Before the Feast is set in Fürstenfelde, a small village in the former GDR, on the day before its annual feast. Why did you decide to set your story there? Do you know the area well? And is this central European location and scenery important to your writing?

I had a mosaic kind of tale in mind which was based on a really small village in the Bosnian mountains, a place where the ancestors of my family lived for centuries. The village is on the verge of disappearing; only about 20 people live there today. I wanted to write the stories of those still remaining, the legends of the region, its beauty and horrors, in order to keep something, anything alive and save it from being forgotten.

Soon I realized that this kind of approach was more of a documentary project than a fictional one. I continued the research but stopped the writing.

The topics of decay, disappearance, life and death in remote areas didn’t cease to interest me even after my work in that village was done. And so I created my own village, in which I could write fictional prose as much as I liked, and placed it in Germany’s northeast where many problematic issues of German and European societies are visible – unemployment of the youth, a strong right-wing movement, the loneliness of old people and so on.

I didn’t have a very deep knowledge of the region, which is why I spent a lot of time in Uckermark and did research, talked to people, read and learned. It is a region with a literary tradition of its own, but not much has been written in recent times.

I found that many stories from ‘my’ ancestors’ village were very similar in their core to stories I was being told or researched in Uckermark. There is something beautiful in the fact that such different cultural landscapes share similar motives and story-telling devices, which in the end means that Europe is nothing more than a village itself. A big and angry one, eerie and manifold, but in the end just a village.

You thank the people of Furstenberg, Furstenfelde and Furstenwalde at the end of your novel. How much is the book based on real local history?

I actually never went to those places (except Fürstenwerder). The thank-you note is itself fiction, since everybody is always trying to find the ‘real’ in fiction.

There is a bit of local history revolving around the end of World War II which I took as the background for one story; also bits of GDR history are relevant. But there is much more invented history and even pieces from Bosnia which I used and transferred to Germany without changing too many parameters.

The book was never meant to be a fictional mirror of history. It even plays with the fact that history is always different depending on who is writing it. The winners, the losers, the historians, the authors of fictions.

In the novel the local historical archive is mysteriously broken into and stories escape, allowing myths and memories flow through the village during the night. Why this fascination with collective memory and the past?

As a writer I am fascinated by memory (and its flaws) as a constituent of our present lives. I cannot write honestly about a 90-year-old former soldier without trying to understand his views on war as a young man or his thoughts on the military and his own time spent with a weapon.

Collective memory is a kind of a myth in itself. There is almost never such a thing as complete agreement on how historical events unfolded, because there is always that one person who will say, ‘I don’t believe,’ and, ‘This is how it went,’ no matter how much evidence would prove him wrong.

Even written records are never complete and perhaps not even correct, or they’re forged; in any case, many might say they are not to be trusted. I like the mistrust.

I like the flaws of remembrance and the insecurities of biographies. I am not interested in the past as a moment in time but in the present as a carryover of all the memories and dealings in and with the past.

The village of Furstenfelde is in decline. Is writing about this place your way of keeping it alive?

Not really. Maybe it would be so if it actually existed. While dealing with the past of the village of my ancestors, I realized that I am either a fiction writer, or a journalist or a museum curator, but never all of those things together.

Also – unfortunately? – fiction can’t save much from disappearance. It might provide insight for those who are interested and maybe even create a good story which will forever become a part of the cultural heritage of a place, but only a fantasist would give it actual healing powers.

This novel has a wonderfully rich host of local characters, from an aged painter, a teenage bell-ringer and a suicidal ex-soldier to the vixen who lives in the nearby forest. The reader has a strong feeling that the animals, people and landscape are all connected together. In fact, the book is often narrated by a collective ‘we’. Who are ‘we’ in the story? And why did you decide on this constantly shifting perspective?

In creating a mosaic of a village I kind of wanted the mosaic itself to have a voice which was stronger than its singular pieces. Only a ‘we’ could provide such force.

Also, ‘we’ is very often used in rural contexts, for example in conversations. It provides a sense of unity and agreement, and at the same time it divides ‘us’ (the villagers) from ‘them’ (the outside world), thus creating a strong group feeling which always has more credibility and strength than one single voice.

