All too often, literary events lack substance. Writers called upon to discuss their books end up discussing their lives (this is what ‘the audience’ wants). Friends interview each other with the rigor of a publicist. And sometimes the charade of ‘literary discussion’ is altogether eschewed for a grab-bag session of nostalgia, jokes, aw-shucks banter.
I say that by way of context. Or rather contrast. For this past Thursday, I attended a literary panel discussion that was not only very enjoyable, but also very edifying. Indeed, I left with a feeling of exhilarated gratefulness that only the best professors provoke. The writers were humble, funny, passionate, engaging. And New Yorkers will have the chance to see a lot more of them this week! Because the panel discussion, titled “Resonances,” was only the opening event of the 2016 PEN’s World Voices Festival. If its standards are anything to go by, we are in for some great literary programming.
*
Founded in 2005 by the Michael Roberts and noted translator Esther Allen, the World Voices Festival has since established itself as America’s premier literary event. It was created to promote international literature, and its short history has featured a rather amazing list of writers including Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ryszard Kapuściński. And the festival is known not just for its literary heavyweights and political commitments—in 2013, Salman Rushdie interviewed the then-imprisoned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei over a video call—but also for featuring off-beat events like a ‘translation slam’ (hosted by the Believer magazine) and musico-literary performances at the MET.
This year’s iteration is focused on Mexican Literature, and three of the four writers on the panel I attended had deep, though conflicted, connections to the country. But the discussion itself wasn’t about Mexico (there are many of those scheduled for the upcoming week). Rather these writers had been invited to discuss a ‘Classic’ work of literature that held personal importance to them.
Classics, of course, are a perennially interesting subject. But the PEN event was special because none of the panelists hailed from the traditional Anglo-European-American centers of literature. Their notion of the ‘classic canon’ was thus quite different from what American students might have come to expect from their high school and college syllabi. Even when they did pick a more conventionally canonical text (the sort that arch-curmudgeon Harold Bloom would approve of) their reading of it was fresh and subversive.
The Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman (who, now in his 60s, was by far the most senior figure at the event) for example, chose to discuss Stendhal, a writer he discovered a roadside bookstore in Guatemala City as a high schooler. Now if a layperson knows anything about Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, it’s the famous quote about “politics in a work of literature” being “like a gunshot in the middle of a concert.” Aesthetes routinely parrot that as an argument against political fiction. But, as Goldman persuasively argued, their argument is rather ironic (not to mention idiotic) because The Red and the Black is one of the most politically engaged novels ever written. In fact the whole gunshot-concert image is used to introduce a 50-page section of political intrigue.
Goldman didn’t highlight this just to score pedantic points. For his relationship with The Red and the Black goes much deeper.
A child of immigrants, Goldman grew up in a protected Boston suburb, safely removed from the violence and civil wars that were ravaging his native Guatemala. But writers like Stendhal inspired him to directly confront politics in his life and writing. As a young man, Stendhal had fought in Napoleon’s army, an experience that would leave an indelible mark on his fiction (vide The Charterhouse of Panama). After graduating college, Goldman similarly decided to leave behind his sheltered American and set out to, as he puts it, “apprentice myself to reality” by working as an investigative journalist in Central America.
Readers of his debut novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, whose protagonist investigates the murder of a young woman who was like a sister to him; or The Art of Political Murder, his nonfiction account of the human rights activist Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera’s assassination; or any of his political essays for the New Yorker, will know how important this experience was to his writerly sensibility. (Goldman writes movingly about the relation between literature and politics in this profile of Garcia Marquez. It’s an essay that all young writers, especially the sort holed up in Brooklyn with their own self-consciousness, should read and re-read).
But I’m making Goldman sound far more ominous and self-serious that he was. He was as interested in Stendhal’s touching, over-the-top sentimentalism, his unpretentiousness and his great sense of comedy, as he was in his politics. Indeed The Red and the Black meant so much to Goldman precisely because of its rather irreverent treatment of serious matters. “It taught me treat my experiences with levity,” Goldman said, “it was the book that helped me stay sane during those years in Guatemala.”
Goldman’s presentation left me pining to sit in on his classes, and that’s a privilege that the evening’s next panelist Yelena Akhtiorskaya had when she was an undergraduate.
Born in Odessa, raised in Brooklyn, presently living, as her bio puts “in Riverside Park with her friends,” Akhtiorskaya made her name with Panic In A Suitcase, a semiautobiographical émigré novel that won her a National Book Award ‘5 Under 35’ nomination in 2014. But before she had begun excerpting parts of that book in N+1 and before she got her MFA from Columbia, Akhtiorskaya was a preternaturally gifted bur rather bored undergraduate at Hunter College. One semester she took a creative writing course at Baruch (where the “Resonances” event was held, and where the panel moderator, Esther Allen, teaches translation) that was taught by the then writer-in-residence Francisco Goldman. “He was the most exciting professor I ever had,” she said, “There was so much passion. So many stories… Some people speak in sentences, but Frank speaks in stories. It was a shock. Class is usually so boring. But it was phenomenal to be around him.”
