| Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:18PM | | | | Best Ticket in Town | Posted By: Jane Ciabattari
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| Tags: World Voices, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Steve Martin, Neil Gaiman, Alain Mabanckou, Saadi Youssef, Tatyana Tolstaya, Don DeLillo, Pia Tafdrup | In an age of mass migration,when human herds cross borders in flight from conflict, poverty, disease, violence, what is home? How and where do we find it?
Nadine Gordimer, the penultimate reader in last night's PEN readings on "Writing Home," spoke of the millions of refugees from wars and conflicts. Silver-haired, dressed in gray, with a long white-bordered stole, she drew the photographers from the shadows at Town Hall. Just before reading the first sentence of her powerful story "The Ultimate Safari," she said, "Forget about me, the old woman. It's being narrated by an eleven year old girl." Her narrator's mother has disappeared and her father is in the civil war in Mozambique. With her grandparents and two brothers, she makes the treacherous trek through Kruger Park, "a kind of whole country of animals--elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles"--to a "very big tent"-- a refugee camp in South Africa where, they live for two years, so long that the grandmother, whose husband had disappeared on the trek, feels there is no home to return to. (The story appeared in the 2004 anthology Telling Tales, published as a fundraiser for people with HIV/AIDS in southern Africa.) Silence in the hall before waves of applause. Moral authority is rare these days.
Nine other readers also brought the packed hall to attention.
Steve Martin (impeccable summer linens, crisp timing) drew steady laughs with excerpts from his forthcoming memoir, "Born Standing Up." He's twenty years old, finding his home onstage at the "Coffee and Confusion" in North Beach, trying out the napkin trick, the "arrow-in-the-head," the banjo backed shaggy dog songs, while offstage wandering through the fantasyworld of City Lights Books, Mike's Pool Hall (bikers and hippies, oh my), Carol Doda's Condor Club, Haight Ashbury.
Don DeLillo, lean, austere in sea green shirt and khakis, read a snipet from the third chapter of his new novel "Falling Man," set during the days after the World Trade Towers were attacked. In one paragraph he brought it back this disruption of the place those of us who live on this island call home: "He...looked into the haze, seeing the strands of bent filagree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower where he'd worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, in the rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes."
Pia Tafdrup, yellow jacket brightening her black ensemble, sketched her life from conception ("Kernel") to the end of her father's life ("milky ways of morphine murmur through his body" ) in three poems, reading the last, "Good Night," first in Danish. [Read it here:http://www.danishliterarymagazine.info/14c00029/GSID/2053610]
Tatyana Tolstaya, sturdy and serious, read from her 2003 dystopian novel "The Slynx," her Benedikt struggling against bitter cold, blackness "like a long fall into a well," and contemplating the constellations: "You're born, you die, you get up, you lie down, you dance at your neight's wedding....and the stars are still there."
Iraqi-born poet Saadi Youssef, white-haired, gray suit, yellow shirt, wrote of the fifth of July 1992. "I think of forty years back when I published my first poetic text." He'd borrowed fifty dollars from an uncle for the publication, and returned the money not in banknotes, but in a sack of coins. Youssef struck an absurdist note while capturing the profound disorientation of exile: "Why am I there and here, here and there? Damascus, Tunis, Paris. What am I doing in Paris?"
Photographers came from the back of Town Hall to get a shot of Kiran Desai, who read from "The Inheritance of Loss," her second novel, winner of this year's National Book Critics Circle and Booker awards. Willowy, animated, in a long black dress, she joked about coming in under the time limit so she would "not become the stereotype of the Indian behind the microphone." Her accents were dead-on, as were her descriptions of New York City's layers, from the wealthy Indian girl who "wants the Marlboro Man with a Ph.D." to the delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant who tries to warm himself with scallion pancakes under his shirt.
The grief of exile was best portrayed by Alain Mabanckou, in yellow shirt and cap, long white jacket, grey trousers. He read a poem for his mother in French; Joel Connaroe read the English translation, which invoked Mabanckou's home--"two syllables. Congo," the tree where he wrote his first poem and the cemetery there where his mother rests. The poet's warmth was obvious as he threw his arm around Connaroe to escort him backstage. (I first read Mabanckou's work in the extraordinary Words without Borders, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Bleublancrouge)
Neil Gaiman, British born creator of Sandman comics, appeared all in black, including leather jacket, to read an excerpt from the end of his Hugo, Bram Stoker, Nebula and Locus award-winning novel "American Gods," where Shadow finds himself in Reykjavik, alternating between reading guidebooks and "Bleak House," eating smoked puffin, cloudberries and arctic char and musing about finding home. Gaiman followed up with his poem "Instructions," about what to do if you find yourself in a fairy tale. (For Gaiman's perspective on the the evening, check out his blog: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/ ) He's a masterful reader; watch for him at the PEN "Moth" reading.
Next up was Gordimer. And then it was time for Salman Rushdie, who had kicked off the evening with brief remarks. The most relaxed of the readers, Rushdie was casual in jeans and jacket, reading a section from "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," his playful rock and roll riff on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Not a bad time to remind us that "the world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains."
At the end: A huge sigh from the hundreds in the audience. Satisfaction. On April 25, 2007, this was the best ticket in town.
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3 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 5-16-09 6:12PM: female bodybuilders said...
So funny, I just posted my blog about the same event, and now I see after reading yours that we picked out some of the same favorite lines and images with Desai and Rushdie! It was a great night.
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female bodybuilders
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| 4-26-07 5:00PM: Aaron Hamburger said...
So funny, I just posted my blog about the same event, and now I see after reading yours that we picked out some of the same favorite lines and images with Desai and Rushdie! It was a great night.
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| 4-26-07 2:12PM: Jane Ciabattari said...
Take a look at Nadine Gordimer's contribution to the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews and her thoughts on the value of book culture on the NBCC blog, http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/
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