| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 5:48PM | | | | True Lies | Posted By: Martha Southgate
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| Tags: Colum McCann, Laila Lalami, Truth, Arthur Japin, Imme Monso, Michael Wallner, William Maxwell | “In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.”—William Maxwell
Just back from the first of the three “World Voices” events that I’m scheduled to attend. This one was entitled “History and the Truth of Fiction.” It featured Arthur Japin, Michael Wallner, Laila Lalami and Imma Monso. It was moderated by the charming Colum McCann. McCann kicked off his remarks with the above quote from William Maxwell, one of my favorite writers. McCann used the quote, along with this one by Brecht—“Art is not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it”—to lay out the parameters of the panel, namely, how one works with nonfictional material in the service of fiction.
Each of the panelists spoke briefly—it had been left up to them whether to read or talk about their work a bit. Japin, a former actor, read beautifully from his novel The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi. It was a tad “actorish” but hey, it totally worked. Lalami read the gripping opening paragraph of her book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and then talked briefly about the books genesis. Wallner did the same, reading from his novel April in Paris. Monso, who writes in Catalan and lives in Spain, bravely and charmingly spoke in English even though she's not fluent. She didn’t read (her work is not yet available in translation) but spoke about why she chose to work with a true story of her life—the death of her partner—as material for her most recent novel.
The discussion was wide-ranging and thoughtful in its consideration of the issues of working with real figures, either historic or present-day. Lalami and Japin provided most of the high points (though McCann was a delightful moderator). Japin over and over stressed the need to “fall in love” with his characters. That’s what allows him to spend years (10 in the case of Kwasi Boachi) researching his work so that he comes to know the characters so well that he can imagine his way into how they would react to certain events. This remark put me in mind of the terrific new film, The Hoax, in which Clifford Irving (played brilliantly by Richard Gere) so thoroughly imagines (with the help of a brilliant researcher) what it would be like to truly interact with Howard Hughes that he is able to convince a number of people that he’s done it.
Lalami’s passionate imagining of her characters comes from the opposite pole. She stressed that they are all completely imaginary but that the situation they find themselves in—attempting to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in a raft from Morocco to Spain in order to find work—is all too real for many, many people.
In my own work, I’ve been helped greatly in thinking about these issues by two novels: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. The brilliant yet casual blending of true facts and joyous, empathetic fiction, taught me reams about how one might begin to work with what is “real” and what is not “real” within a novel. Lalami put it best when she said: “You write whatever you want and make it as good as you can make it.”
I have one tiny rant about the Q and A—at every New York literary event I’ve ever been to, someone stands up and asks a “question” that is really more of a meandering, self-promoting statement. A good panel knows how to dispatch this kind of thing quickly and this was a good panel, but boy, I’d love to go to one of these things and have only honest questions, honestly asked. | | |
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2 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 4-30-07 2:53PM: Martha Southgate said...
Too right!
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| 4-28-07 10:51AM: Timothy Liu said...
Yes, there should be a Q&A patrol ejecting self-absorbed non-answering-seeking attention-starved opportunists from the house!
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