Here we have a conversation with Jonathan Franzen, still an unknown author, on the eve of the publication of The Corrections; and one with Roberto Bolaño, near the end of his life. Lydia Davis and Francine Prose break down the intricacies of Davis's methods; Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz discuss the power of Caribbean diasporic fiction. This anthology brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.
Here we have a conversation with Jonathan Franzen, still an unknown author, on the eve of the publication of The Corrections; and one with Roberto Bolaño, near the end of his life. Lydia Davis and Francine Prose break down the intricacies of Davis's methods; Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz discuss the power of Caribbean diasporic fiction. This anthology brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.
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Overview
Here we have a conversation with Jonathan Franzen, still an unknown author, on the eve of the publication of The Corrections; and one with Roberto Bolaño, near the end of his life. Lydia Davis and Francine Prose break down the intricacies of Davis's methods; Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz discuss the power of Caribbean diasporic fiction. This anthology brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616953805 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Soho Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Chris Abani and Colm Tóibín
CHRIS ABANI was born in Afikpo, Nigeria, in 1966. He is the author of several volumes of fiction and poetry, including the novels GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hemingway/PEN Prize, the PEN Beyond Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. He is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. He lives in Chicago.
COLM TÓIBÍN was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955. He is the author of several novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and The Testament of Mary, as well as two story collections. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York and currently serves as Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
COLM TÓIBÍN There are very few obvious connections between Ireland and Nigeria, other than the heritage we received from Her Majesty's government over the years. In Ireland, we haven't struck oil yet. Nonetheless, there's an astonishing passage in Chinua Achebe's book The Trouble with Nigeria that connects the two countries. Achebe is in Dublin, and he's watching a ceremonial event that the Irish government has organized. And he notices that the president of Ireland, Patrick J. Hillery — he was the president of Ireland from 1976 to 1990 — sidles into the room, just moves into a public event with no obvious security, with no obvious sense of pomp, no medals, no uniform; he just walks into the room, greets a few people and sits down. And Achebe thinks that's an astonishing idea, and it stays in his mind. Of course, for us, that is the Irish, it was an aspect of the sheer dullness of Patrick J. Hillery that nobody wanted to kill him, or mob him. If you were a novelist in the society, you had trouble, because although the conflagration of Northern Ireland was happening just two hours away, it did not impinge on this world. To try to create fiction in this world created certain difficulties. But for Achebe, of course, this was to be envied. In some ways, the same difficulty arises for novelists operating in a theater of war as for novelists in a theater of dullness. The simple business of the sentence and the paragraph — the substance of fiction — in war or in peace seems to me not to be a particularly different task, no matter what the society. But the task you faced, where your president did not sidle into rooms unguarded, nonetheless created a different problem for you than Patrick J. Hillery did for me. Is that correct?
CHRIS ABANI I like that. I would agree. It creates the problem of how to write an interior, somewhat quiet yet still important novel about people in that culture when the external theater seems so much more alluring, urgent even. But there is the problem, the obvious becomes the trap, and precisely because it is obvious it is considered important, so the rendering of the culture, of life in that culture, as art, is often not the measure. But to go back to the connections between Nigeria and Ireland, for me, on a personal level, a familial level almost, but also at the level of being Igbo, these connections go deep because much of the education of Igbos in Nigeria was from Irish priests and missionaries, directly in Catholic schools and through the Church, but also in the form of scholarships to Irish universities. In fact my father was at the University of Cork in the early 1950s and is still known around Cork as that bloody black idiot speeding down the middle of the road, causing pedestrians to flee either way. The Irish missionaries were different in Nigeria from, say, the Scottish or the Protestants. There was a quietness, almost an apology, in the way they were supposed to be "civilizing" us, partly because culturally there was so much in common that they would often want to defend the indigenous culture. They were the only ones who stayed during the Biafran Civil War — these incredible nuns and priests put themselves between the soldiers and the guns. They made a strong impression on people like my father. That quiet elegance continues even to today in Ireland, not just in the area of government, but also in the way that the literature is produced. I remember doing a reading in Dublin with Seamus Heaney. This guy shuffles into the room in a shabby jacket, sits down next to me. He's drinking a Guinness. I had just come offstage and he's like, "That was rather nice." I was like, "Who is this strange man?" Not out loud, of course. Then they announce, "Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney." I'm looking for Seamus, and this guy says, "Hold my Guinness." It was him! We all went to his house afterward, all these young poets sitting around on the floor. This notion that art is available to everyone and there is no hierarchy has a quiet elegance too. I see that in your writing, and I wonder if that is more your tradition?
CT There are two traditions in Ireland. One is that you want to write a book that will change books forever, that will have its reader contained within the book. Those books have made a difference all over the world — for example, Ulysses, the work of Beckett, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds — in that they take on the entire business of language itself, consciousness itself, and create a new way of working with them. But as the Republic of Ireland settled down, there was an older tradition that could be worked on, which came from song, fundamentally, and also from prayer. It tended toward melancholy, which often worked best in the short story; it tended to use unadorned sentences, and be very respectful to rhythms and to the idea of a book itself. The master of this, who died last month, was the Irish writer John McGahern. What we don't have in Ireland is a novel that describes the disintegration of Gaelic society and its replacement with English-speaking society. We don't have a Things Fall Apart. We don't have a novel from which everything must take its bearings, that seems to catch history at a certain point and deal with it using a sense of fable, but also making it almost like a song, almost simple, immensely moving, as well as complex, but that could be read by everyone all over the world. Is Achebe's Things Fall Apart as important a book in Nigeria as it has been for people outside Nigeria?