The ‘we’ in the story is a kind of collective voice of the village itself. I tried to imagine how it would sound if all the people who ever lived in this place merged into one. It would be protective towards the village since it consists of the village, it would be harsh because times were mostly harsh, but it would also be sensible and even poetic because of all the sensible and poetic voices that have lived in Fürstenfelde. And so on: the aim was to create a kind of a choir with singers long dead and some still alive, always singing, because a village is never quiet, not even in its darkest hours.

You arrived in Germany with your parents at the age of 14, having fled the war in former Yugoslavia. You now write your books in German. Beyond the Feast is stylistically very rich with wonderfully surprising changes in tone and timescale. Tibor Fischer in the Independent said that you manage to ‘put a bit of Balkan fun into the Reich’. Do you think that the fact that German is your second language contributes to your linguistic inventiveness? How has your mother tongue affected your writing?

Not much really. I have no idea what Balkan fun actually is, I lived there only for those 14 years and the last one or two were not really fun. People tend to believe that writing has much to do with our biographical upbringing. That might be true for some people but for me writing only has to do with the actual topic I am writing about. For me a good writer of fiction is someone who can adapt to any milieu, setting, person and bring it to life on the page – no matter how far away this milieu, setting and person is from the writer’s background.

So the answer would be: I am linguistically inventive because the language is there to be linguistically reinvented – if, and only if, it works for a story and a character’s way of speech.

How do you feel about your adopted homeland?

It is very hard to think about such a complicated, manifold, unreal construct as a ‘country’ as if it were a hat. Even hats are not really simple. But simpler than ‘Germany’. I’ll try:

I don’t really know how I feel about the very complicated hat Germany. It is colourful. To wear it makes me happy at times, sad at times, angry at times, confused at times. I like to wear it because it doesn’t really fit me or anyone else. Sometimes I must lift it for couple of weeks and put another hat on since it tends to get narrower over time. France is a good alternative hat.

Anthea Bell, who translated both your novels, is a wonderful translator. She has been widely praised for this and for her other translations. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

There are no words to describe the beauty, precision and literary quality of Anthea’s work. May she live and translate forever.

I enjoy working with translators in general. They are the best readers: very focused and critical.

Find out more about Before the Feast, published by Pushkin Press.

Find out more about How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone on English PEN’s World Bookshelf including a free, downloadable reading guide.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Saša Stanišić appeared first on English PEN.

The only difference between the Amélie of my novels and me is that I am far more anxious. This literary device is appealing to me because I am a huge part of the human mystery.

Many of your books are inspired by autobiographical events. How do you select which memories end up in a novel as literary material?

Each time I don’t understand what happened to me, I feel it will be a good literary material.

Petronille has a very funny vignette of Amélie’s disastrous interview with Vivienne Westwood. Have you really interviewed Vivienne Westwood?

Yes! And it was exactly the way I wrote it. I did not exaggerate.

Amélie in the book, like you, is Belgian, and fascinated with French-ness. Is being an outsider important to your writing?

Being an outsider is extremely important in my writing and in my life. It is so interesting to be an outsider. I have always been one, even in my own country.

Petronille describes a complex nature of friendship between two very different women – both writers and both lovers of champagne. To what extent is that an ideal friendship?

It is an ideal friendship because these two women have important common interests and basic differences: this is an interesting recipe.

Can friendship between writers be free from rivalry?

Unfortunately, no. I have experienced it several times.

Petronille and Amélie come from very different social backgrounds and your book gently pokes fun at their prejudices. Amélie is also an established writer and Petronille her young disciple. Why are they fascinated with each other?

In French, we say: ‘Les contraires s’attirent.’ Petronille is exotic for Amélie and vice versa.

This novel pays tribute to bookshops and booksellers. How do you see their role in encouraging young writers? The character Amélie Nothomb is asked to do many signing sessions. Do you enjoy the moment of meeting your readers and signing books?

This role is so important. When a bookseller invites a young writer for a booksigning, it is a great gift for a young and/or unknown writer. What an opportunity! I love meeting my readers. They are so fascinating.

