| Thursday, April 29, 2010 8:29PM | | | | The Virtue of Patience | Posted By: Anelise Chen
|
| Tags: Salman Rushdie, Yiyun Li, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Alberto Ruy-Sanchez, Miguel Syjuco, Andrzej Stasiuk, Sofi Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Mohsin Hamid, Patti Smith |
Most of the ten international writers at last night’s Readings From Around the Globe Opening Night Extravaganza exhibited a sensibility few American writers have: a readiness to meditate on a single idea. Unlike much contemporary American writing—jumpy, fragmented, staccato—their language was poured out slowly, longitudinally, unanxious that the reader might look away.
If impatience has been codified into American literature, these international writers seemed, luckily, to be removed from it.
An example: with the translated text scrolling behind him, Mexican novelist Alberto Ruy-Sánchez read in Spanish from his novel THE SECRET GARDEN OF MOGADOR, which is about a man learning how to become a better lover. It is a reverse 1,001 nights, where the man returns night after night to tell his lover a new story. “I don’t care if he becomes a better lover,” Ruy-Sánchez said. “I just care if he becomes a better story-teller.”
The scene Ruy-Sánchez read was breathtaking, because his attention was fixed on every detail and nuance coming from his character’s body. But as I tried to imagine the story as part of an entire novel, I couldn’t help but think: okay, but who can afford to do this—who has 1,001 nights?
I thought back to what Israeli novelist Alex Epstein said during the Diversity Test panel on Monday. As English is the universal language of trade and commerce, it was difficult for him to think about how his books would be read in English. Writing in Hebrew freed him from having to address the globalized role that English presents. He went on to relate that the connotations of a language unavoidably influence the writing that comes out of it. Hebrew has an ethereal, mystic quality, English, unfortunately, is perhaps too wrapped up in capitalism.
Living in America and writing in English, writer Salman Rushie understands this problem all too well. Rushdie read from an essay on sloth, which was not so much a condemnation of his “second favorite” deadly sin, but an expressed wish to indulge in it. “I am only going to read a couple sections...because I am lazy...and then I will be tired,” he joked. (But of course it wasn’t for his sake; he knew that to read any longer was to test his audience. We found his promise for brevity reassuring.)
The main characters in Rushdie’s piece are Linda Evangelista (who famously said, “I don’t get up for less than $10,000”) and Oblomov, the subject of Ivan Goncharov’s novel of the same name. To Rushdie, Oblomov takes Bartleby’s refusal to work one step further by simply refusing to get of bed at all. Rather than saying, “I prefer not to,” Oblomov says flatly, “No.” No, he will not get out of bed; no, he will not work. He is sleepy; he prefers to nap. Perhaps “Oblomovitis” is symptomatic of the decay and torpor of the class he represents, but “a little Oblomov lies within all of us,” Rushdie suggested.
Chinese writer Yiyun Li lives in the United States and writes in English, but seems to have escaped the hysterical pace of American life and her writing reflects it. Her prose is spare, unarresting, so much that it takes us out of the moment when English exclamations like “alas!” appear (do they say that in China?). Though her books are written in English, her work felt closer to the international readers.
Polish novelist Andrzej Stasiuk’s reading of his novel NINE captured best the tension between slow and fast, nostalgia and commerce.
“This is a sad story,” he warned us.
Stasiuk began with a thick description of a girl’s living space. Kurt Cobain dies, and the girl takes the tape player into bed with her. I thought: is this the sad part? Cobain dying? Later she has a conversation with another school girl, and they discuss whether they would rather have sex with Krishna or Cobain. I pictured these girls in a town in Poland, having this conversation. Then, Stasiuk began to describe a marketplace. For about five minutes the list of things in the marketplace dominated the narrative. Soon there was no story, only a list, which in itself became a kind of story, as if to say: here is the petty stuff that is the world. Stasiuk himself was out of breath, getting tired from reading his own long, exhaustive list. People in the audience began to stir, shift in their seats. Finally, he said: “The air hasn’t changed for generations in the marketplace.” It was a devastating ending. I thought: yes, he was right. This is a sad story.
--Anelise Chen
| | | |
| | |
|