CA Well, yes and no. I was going to ask you about Ulysses and Dublin. We both seem drawn to re-render cities that other writers have inhabited, but we can talk about that later. Things Fall Apart has more import, I think, as a political moment and has caused me to question if there is a Nigerian novel and what shape it should take. As beautiful as Achebe's book is, it seems to me that it didn't come from an aesthetic engagement, but rather a political one, written in response to Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. It is a response to colonialism. Whereas Amos Tutuola, who comes before him, and even Cyprian Ekwensi, seem to be engaged with their own imagination, their own aesthetic. There are two schools of writing in Nigeria: Tutuola, Fagunwa, Okara, Soyinka, Okri and Oyeyemi and then Achebe, Aluko, Okpewho, Iyayi, Atta and Adichie. Habila and myself, I think, occupy a form somewhere between these two.
CT Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard is written getting everything there is in the oral culture, and playing with it.
CA Playing with it in this new form, which is the written form.
CT And it is totally alert to the possibilities of bringing a modernist aesthetic into a society that has had an oral culture.
CA Completely, and at the same time being aware of the political moment. It is very subversive. Achebe has set up a difficult thing to follow, the representational approach to Nigerian literature; we have to perform the culture to other people. I would much prefer to be like Joyce and Tutuola.
CT Yes, but Joyce comes in two guises: the author of Dubliners, which for anyone working to create a simple moment, seen and understood, offers a poetic zeal and beauty. To the aura surrounding, say, defeat or poverty — Dubliners does that. Whereas Ulysses breaks the possibility of anyone doing that again. But then you can never contain those two traditions. For example, in — what's the name of the later Achebe novel that has a wonderful woman character that Nadine Gordimer called "the best female character yet created by an African writer"?
CA Arrow of God?
CT No, the later one.
CA A Man of the People?
CT No, the later one.
CA Anthills of the Savanna!
CT Yes! As an aesthetic achievement, that woman's presence in the book — I know that she has a role in politics, but for example, when she talks about the taste of sperm in her mouth and how she feels about that, that's got nothing to do with Nigerian politics, but it's a wonderful moment.
CA It depends on whose sperm it is.
CT Irrespective of whose sperm it is, you feel that the way it's described — sorry, I picked a good example — that could be in any country, anywhere. That novel is full of extremely interesting perceptions about people, about men and women, her voice especially. Am I right about that?
CA You're absolutely right, but that's part of the beauty, the tragedy of political insurgency. It's not until his fourth novel that Achebe continues the experiment with form and voice begun in Arrow of God. But Gabriel Okara had done this already in The Voice. That's what happens in political contexts where literature takes on this role. I wouldn't be able to write if Achebe hadn't written. So it's not a criticism. His generation's privileging of the political moment has created a space for the Nigerian novel that allows my generation to enter and start to talk about the aesthetic moment.
CT You've written recently about [Wole] Soyinka. How important has he been?
CA You can't talk about Nigeria in any context without Soyinka. The country comes to birth in Soyinka's imagination. There's no political moment, no nationalistic moment that he doesn't have some involvement in. Purely as a voice of conscience, he's been the one constant. In Nigeria we have 250 ethnicities that are engaged in the often violent moments of self-determination. Soyinka is one of a few people able to occupy that duality that's required if Nigeria is to find itself. And you see that in his plays and novels as well. His work begins to achieve a universalism that has often led to criticisms over authenticity because he doesn't privilege folklore. For him myth and mythology exist only in terms of what they can do for the aesthetic moment, the way it did for the Greeks and the Romans. For me as a writer he is the most influential, both as a voice of conscience, but also in terms of aesthetic rigor and framework.
CT Compared to Things Fall Apart, I never liked The Interpreters. It seems to me very dull indeed. Is that just an outsider's view? Maybe Soyinka's theater is his best work.
CA Theater is his best work, but I do think it is an outsider's view. In many ways Things Fall Apart performs a certain reassuring expectation of Africa. This means that most writers within my generation are resisting that performance. I am in fact lucky to get any kind of exposure because all my work is about resisting that performance. This new storytelling is a difficult balance.
CT Yes, but it seems to me that you've taken both. In GraceLand you're certainly alert to what Tutuola has done, in terms of your repetitions and style. But also there are pure pieces of nineteenth-century Russian realism, which both Achebe and Soyinka have worked with. So you're actually bringing the two forms together in order to dramatize what is quite a difficult public life for quite a fragile consciousness, your protagonist, Elvis. You're conscious of using both?