The character of Petronille can be traced to an existing writer too. Did you not worry that your book could be read as a satire on a Parisian literary scene?

Yes, Petronille was inspired by the writer Stéphanie Hochet. And this book is many things, including a satire on a Parisian literary world.

You are a very prodigious writer. You wrote more books than you published. How many books have you written now?

I am now writing my 84^th novel. I published 24 of them. I don’t know where this urge to write comes from.

The cover of Petronille, like your other books, has a wonderful image of you wearing a beautiful black hat. What inspired this playful approach to your book covers – or is this just an excuse to buy a new hat before every publication?

Both explanations are correct! Many little children, including babies, love my books, even if they don’t read, only because of the covers.

Read more about Petronille and buy it through our book partner Foyles.

Photo credit: Catherine Cabrol

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Amélie Nothomb appeared first on English PEN.

All Days Are Night describes a woman, who is a television host, recuperating after a car crash which killed her husband and left her face disfigured beyond recognition. Seeing yourself and being seen by others, the body and identity are major subjects of this novel. Why did you choose the subject of image and self-image? Do you think that women often end up existing through the image others have of them?

I think we all do. Our self-image is crucially influenced by how others react to us, perceive us and reflect us back to ourselves. We’re social animals, after all. But I’ve noticed at readings from the book that women think more about the subject, are more interested in it. Men present themselves in a more naïve way, in fact they usually even fall for their presentations of themselves. I can’t really say why I chose the subject for my book. I think all writers have their subjects that pursue them for their whole lives. I had a project on the same subject ten years ago, but a very different story. That novel never came about, sadly, but the subject refused to go away.

You describe the difficulties of relationships at the early-to-middle stage of one’s life in your other books, notably in the novel Seven Years. Why are you interested in couples during this vulnerable period? Do you think that Gillian and Matthias’s relationship would have lasted and survived to old age? 

I’d have to write a new book to know that. But I wouldn’t rate their chances too highly. In other words: I’d want them to split up with decency because the relationship clearly isn’t working. In my writing, I’m interested in crises because it’s easier to recognise people in crises. But I think there are crises at every age. My first books were more about young people looking for relationships. Now that I’ve reached middle age I’m writing books about middle-aged people. And when I get old I might write about the problems of aging and death. Or I might just stick to gardening.

Hubert, the second main character in this novel, is a painter, whose most successful series of paintings showed naked women performing the most mundane tasks of everyday life. The relationship between the artist and his subject is essential here. Would you compare it to the relationship the writer has with his/her characters?

For the book, I had my portrait done by a painter friend, to find out what it feels like to be a model. And I also once tried writing with a model, but that didn’t really work. There are some parallels between my writing and painting and I have as many friends who are painters as writer-friends. But there are also big differences. My image of my characters isn’t primarily visual. I slip inside their minds and try to feel the way they do. The painter’s position, by contrast, seems to me to be a purely external one.

Your books mostly deal with everyday life and small everyday events. Why are you interested in describing the ordinary rather than the dramatic side of life?

I’m going to go back to painting again now. No painter who takes himself seriously would ever think of painting Miss Universe. What they do is paint the people around them: their wives, their children, their landlady. Even landscape painters don’t paint the world’s most amazing landscapes but often those they find outside their front door. It’s not primarily a question of content; it’s more about how the picture is painted. If you choose extreme subjects there’s a risk that they take on too much weight. And when it comes to people, I think they’re easier to recognise in everyday life. We’re all similar in extreme situations. But we’re most ourselves in everyday life, in the little things. In the moments when nobody’s looking.

When writing ‘Sweet Dreams’, one of the stories in We Are Flying, you told your editor: ‘I’m writing a story about a woman who buys a corkscrew.’ How do you choose which moment to focus on in your stories, and which detail of everyday life is important to you and your characters?

I go through life with my eyes open and suddenly a situation leaps out at me and I know I want to make a story out of it. The corkscrew wasn’t what I was interested in for the story, of course. I saw a young couple on a bus and I was touched by how they acted together. They came across a little like an old couple, very serious, as if they were playing at being grown up. It made me think of the time when I was their age and setting up a home for the first time and buying things and thought I’d found the woman I’d be with for the rest of my life.

Three of your books are short story collections and you are known as the master of this genre. Why are you attracted to the short story form? Is this form popular in Swiss literature?

No, unfortunately the short story is no longer very popular in German-language literature. I’ve often compared them to chamber music, which I also like very much. You only have a few voices but you do hear every note. And because they’re short, you can achieve a level of perfection that’s almost impossible in novels. I’ve written a few short stories that are like pictures, in which plot plays barely any role and the atmosphere takes centre stage. And you can try things out in short stories that would become tiring very quickly in a novel. For example, I wrote a story in the second person and one with very fast changes of perspective, sometimes in the same sentence. I’ve been meaning for a long time to go more towards ‘prose poetry’ and write even shorter pieces.

Who are your literary influences?

Actually, every book a writer reads is a literary influence. Sometimes books you don’t like influence you more because you realise from them what you don’t want to do. And because bad books are easier to see through than good ones. The first writers who had a positive influence on me were Henrik Ibsen and Edgar Allan Poe, who I read at a very early age. Later came Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, also Albert Camus, Cesare Pavese and Anton Chekhov. I like Robert Walser, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Heinrich von Kleist a great deal, and in poetry Joseph von Eichendorff. And many, many more.

You have published nine books in Switzerland in German and they were all translated into English by Michael Hoffman. How do you work with him and with your other translators?

Michael asks very few questions. I think he simply understands my books and has found an English voice for them. I like him a lot and when we meet we talk about all sorts of things – just not much about the translations. Other translators ask me more questions. I think it’s a question of temperament. I’ve now started making a list for the translators to go with every book, for example the origin of the quotes or any mistakes that have been corrected since the first edition.

Are there any other young Swiss writers you would like to recommend to readers and publishers abroad?

It’s kind of you to call me a ‘young Swiss writer’ – I’m 52 now. I’m afraid I have to admit I read less than I’d like to. And it doesn’t matter to me where a writer comes from, so I don’t tend to prefer Swiss authors. Tim Krohn is a good friend of mine but I don’t think he’s been translated into English. Markus Werner is a wonderful writer but not quite young any more; he turned 70 last year. He’s translated by Michael Hoffman too. And Klaus Merz, whose 70th birthday is this year, is another great writer.

Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Clemens Meyer, Helene Hegemann and Simon Urban.

About the editor

Tasja Dorkofikis is editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Peter Stamm appeared first on English PEN.

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death combines your experience of Auschwitz as a boy between September 1943 and January 1945, your ‘private mythology’, with deep historical analysis and understanding, which you have acquired as a historian later in life. At what point did you decide to combine these two individual perspectives?

It always was with me. However, in my scholarly work I have strictly separated these two dimensions while completely avoiding the mentioning of my autobiographical experience as a boy in Auschwitz. There was no place for exploring my own past in my historical research, which was always based on documentary, mostly archival material, and its analysis and evaluation. But this was not the case the other way around. Auschwitz was ever present, but only in my diaries and dreams and, from a certain point on, also in tape-recorded monologues, where I dived into the ‘Landscapes’ that I have called the Metropolis of Death. In these ‘Landscapes’ my reflective thoughts as a historian were already present.

You recorded your memories of Auschwitz and you kept them private for a long time. Why did it take you so long to make your recordings public?

I started the recordings in 1991 and continued until 2001. All these recordings and my diaries existed for my self-understanding only and, as mentioned above, I regarded it as illegitimate to mix them with my scholarly, strictly impersonal research (for example: an article on the Familienlager found in the appendix of my book – written in the ’70s) but when I was diagnosed with advanced cancer fifteen years ago, after an operation and chemotherapy, the surgeon told me that I had only two to three years to live. This was in 1997.