Akhtiorskaya wasn’t just being nice to her old teacher. Her discussion about interest and boredom was actually used as segue to explain what she looks for in literature. “You want it to [a short story] to not be boring,” she said, “Because so much of life is boring. Really everything. Except, that is, the best stories.”
Akhtiorskaya then read a story by the underrated American prose stylist Leonard Michaels, “Storytellers, Liars, and Bores” which basically dramatized, with grim wit and hallucinatory description, all she had said so far. Michaels might seems like a strange choice for a ‘classic’ writer (he died in 2003, and many of his books were out of print before then) but that only goes to show how little Akhtiorskaya cared about conventional understanding of that tag. “Who is a classic?” she asked, “Someone who is a dead, right? Well Leonard Michaels is dead.” (Readers who wish to learn more about Michaels can read this admiring essay by David Bezmozgis, another émigré from the former USSR).
*
Next up was the Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrigue, whose recently translated—and translated by Natasha Wimmer no less—novel Sudden Death, a madcap narrative centered around on a fictional 16th-century tennis match played between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and Caravaggio, has been winning accolades in the US, just as it did in Spain where it won the Premio Herralde in 2013. (The award, something like a Hispanic Booker Prize—though, of course, more literary—has been given annually since 1983. A courageous publishing house would do well to translate all the novels that have won the prize so far.)
In person, Enrigue is dashing, exuberant, and brimful with enthusiasm. This should make him a good public speaker, but for some reason it does not. I’ve seen him read some four times within the past few months (what can I say, I like the novel) and each time come away wishing that he’d relax a little instead of manically jumping from one enthusiasm to another. To be sure, Enrigue left me wanting to read his ‘Classic’ selection, the 17th century poet, proto-feminist, and scientific genius Juana Ines De La Cruz. But that had little to with the way his gushing monologue and more with the poem of hers, translated by Edith Grossman, which was projected onto a screen behind the stage.
Also projected on that screen was a painting of Juana Inez that was the cause of much merriment. At one point Enrigue asked his wife and co-panelist Valeria Luiselli to pose like Inez so he could explain some finer points about the painting. (“This will come up in couples therapy,” she muttered, before playing along.) And at the end of his presentation, he showed a doctored version of the portrait in which Inez is carrying a copy of Sudden Death.
The last presenter of the evening was also by far the best. Valeria Luiselli—who one can describe as a ‘Mexican writer,’ though she spent a good part of her childhood in South Africa and India, and now lives in Harlem—spoke about the great Juan Rulfo, specifically about Pedro Paramo, his 1955 novel that was praised by everyone from Borges to Calvino to Sontag, and which Garcia Marquez famously claimed he could “recite…forwards and backwards.”
Her presentation was the best for a simple reason: it had the most substance. Rather than simply read from or enthuse about the book, Luiselli presented something like a mini performance cum lecture that had the double benefit of being both critically insightful and just plain fun.
Luiselli began by projecting passages from three unidentified books on the screen. “Which are originals, and which are translated?” she asked, after giving us time to read each one. The point of this exercise was to make us confront our assumptions about foreign literature (lush, ‘magical’, run on sentences) but Luiselli’s plan was unfortunately sabotaged because the audience easily recognized two of the passages: one from local favorite Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and another from the lush and magical Mrs. Dalloway. Nevertheless the demonstration was very successful in winning back the audience’s flagging attention (the event was an hour in by the time she Luiselli began to speak) and her subsequent discussion of Rulfo was a complete success.
Pedro Paramo is one of the great literary studies of political violence, and it’s unsurprising that Luiselli has turned to it as she tries to write fiction that grapples with the contemporary problems ravaging Mexico. She spoke movingly about her first encounter with the book’s ‘skeletal beauty’ as a teenager, before discussing its intricate and ingenious structuring. But the most powerful part of her presentation, and indeed of the whole evening, came at its conclusion. Luiselli projected a passage from Pedro Paramo on the screen, and then proceeded to read from her novel-in-progress. This would have been a confusing experience if not for the fact that Luiselli’s novel (or at least the section she read) was a rewrite of Pedro Paramo featuring disenfranchised migrants trying to escape into the US. Her sentence rhythms adhered so closely to Rulfo’s, and her passage’s narrative structure so precisely replicated his, that one couldn’t help but feeling that the dead man’s spirit has somehow been resuscitated.
“A classic is a classic,” Ezra Pound wrote, “not because it fits certain definitions…[but] because of a certain and irrepressible freshness.” By using past writers to illuminate the present, the panelists at PEN’s ‘Resonances’ event proved precisely that.
****
Read more dispatches: