The Elegant Variation

PEN WORLD VOICES WRAP-UP

Event:  Mixing Art and Politics
Participants: With Dorothea Dieckmann, Almudena Grandes, Janne Teller, Saul Williams; moderated by Sam Tanenhaus
Attendance: Strong - 50+.
Logline: On the impact - and relevance - of politics in an author's work and in assessing his/her legacy.
Impressions:  A smart, spirited event.  We arrived a bit late but none of the panelists were shy, although they agreed with one another a bit too much for Tanenhaus's taste (and ours).
Highlights:  Poet Saul Williams suggesting that an artist claiming to be non-political is coming from a position of privilege ... and describing the Bible, Koran and others as "books of poems" ... Panel agreed that serious writing cannot avoid political engagement, at which point Tanenhaus asked how, then, to consider the work of a Pound, whose work we consider great and whose politics we find repellent ... Saul wondered whether he should be dancing to Dr. Dre or not ... but the panel seemed to agree that language finally trumps politics ... The political theme did bring out a few angry, ranting questioners, which does bring up our one pet peeve about this sort of thing - dump the Q&A ... They are seldom edifying and more often excruciating as apparently lonely questioners simply want someone to talk to ... Had we spoken up - we had to leave to catch another event - we would have reminded the panel of Robert Hughes's remark - that Guernica did not shorten the Franco regime by a day - and ask for their rejoinder; which works have exerted real political weight?  Next time ...

Event:  Conversation: Tatyana Tolstaya & David Remnick
Participants: Tatyana Tolstaya & David Remnick
Attendance: Strong - Around 100 or so.
Logline: Russian-accented literary conversation.
Impressions:  We admit we were as curious to see Remnick as we were to see Tolstaya.  He's terribly well-versed in the subject matter so, unsurprisingly, it was an interesting event.  Tolstaya reminds us of most of our relatives, with that Slavic tendency toward absolutes.
Highlights:  She's essentially supportive of Putin, which didn't seem to draw enough of a challenge from Remnick, especially given PEN's concerns ... but she doesn't really "know who he is" and invoked The Matrix, that there are those worse than Putin and it's the Matrix that controls things ... She observed that the New Authoritarians don't care about literature, which is why they persecute journalists, instead (invoking Tom Stoppard's idea that the greatest time to be a poet was when the Soviets would kill you for it.)  She's convinced that all the Modern Russian is concerned about is money ... Finally, the pair shared their love of Pushkin, who, according to Tolstaya, "created language, created archetypes, created sound, created Russian literature" but is finally "unexplainable ... a mystery."  (The stupid Q&A curse continued with the first questioner inquiring whether her two sons got along.)

Event:  A Believer Nighttime Event
Participants: With Niccolò Ammaniti, John Hodgman, Uzodinma Iweala, Miranda July, Yasmina Khadra; and Eric Bogosian
Attendance: Completely packed - standing room only.
Logline: An orgy of twee.
Impressions:  We've come a long, long way concerning the Believer (the magazine), which has gotten much better and much more serious over the years.  But their public events are a different story and this one betrays the awful strain of cute that threatens to creep and poison the whole enterprise.  (We should note, in fairness, that we're clearly the crabby minority, as the audience seemed to love the shennanigans.)
Highlights:  Nothing for us, really ... but it's a matter of taste ... If watching Miranda July auction off audience-donated Ricola cough drops or literary speed dating with the likes of Uzodinma Iweala and Yasmina Khadra turns your crank, then this is the event for you ... But if we never have to endure another minute of Eric Bogosian's jumped-up-invective-as-performance-art, we'll die happily, indeed.  But - and we mean this - the magazine is another, more impressive story altogether ... And the underlying idea that literary events can be fun and needn't be moribund affairs is absolutely fair game ... A question of taste, that's all.

Overall summary: The best literary event of its kind we've attended ... We're sorry to have missed the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books but this one was an easy call ... If you missed out this year, don't make the same mistake next time around.  And thanks for the patience as we've struggled to get these dispatches up for you.

PEN REPORTS: DAY THREE

Event:  Conversation: Per Petterson & Marilynne Robinson, with Radhika Jones
Participants: Per Petterson, Marilynne Robinson, Radhika Jones
Attendance: Very strong - more than 100.
Logline: For us - a chance to Robinson.
Impressions:  We couldn't stay as long as we wanted but getting a chance to see and hear Robinson was one of the highlights of trip, including her brief reading from Gilead.
Highlights:  Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduced the event and then retreated to the audience to watch ... Discussing Housekeeping, Robinson said, "I thought I was writing an unpublishable novel." ... A friend gave it to his agent without telling her ... Her favorite literature is (no surpise) 19th century American ... A video of her reading from Gilead appears below:  (We just posted it so it might take a little while to show up.)

Event:  Conversation: Kiran Desai & Vikram Chandra, with Rachel Donadio
Participants: Kiran Desai, Vikram Chandra, Rachel Donadio
Attendance: Spotty for such a headline event - Rain must have been a factor.
Logline: Two of India's brightest young literary lights in conversation.
Impressions:  Smart and lively participants but an opportunity missed owing to some uninspired moderation.
Highlights:  The event was held in the magnificent new auditorium at the Morgan Library and really should have drawn a bigger crowd ... Salman Rushdie was there to take in the event ... And although Donadio was clearly well familar with both Sacred Games and The Inheritance of Loss, the questions ranged from the likes of "Who are your influences?" to "How did you handle structuring your book?" - serviceable enough but a bit college paper for our tastes, which had the unfortunate effect of creating two separate talks going on instead of bringing the two writers into real conversation ... and the event themes of Home and Away?  Nowhere in evidence ... In spite of this, there were still interesting bits ... Desai spoke of being influenced by Chandra's manifesto "The Cult of Authenticity" ... Chandra described the Bombay underworld as "practical gentlemen who realize you have to travel to make a buck" ... He thought, at the outset, that Sacred Games would be a short book about local crime but it led him to the nexus of organized crime, religion, media, politics ... He discussed using Microsoft Project to help him track the whereabouts of his many characters ... He is interested in using "data structures to examine patterns in narratives" (He's a self-proclaimed computer geek who used to write programs) ... Desai feels that she used her novel to teach herself how to write ... and wondered about the usefulness of paying attention to critics.

More event coverage to follow, including Sam Tanenhaus's lively panel on Art and Politics and the big Believer event.   We're typing as fast as we can ...

PEN REPORTS: DAY TWO

Event:  Make it New: Retranslate Great Literature
Participants: Mary Ann Caws, Edith Grossman, Charles Martin, Mark Polizzotti; moderated by Michael Scammell
Attendance: Spotty - less than 30 or so.  (The remote Columbia University setting didn't help.)
Logline: Great translators considering - and reconsidering - the great works.
Impressions:  Another smart, lively event, woefully underattended and marred only by moderator Scammell's lamentable fixation with Columbia politics (far too much time given over to complaining that translation doesn't count as publication for Columbia professors; cry us a river).  Sponsored by the Center for Literary Translation.
Highlights:  The Tobias Smollett translation of Don Quixote is "a classic in its own right" ... Pope's translation of Homer is "unfaded" ... The market for translation of classics is textbook driven, hence the proliferation of Ovid ... Agreement that knowledged of the "target language" of the translation is more important the knowledge of the native language ... Grossman mentioning the "madwoman" who suggested to her that nothing should be read in translation at the graduate level ... The statistic that there are 6,000 languages in the world, 2,000 of which are written ... "Academics are the only people who talk about the 'canon' " - Grossman (She thinks the "canon" will vary by country and culture.) ... Pindar is untranslatable ... Grossman bought up every copy of her first translation when the publisher changed her speakers into "Spanish Spanish" with the upshot that Colombia peasants spoke as if they were in Madrid.

Event:  Pico Iyer in Conversation with Hal Wake
Participants: Pico Iyer, Hal Wake
Attendance: Strong - more than 50. 
Logline: Reflections from a great travel writer and citizen of the world.
Impressions:  Iyer was a fantastic panelist, lively, charming and erudite.  The brief one-hour lecture was a self-contained trip around the world, utterly in keeping with PEN's theme of Home and Away. 
Highlights:  Of Tamil origin, Iyer recently visited Sri Lanka just as a cease fire fell apart ... He believes in the idea of talking to our so-called "enemies" - "How fragile the notion of enmity is." ... He notes that travel isn't always about going somewhere, that sometimes travel comes to us - thinks a great travel piece would take the form of sitting in the Port Authority ... He mentioned a piece for Harpers, which we're digging up, in which he spent two weeks at LAX ... "Encounters in an airport are as exotic as anything on Easter Island" ... Home became a particularly poignant idea for him as he discussed his home in California burning down with the subsequent loss of all his possessions, including a book in progress ... He divides his time between California and Japan, where, he notes, "the main language they speak is silence."  Here's a very brief video clip from the reading:

Event:  György Konrád in Conversation
Participants: György Konrád and Ivan Sanders
Attendance: Full House - Standing Room Only
Logline: One of Hungary's great writers reflects on his life on the occasion of the release of his memoir.
Impressions:  Edward Teller described a Hungarian as "someone who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front you."  Just as the panel was about to begin, the hosts pulled back the dais and added another row a seats - a new front row - right in front of all of those who showed up early.  We couldn't help but laugh.  Only the Hungarians would do that.  Despite his broken English, and a moderator more intent on speaking than listening, Konrad gave an engaging talk about his life writing through the tumultuous second half of the twentieth century.
Highlights:  Konrad read the opening in Hungarian (video below) and then actor Peter Hecht gave a stirring reading in English ... Konrad reminsced about Pantheon founds Kurt and Helen Wolff (she edited him, he edited Kafka), who "had the conviction that writers and publishers are companions" ... "Without paradox, there is no literature ... no irony ... no ambiguity" ... 2,000 Hungarian emigres are now professors ... Here's Konrad, reading from the first chapter:

PEN REPORTS: DAY ONE

Clearly, getting coverage posted in a timely manner is proving to be a challenge.  Expect the lag to continue through the weekend.

However, first and most important thought:  If you are in NYC and have not attended any of these events yet, do so.  Now.  These events have uniformly been fascinating, well-presented and thought provoking - in short, it's been the best festival of its kind that we've ever attended and we strongly encourage you to check into any of the remaining events over the next few days.

Herewith, thumbnail impressions of the first day's events:

Event:  History and the Truth of Fiction
Participants: Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Attendance: Strong - 50+
Logline: On the obligations to "truth" and "facts" when writing fiction dealing with historical events.
Impressions:  An awfully strong start to the festival for us.  We mentioned to a friend that if this was the level of discourse to expect from the whole weekend, we were going to have fun, indeed.  McCann was a witty and thoughtful moderator and the panel stayed remarkably focused, even as they expressed occasional disagreement with one another.  Especially great to see Monsó present with a translator, emphasizing the international nature of the event.
Highlights:  Japin giving a reading-cum-performance from his novel that can only be described as Shatner-eqsue ... Laila on the clear distinction between "facts" and "truth" ... McCann suggesting that Leopold Bloom is more real to him than his own great-grandfater (who he never knew), and suggesting that writers are the "unacknowledged historians of the future."

Event:  Town Hall Readings
Participants: With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, Saadi Youssef
Attendance: Packed - near sellout
Logline: Ten A-list authors from around the world reading 10-minute excerpts from their work dealing with themes of Home.
Impressions:  We had more room in our cramped coach seat on American Airlines than we had in the unbearably uncomfortable Town Hall.  But it was worth suffering through for a chance to hear some of these luminaries read.  Steve Martin, reading from his memoir-in-progress, was entertaining as one would expect; DeLillo was an unremarkable reader, whereas Desai gave one of the liveliest readings of the night.
Highlights:  Alain Mabanckou read a lovely poem in French, which was then read in English by an interpreter ... and Danish poet Pai Tafdrup also read one of her poems in Danish, a wonderful touch as befits an international festival ... Rushdie read from The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Gordimer read excerpts from a new short story ... Rushdie opened the proceedings, imploring "You, Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man" (the who always forgets to shut if off despite requests) for compliance ... and he took note at the outset of the remarkably youthful makeup of the audience which proposed "means maybe the novel is not" dead.  (Forgive our horrible photographs but we were up in the balcony with a crummy digital camera.  Yes, that is Rushdie.)

Afterwards, we attended the party Soft Skull threw in honor of Mabanckou's new novel African Psycho.  (Mabanckou lives in Santa Monica and teaches at UCLA.)  It's a book worth checking out.

We're off to head in for another rainy day of events but will post Day Two as soon as we can, which will include brief video clips of Pico Iyer's event and George Konrad reading in Hungarian.  More presently.

PEN UPDATES SOON

Things we've learned today: Typepad's Palm blogging software is worthless.

We've been running around like mad dogs with limited intenet access but reports will follow late today or early tomorrow on the festivities here, including last night's packed Town Hall reading which included the likes of Nadine Gordimer, Steve Martin and Salman Rushdie.  We're off to Columbia to hear Edith Grossman, then to Hunter to see Pico Iyer and then all the way down to Tribeca for George Konrad.  But reports on these, and more, will be up sooner rather than later.  In the interim, multiple contributors post impressions at the official event blog.

PEN WORLD VOICES COVERAGE

As we've mentioned previously, we're going to take a pass on next week's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and spend our week in New York covering the much more exciting PEN World Voices events.  In case you're wondering, here's a list of the events we plan to attend and post about for you throughout the week (a few of these are tentative):

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25

History and the Truth of Fiction: With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann

Postcolonial Writing in a Globalized World: Amitava Kumar & Ilija Trojanow

Town Hall Readings - Writing Home: With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, Saadi Youssef

THURSDAY, APRIL 26

Making it New - Retranslating Great Literature: With Mary Ann Caws, Edith Grossman, Charles Martin, Mark Polizzotti; moderated by Michael Scammell

Pico Iyer in Conversation with Hal Wake.

György Konrád in Conversation - Highly, highly recommended.

FRIDAY, APRIL 27

Gritty Realism: With Daniel Alarcón, Guillermo Arriaga, Jorge Franco, Patrícia Melo; moderated by Margo Jefferson

Imaginary Geographies: With Daniel Alarcón, Arthur Japin, Tatyana Tolstaya; moderated by Deborah Treisman

Conversation: Per Petterson & Marilynne Robinson, with Radhika Jones

Conversation: Kiran Desai & Vikram Chandra, with Rachel Donadio

Conversation: Dave Eggers & Valentino Achak Deng

SATURDAY, APRIL 28

Mixing Art and Politics: With Dorothea Dieckmann, Almudena Grandes, Janne Teller, Saul Williams; moderated by Sam Tanenhaus

Conversation: Tatyana Tolstaya & David Remnick

What's So Funny? Humor out of Context: With Guillermo Arriaga, Arnon Grunberg, Ma Jian, and others; moderated by Victoria Roberts

A Believer Nighttime Event: With Niccolò Ammaniti, John Hodgman, Uzodinma Iweala, Miranda July, Yasmina Khadra; and Eric Bogosian

SUNDAY, APRIL 29

A Tribute to Ryszard Kapuscinski: Breyten Breytenbach, Elzbieta Czyzewska, Carolin Emcke, Philip Gourevitch, Adam Michnik, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Weschler

What Makes a Home?  With Alain de Botton, Margriet de Moor, Carlos María Domínguez, Lee Stringer; moderated by Caro Llewellyn

And if we didn't have a 9 p.m. flight to catch for L.A., there's no way we'd miss David Grossman and Nadine Gordimer.  But we can't do it all.  So watch this space next week for posts, updates, photos, clips and general impressions as some the greatest literary minds in the world converge upon New York.