I decided to have the recordings and diaries typed up, and did another recording, to round off the series. I consulted a publisher friend and told him that I wanted the texts to be part of my literary estate. He said there was a chance that they might be considered for publication and that I had to make up my mind about this. I gave the transcript to a few colleagues and friends to read, and had a selection translated into English. But for a long time I doubted whether these texts could reach anyone other than me. I sent the English text to a few colleagues abroad, and first and foremost to Ian Kershaw, with whom I have worked together in research and exchanged ideas for years. Ian and others analysed and commented on it in great depth. But the first to hear some of the recordings was my friend, the historian Saul Friedländer, who a few years earlier published his book When Memory Comes. Saul told me unequivocally that I must publish. All of them tried to persuade me to make this manuscript accessible to the public. But it took me another decade to decide. Only after publishing three major documentary and research projects between 1997 and 2010, on which I was working many years before, was I ready to embark on the new road of publishing my ‘non-scholarly’ work.

You survived Auschwitz in Familienlager, or ‘Family Camp’ allowing families to be housed together, their heads unshaved and wearing civilian clothes. You describe it yourself in the book as a ‘miracle, whose meaning no one understood’. The history of the family camp is relatively unknown to the general public. Can you tell our readers more about the role of the Red Cross in this part of the Holocaust’s history?

I have written a scholarly article on the history of the so-called Family Camp based on the documentary material that I discovered in one of the German archives. You will not find a trace of my personal experiences in this article, written in 1980. It appears as the appendix in the book Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. I refer to it in my book and not the other way around. But beyond the documentation mentioned in my article, I did not research further on the role of the Red Cross during the Nazi-period. I only wish to clarify here that the documents include an exchange of letters and negotiations between Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Main Security Office of the SS and the German Red Cross, and between the German Red Cross and the International Red Cross in Genève. The negotiations discussed the question of a possible visit to the Ghetto of Theresienstadt and a Jewish camp in the East, which could have been identified as the Family Camp in Auschwitz, by the International Red Cross.

You talk about the cultural life in the camp, about concerts, performances and classes. You say that these experiences ‘form the moral basis of your approach to culture, to life, almost to everything. Historical, functional, and normative values and patterns of life were transformed into something in the order of absolute values’. How do you think this was possible?

What I mean here is that the education that went on, even in the world of the children’s block of the Family Camp, was unprecedented. Since education is, in its essence, always oriented to the future and the future was the only thing that certainly did not exist for those children and their educators in Auschwitz, it was not performed for any other purpose than for its own existence. That makes the values underlying this education ‘into something in the order of absolute values’.

The book describes some ‘fond memories’ like classes in history and literature, a friendship with a young man who gave you his copy of Crime and Punishment, or an image of blue skies above the camp, signifying for you: ‘the colour of summer, the colour of tranquility, the colour of forgetting.’ How do you think these positive memories managed to stay with you, and were even possible?

The only possible answer I have is my existence, and the fact that those memories are living with me and shaped my entire life.

Your book tries to look at how your memory preserved and processed the trauma of Auschwitz.  This is, of course, a very personal and unique process. You experienced Auschwitz as a 10-11 year old boy who was confronted on a daily basis with images of death and atrocities. How do you think this differs from experiencing Auschwitz as an adult? From remembering it?

We, the children in the children-and-youth barrack, were not directly exposed to the atrocities that were part of the daily life of the adult inmates. But we were of course aware of the presence of the Great Death and of, what I call in my diaries and in the book, the ‘Unalterable Law of the Great Death’, meaning that there was no way out of Auschwitz and we were all doomed to die there. Through these metaphors and other abstractions I have been able to internalise and express the world of these atrocities.

You describe an episode when a children’s choir learnt to sing ‘Ode to Joy’ in a lavatory barrack where the acoustics were good. You wonder in the book whether the choice of music and that particular text was an act of defiance, expressing belief in absolute values despite the reality of the camp, or a case of ‘extreme sarcasm.’ Which interpretation do you lean towards?

In my professional life as a teacher at the university I am trying to understand and convey my understanding of absolute values, of the humanistic interpretation of history, including this period. But the other case you mention is always present within me with all its ambivalence. My own attempt to understand this history and my approach to it is shaped by this polarity.

The ‘Immutable Law of Death’, the ultimate certainty that one was going to die, was how you saw what was happening in Auschwitz. Yet you survived through chance. ‘However much I know that I must be caught. I always know, too, that I must be spared. It’s a kind of circle’. You talk about this a lot in your book and about other images of escape and return. Are you finally free from them now?

No.

What do you think is the role of ideology when exploring the history of the final solution? And how is scholarship and understanding of that period at all possible when one is faced with events of such utter horror?

There is a very nice sentence that often appears in the rhetoric of commemoration: ‘What happened in this period was perpetrated by humans to other humans.’ In my eyes this is not much more than a truism. What happened then was perpetrated by humans who have devoted themselves to a radical racialist ideology or were ruled by it. They believed in it or believed in its necessity to ‘save’ the nation or even the world from what they regarded as disastrous, universalist ‘Jewish spirit’ and its bearers were the Jews. This ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ was the very core of national socialist ideology and the imperative behind the attempt at the ‘Final Solution’. Once this ideology and its charismatic leadership were defeated, or in other words, when Germany was liberated from them, most of the former perpetrators returned to being normal liberal citizens of post-war European society.

After your visit in Auschwitz in 1978 you never went there again. Why?

The impressions of my return to the deserted landscapes of the ruins of Auschwitz in 1978 were so powerful and are imprinted in my memory and imagination so deeply, that I am not willing to reshape or overwrite them. These were my own childhood landscapes, in which I always find a kind of freedom, which exists only for me. I am always afraid that I will be alienated from these impressions through receiving different images.

You moved to Israel when you were still very young and your father stayed in Czechoslovakia. What does Israel mean to you?

I moved to Israel in the year 1949 at the age of 16 in the awareness that I am participating in the great historical event of the return of an exiled and dispersed nation to its ancient homeland. This also meant for me and my generation an attempt to create a new society based on humanistic values and the active participation in the revival of an ancient language and the creation of a modern culture built on a historical heritage. My father first stayed in Prague, with his new family. But in 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which crushed the dream of the Prague Spring, he joined me.

About the editor

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death recently won the the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2014. The book was translated by Ralph Mendel.

The memoir explores Otto Dov Kulka’s haunting memories of a childhood spent in Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, it is now translated into 17 languages.

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is available from Penguin.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Otto Dov Kulka appeared first on English PEN.

Yes, I know Wales very well. Only once was I in the south of Wales, where I did – all alone – the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Which is far too long: I walked for two weeks with the Atlantic on my left hand side. That was quite boring after a while. North Wales I like best, it is often almost like a Mediterranean country. I’ve been going there for years and years, and I have this strange habit of wanting to climb Mount Snowdon at least once a year. The country is old, feels old, almost ancient. Timeless in a way, and that is – I realise now – exactly the reason why I had to set the story of The Detour right there.

Emily Dickinson is one of the ghosts haunting the novel. Is she a poet you have read a lot? Could you tell us a bit more about why you chose her?

Ever since I formed a ‘poets’ society’ with two friends – this was somewhere in the early Nineties – I have loved this one particular poem, the motto-poem of the novel. We translated English poems, and this one was most elusive. We just did not understand it, we could make no satisfactory translation. After a while we also started to write our own poems. Later I read more Dickinson, and especially when I re-read her for this novel, I found that quite a few poems are, well, not so good. But I think that maybe I wrote the entire novel to be able – through the main character – finally to make a translation that comes close to what it should be, or wants to be. I’ve always found it very hard to accept a story in commission: I did not dare to accept it, for I thought: suppose I get no ideas? Suppose I cannot finish it in time? But since a year or so I’ve dared to accept such commissions, because I’ve found out that I am able to write a short story on the basis of a poem that I once wrote. And, in this case, possibly a complete novel…

Emilie is full of grief. Your previous novel, The Twin, explored a similar subject. Do you feel that we can get close to the essence of suffering by describing it?

Yes. Describing, that’s the right word. Not explain, not psychologize. Show through action, not so much through thoughts or little philosophies. Readers can – if they want to, of course – have thoughts or little philosophies. I love atmosphere in a novel, and I think that to create an atmosphere, you do this best by describing things, and then preferably as sober and restrained as possible. It’s a wonder that most of my novels exceed 200 pages…

Apart from Emily Dickinson, there are other ghosts in the novel: the uncle, who nearly committed suicide; Mrs Evans, who used to live in the Welsh house; the gradually disappearing geese. Emilie looks at herself through the past, for example by thinking that she can smell Mrs Evan’s smell on herself.  Why did you decide to make these past figures so prominent in the novel?

They just came. With Mrs Evans for instance, I did not think in advance: let’s have her invade the body of Emilie, as a symbol or foreshadowing of what would happen to her. She just came, and as she was there, her presence got stronger and stronger. And this uncle, well, that was actually the chapter that originally started the book, until my publisher suggested that that chapter be moved to chapter 4. This is something by the way that more or less really happened to one of my uncles. And I don’t do this a lot: use real people or real life in my novels.

The novel is partly about loneliness, and our inability to really connect with the others.  Yet Emilie meets a boy, who stays in the house with her, and there is a sense of closeness. Is language essential to being close?

No, not at all, I think. Remember the song ‘Enjoy the silence’ by Depeche Mode: “All I ever wanted/ All I ever needed /Is here in my arms/ Words are very unnecessary /They can only do harm

Vows are spoken/ To be broken/ Feelings are intense/ Words are trivial/ Pleasures remain/ So does the pain/ Words are meaningless/ And forgettable.”

I quite like this song, especially the acoustic harmonium version of it. Maybe I am not normal, but for me non-verbal language is much more important than spoken language. But: people want to talk to each other or have to talk to each other. And that’s also what Bradwen and Emilie do, but I think that both of them would rather do everything in silence, Emilie more than Bradwen, but still.

Your novel is translated from the Dutch. How closely do you work with your translator, David Colmer?

For this novel very close, because I woke up one night, almost two years ago now, almost in a panic. I thought: one cannot translate this novel, there is far too much language-stuff in it, and it is about the translation of an English poem into Dutch! So I contacted David and he stayed very calm and said: “That’s my problem, relax.” He is wonderful. But for the first time I read a translation of one of my novels before it was sent to Harvill Secker. And we worked on it, I had some comments, and then David had counter-arguments, and so on. It was nice to do it like this.

The Twin brought you much international recognition. Was it difficult to write a new novel after winning the IMPAC? Or was it in some way liberating to know that you have that official stamp of approval?

The Detour was already finished when The Twin was awarded with the IMPAC. It came out in October of 2010 here in Holland. So: no. But: since The Detour (or Ten White Geese in the USA) I haven’t written anything, apart from my weblog and the occasional story or column. I simply did not feel like it. What I did do in the end with the prize money was to buy a house with land in The Eifel, Germany. Since the first of December last year I own it, and I go there a lot. One part of the house will be renovated later this spring, and there I will have a – I hope – wonderful, big writing room with only a wood burning stove in it, accessible via a staircase, outside the house. I’ve been having some problems with depression and stuff, and now I feel just fine, writing is not a part of my daily life, but I do feel like I have to have the feeling of wanting to write, if you know what I mean. Usually I’m very happy when I write. I work like a horse then: I don’t think or analyse much, I just move forward until the book is finished.

What are your literary influences if any?  Who do you enjoy reading now?

Carson McCullers is, come to think of it, one of my influences. I love the way she writes, very subdued, very brooding, very ‘Southern’. And she uses beautiful language. Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett is a book that has in a way ‘unleashed’ me; that was a book (also Southern USA) that made me realise that one is permitted to write everything one wants to write. And here in Holland, J.J. Voskuil, who wrote, among other things, Het Bureau (The Office): a novel consisting of seven volumes, in total 5000 pages, about, well, nothing much. But at the same time about everything. And that is what I love about it.

PEN Atlas promotes international literature in the UK, a lot of it in translation. Who else from your country would you recommend to British readers and British publishers?

J.J. Voskuil. The first part of this 7-volume novel has come out in Germany last year, and I believe they want to move on…

Interview conducted by Tasja Dorkofikis, Editor, PEN Atlas

Additional Information

Gerbrand Bakker is a Dutch writer. In 2010, he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the English translation of his novel, The Twin (Boven is het stil).

The post PEN Atlas Q&A – Gerbrand Bakker, author of The Detour appeared first on English PEN.