CA Very, but more conscious of actually taking directly from the Russians. There are references in the book — the books that Elvis is reading — that talk about the way the book is made. I read Dostoyevsky very early — ten, twelve years old — and became sucked into that ridiculous existential melancholy that thirteen-year-old boys feel, but haven't earned. Dickens, too. It's a colonial education, and so I had those references. Soyinka and Tutuola have been much more influential than Achebe in terms of my actual writing style. But in terms of how you build a worldview, Achebe has been more important, how you integrate what is essentially an Igbo cosmology into a very modern, contemporary, twenty-first-century novel. There are all of those things, but James Baldwin also plays into this.
CT As does Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I think that with every novel, there's this shadow novel: the novel that should have been and that was in my head at first, that was set in a much more public place. For example, I was in Spain when Franco died. I was at all the demonstrations. There was always a novel to be written. But when I went to write the novel, it was about those earlier years when there was nothing much happening. The Henry James book really should have been a novel about Oscar Wilde, which would have been much more exciting, funnier, more glamorous and sadder in the end. I was also conscious in GraceLand that there are things you are leaving out; the war is mentioned only in passing. It must have been tempting to have done a very big war novel, written the novel of the Biafran war.
CA Do you get that?
CT Of course, of course I do: "Where is the novel of Northern Ireland? Where is the novel of the civil rights movement? Where is the novel of the IRA?" Well, why don't you write it? (laughter)
CA It's funny, because when I was reading The Master — the beautiful opening scene with James's play, when Wilde is mentioned — I can see that temptation. Yes, it is tempting, but GraceLand was doing the very reverse of that; it was trying to be both minute and epic, which is a contradiction in terms. Here's a book that's dealing with a whole generation — my generation — of Nigerians, and our coming of age and our notion of the country's coming of age. So it sprawls all over the place, but it had to follow this single consciousness if it was going to bear through with any degree of resonance. Otherwise it would veer too easily into the polemic. GraceLand is like a manifesto: I wanted to talk about gender, sexuality, the performance of masculinity, and how that is always associated with violence, the terrain of which is the female body within Nigeria; all of those spaces of silence that exist in Nigerian literature and are not privileged in the way that the easily political is privileged. Abigail comes out of that, as does a book I wrote about a boy soldier. They're both novellas. They're small and minute because I'm afraid of that easy political grandstanding. I'm looking for a more effective way of discussing both the political and human. I've returned more and more to Baldwin, because Baldwin is always about the quiet human moment. He never shied away from race, from the civil rights movement. He never shied away from dealing with issues of sexuality. Being ten and reading Another Country, in a very homophobic culture, I realized that for James the only aberration in the world is the absence of love. And what's even more perverse is the giving up on the search for love, which is that melancholic voice that carries us in the quiet moments. That's what I want to return to. You too have this quietness at the heart of your work. Your writing is elegant, it's sparse — Blackwater Lightship, for example — and where the hell do you get these beautiful titles from? For you, is the more distilled voice the better voice? Do you like it more in this sense?
CT There's a lot of fear involved, that you're going to mess up the sentence, so you leave it short. It arises from having to struggle enormously just to get the thing down. I have no natural ability, I don't think. I have colleagues in Ireland who have a real natural ability — almost like having a natural singing voice — where you can write anything. I don't have that at all. So it always comes from fear, I think.
CA It's funny you should say that. Do you know Dermot Healy's work?
CT He has a natural ability to just do anything with words.
CA But he says the same thing! He says that he's terrified. A Goat's Song took him ten years and it's a beautiful book. Do you think that it's just that Irish writers are better writers precisely because they feel that they're not?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Cover,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Foreword by Betsy Sussler,
Introduction by Francine Prose,
Chris Abani and Colm Tóibín,
Kathy Acker and Mark Magill,
Martin Amis and Patrick McGrath,
Roberto Bolaño and Carmen Boullosa,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Oscar Hijuelos,
Maryse Condé and Rebecca Wolff,
Dennis Cooper and Benjamin Weissman,
Lydia Davis and Francine Prose,
Junot Díaz by Edwidge Danticat,
Geoff Dyer and Jonathan Lethem,
Jennifer Egan and Heidi Julavits,
Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Safran Foer,
Brian Evenson and Blake Butler,
Nuruddin Farah and Kwame Anthony Appiah,
Paula Fox and Lynne Tillman,
Jonathan Franzen and Donald Antrim,
Mary Gaitskill and Matthew Sharpe,
Kimiko Hahn and Laurie Sheck,
Wilson Harris and Fred D'Aguiar,
Bernard-Henri Lévy and Frederic Tuten,
Wayne Koestenbaum and Kenneth Goldsmith,
Rachel Kushner and Hari Kunzru,
Ben Lerner and Adam Fitzgerald,
Sam Lipsyte and Christopher Sorrentino,
Ben Marcus and Courtney Eldridge,
Steven Millhauser and Jim Shepard,
Álvaro Mutis and Francisco Goldman,
Sharon Olds and Amy Hempel,
Dale Peck and Jim Lewis,
Sapphire and Kelvin Christopher James,
Lore Segal and Han Ong,
Charles Simic and Tomas Šalamun,
Justin Taylor and Ben Mirov,
John Edgar Wideman and Caryl Phillips,
Tobias Wolff and A.M. Homes,