in English, a Friedrich Schiller play.

“The Pillow Book,” Sei Shonagon

All of Japan is in this book. A true marvel. Set at the Emperor’s court during the 10th century, a woman takes notes and becomes our contemporary. I could have performed that woman. I feel very close to Mizoguchi and Ozu’s actresses.

Continue reading the main story

“Demons,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Maybe the greatest novel ever written, but I haven’t read them all! It’s all of humankind head-on by Dostoyevsky. A mix of sadism and humor. In Poland I shot a movie by Andrzej Wajda based on this great book.

“Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion,” William Faulkner

Regarding books I have not yet read: The “Snopes” trilogy. I know Faulkner created some of the most beautiful female characters. I can’t wait to discover Linda Snopes!

Photo


Isabelle Huppert



Credit

Brad Torchia for The New York Times

“Autobiography,” John Cowper Powys

Friends of mine tell me it’s an essential book. I’m taking it with me to the island! I know it takes place in Venice among other places.

“The Flowers of Evil,” Charles Baudelaire

The poet. He is almost the inventor of our current sensibility. Never naïve, sometimes evil, always brilliant. I am lucky to be able to read him in French.

“Conversations With Wilder,” Cameron Crowe

I bet there aren’t any movie theaters on the desert island, so I will bring books that remind me of cinema. I will try to secretly fill a whole luggage. Some interviews collections: Hitchcock-Truffaut, Orson Welles, Ava Gardner… Officially here is one, with the sublime Billy Wilder.

“Nature: Simple, Healthy, and Good,” Alain Ducasse

Like movie theaters, are there going to be any restaurants on this island? Certainly not, so I want to read some recipes at least. Tribute to Alain Ducasse. If I had the space I would also bring books by Jamie Oliver, Ferran Adrià, Bocuse…

“The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”

Van Gogh’s letters are a worldwide literature masterpiece. We cry at the end…

“Hamlet,” Shakespeare

Yes! Shakespeare! Always! The greatest! All Shakespeare! Of course!

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post My 10 Favorite Books: Isabelle Huppert appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Open Book: Stranger Than Reality?

Close observers of the political scene, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, are getting into the thriller game.


Source link

The post Open Book: Stranger Than Reality? appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Using Kickstarter, Magnetic Press Plans Expanded ‘Black Comix’

Comics creators John Jennings and Damian Duffy are getting a lot of attention for their graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred, just out from Abrams ComicArts, and they have another project in the works. The two are using Kickstarter to fund the publication of Black Comix Returns, an expanded version of an earlier title that will feature work by over 100 African-American comics creators, including Kyle Baker, Ronald Wimberley, Alex Simmons, and Ashley Woods.

The book project is now funded with a little less than two weeks to go on its Kickstarter campaign after raising $16,680 (the goal was $9,500). The two cocreators will also release a hardcover trade edition in August 2017 via Magnetic Press, an imprint of indie comics publisher Lion Forge Comics.

The new Black Comix Returns is based on the out of print Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art, and Culture by Jennings and Duffy, a pioneering work on independent black comics creators published in 2010 by Mark Batty Publishers. The original book grew out of exhibitions curated by Jennings, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside, and his longtime creative partner, Duffy, a cartoonist, scholar, writer, curator, lecturer, teacher, and winner of a Glyph Comics Award for the best in comics by, for, or about people of color.

"We especially focused on black independent comics creators," said Duffy, who cited a “real explosion” in black comics community building. "More black comics conventions starting around the country, and more black creators finding outlets for their work online, through self-publishing, or with small press publishers.”

Duffy said, “these communities speak to huge swaths of readers who thought they weren’t interested in comics because they didn’t see themselves and their interests represented in the relatively narrow focus of corporate superhero comics."

We talked to Jennings, Duffy, and Magnetic Press founder Mike Kennedy about the project.

Why do a new book, and how is it different from the old one?

Duffy: We initially discussed doing a reprint of the first volume, but the culture had grown so much in the intervening years, it seemed like there needed to be a new book just because there’s so much new work out there. It seems like we’ll have around 100 artists, and that’s just a drop in the ocean of talented creators out there. Some are artists who were also in the first book, some are newer to comics. The design of the book will also be different. The first book was a landscape format, the new book is bigger, and square, and—assuming we reach our next stretch goal—longer, at 200 pages.

What sort of challenges do you think remain for black creators?

Jennings: I think one of the main challenges for indie creators who happen to be black is access to the audience that will support their stories. I think there’s still a lot of bias against characters of color and that results in a push back with the retailers regarding orders. Also, I think that black indie comics content is a bit more diverse in genre (like most indie comics) and that’s a double strike against a book that isn’t a superhero title. One of the goals of our book is get these creators noticed and help them build a fan base that will be dedicated to what they are bringing to the table.=

Your Kickstarter is already more than 100% funded. Why has it been so successful?

Jennings: I think this is a testimony to how much this type of content is needed. It’s also a testimony to the myth that black media of all types doesn’t sell. There is still a dearth of positive black images in popular media. So, I think that the demand by a lot of people, not just black consumers, is a desire to see a world in their fantasy narratives that is reflected in their experiences in the real world.

Mike, why did you take on the book and what are your plans for distribution and marketing?

Kennedy: The material spoke to a vocal interest and increasingly prevalent conversation topic in the comics industry and the country as a whole. But marketing it is always the biggest challenge. Grass-roots and social media will play a big part in getting the word out, but the community behind the project can be loud and proud, and that will be a big boost. Getting copies into libraries will also be a big priority. We’re building a network of supporters, scholars, and fans who are looking forward to making this book a part of their curriculum or toolbox.

Source link

The post Using Kickstarter, Magnetic Press Plans Expanded ‘Black Comix’ appeared first on Art of Conversation.