| Sunday, May 2, 2010 11:14AM | | | | War and the Novel | Posted By: Judith Benét Richardson
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| Tags: Atxaga, Florian, Gavron, Rahimi, war, inspiration, Afghanistan, Gaza, Romania, Spanish Civil War | The four writers Bernardo Atxaga of Spain, Assaf Gavron of Israel, Atiq Rahimi of France, Afghanistan and I wonder where else, and Filip Florian of Romania met in the cool confines of Scandinavia House and discussed in depth the sources of their inspiration.
It was a bit surprising at first to see these four male writers, flanked by their translators, all young women and the moderator Susan K, but the translators more than held their own.
Assaf Gavron, the one writer without a translator, began by reading from his novel CROCATTACK that begins on a bus. A woman has become suspicious of another rider and tries to engage the protagonist in seeing the other rider as a threat. Gavron's point was that war is insidious; it moves inside us and we must grapple with it whether we wish to or not.
Atiq Rahimi, a striking man in a black hat, told of the scene in his novel THE PATIENCE STONE in which a fly buzzes around a man in a coma, exploring his body. This scene was inspired by a fly Rahimi was unable to kill during a time he was trapped in his house during violence in the streets. He told how he sat down and wrote a scene in which he killed the fly, "We write because we can't kill. Our words are bullets. We write to overcome weakness." I hope I am paraphrasing correctly as he read in French.
Bernardo Atxaga told a story of a Basque writer who, during the Spanish Civil War, was at first on the side of the Republicans and then changed sides because of outrages toward the church. Atxaga threw this book in the river, but it became part of his inspiration. (This connects in my mind to Javier Cercas, whom I heard later in the day, whose main character in one book is a fascist.)
Filip Florian spoke of the "dark and misty" period in Romania after WWII with 200,000 prisoners in Communist jails. His novel LITTLE FINGERS is not a policier he said, but an attempt to make the story of finding a mass grave into a mirror in which we can all see ourselves. He feels there are only small truths and in such a period only small people's stories can be true.
He read in Romanian.
After these discussions of inspiration, the moderator led us to questions of sources.
Atiq Rahimi heard of an Afghan woman killed by her husband, who was now in a coma as he had tried to commit suicide in prison. Rahimi felt his action was caused by war, because war had destroyed the humanity in him. So he was literally paralyzed by war.
I never had the chance to ask Rahimi about the ending of his book, which I have heard as an audiobook with a wonderful reader. How have readers responded to the ending, I wanted to ask him.
Assaf Gavron was a soldier in Gaza. Fascinated by the idea of the Palestinians, he wrote to discover the "other" as Rahimi seems to have done with women.
Filip Florian had family members who were political prisoners, but people who were "free" also were in a perpetual war with harsh controls, sometimes violent, on the part of the Ceauscu government.
Bernardo Atxaga was as leisurely and discursive as his novels; when he described his writing method as the making of a painting, I had to agree. He, at least, should give war credit for giving him a plot!
Then we moved on to the question of how much distance from events a writer needs and Rahimi made the excellent point that point of view is as important as distance. Most of the writers agreed that time must past, and sometimes it helps to live in another country. Florian felt one could destroy a story by not giving it time, but Gavron cited the urgency that compels a writer to speak out sooner in some cases.
They spoke of grief and how grieving time is often needed as a kind of distance; Atxaga told a touching anecdote of a writer who could not write for six years when his son disppeared in Argentina.
It was interesting to perceive the compassion all these writers felt for their villains. This they attribute, again, to the effort to understand the "other." Rahimi cautions that in fiction you can come to love your villain, because he is yours.
Again, this had echoes later in the day in the interview with Javier Cercas, who said understand, yes, justify, no.
But bullets into words, we liked that idea.
At the end, as the writers bent toward their translators, to have the questions explained to them, I thought how writing is always translation, of interpreting a world of others. This afternoon these writers reached across the chasms of our misunderstanding.
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 5-5-10 4:53PM: shaun said...
I attended this event, and then compared the results to the event later in the day at War, a panel of journalists on writing on the same topic.
Would love to hear your thoughts:
www.mantlethought.org/content/war-words
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