The cold weather is usually pretty conducive to reading and exploring the world through stories and I very much hope that some of you have been inspired by recent dispatches to seek out the books we’ve covered.  Since the beginning of 2013 we have visited many places; from China and India to the Netherlands and Poland, and we will continue broadening our literary horizons. We looked at many genres too; from poetry to graphic novels and memoirs.

First to our selected PEN writers – each year English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee select around 12 newly translated and published novels through their PEN Promotes programme. This January we had Nihad Sirees, the Syrian author of The Silence and the Roar, writing about Aleppo, his childhood town and literary inspiration. Gregor Benton looked at revolution, resistance and the Beijing University literature class that nurtured three of China’s best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in the light of his forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years. Alejandro Zambra, the author of Ways of Going Home, talked to the PEN Atlas about his new novel, the responsibility of memory, and contemporary Chileans grappling with their country’s violent past.

Our other dispatches looked at similar themes of history and its effects on the present. Jeet Thayil reported from the Jaipur Literary Festival about the unusual experience of attending the festival under police guard, because the previous year he had read from The Satanic Verses. During his stay in Jaipur he was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his novel Narcopolis, which is also short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize (to be announced on the 14th of March).

Basia Howard, the translator of Mother Departs  by Tadeus Różewicz, published in March in the UK, wrote about Tadeusz Różewicz who is seen alongside Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłoszas one of the greats of Polish poetry. According to Seamus Heaney he is one of the great European poets of the twentieth century and Tom Paulin remarks that ‘Tadeusz Różewicz (…) sends messages from underground that are like jammed radio signals. Though he would not agree, he has succeeded in writing poetry after Auschwitz.’

Michele Hutchinson, one of our regular contributors, looked at international graphic novels and their new popularity, and travelled with Dutch writers all over the UK during their High Impact tour. High Impact is a brilliant new initiative, bringing new foreign writers to British readers.  The Greeks will be following the Dutch touring the UK later this year.

The PEN Atlas also compiled a selected list of books coming out in the UK in translation during 2013. It is an incredibly rich and stimulating list which includes crime, graphic novels, romance, memoir, poetry and many others….Despite the fact that the numbers of translated books published in the UK are still rather low, there are marvellous books there and we have a lot to celebrate.

The growing profile of books in translation is partly due to various translation initiatives, many worth exploring; from a wonderful selection of events at London Review of Books Bookshop, to translation summer schools in Norwich and London, a translation mentorship scheme, and a host of international writers attending UK literary festivals. And if you happen to be in New York, there is always the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just announced its line-up.

The PEN Atlas will travel extensively through Turkey during the next few months, and will bring you some new voices from Africa.  I hope that you will continue reading the PEN Atlas and the books we cover.  Read it, like it, and then share it!

Tasja Dorkofikis,

Editor, PEN Atlas

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

The post PEN Atlas – Editor’s Round Up February 2013 appeared first on English PEN.

Formas de Volver a Casa [Ways of Going Home] presenta la generación de sus padres o como víctimas o como cómplices del régimen de Pinochet; era difícil mantenerse neutral. ¿Es esencial para proseguir y dejar aquellos tiempos oscuros el intento de establecer exactamente lo qué ocurrió?

Es esencial, es necesario e inevitable. La sociedad chilena así lo ha entendido. Quienes éramos niños entonces podríamos refugiarnos en la idea de que no estábamos ahí, de que no sabíamos nada, y en parte era así, pero había ciertas cosas, ciertos movimientos, ciertas ideas que entendíamos, que intuíamos. Me parecía importante intentar recuperar ese mundo que vivimos a medias. No sabíamos si nuestros padres eran así porque así eran los adultos o porque tenían miedo.

Su generación vive con el espectro del pasado. Sin embargo, como escribe en la novela, ellos eran solamente personajes secundarios “La novela es la novela de los padres, pensé entonces, pienso ahora. Crecimos creyendo eso, que la novela era de los padres. Maldiciéndolos, y también refugiándonos, aliviados, en esa penumbra. Mientras los adultos mataban o eran muertos, nosotros hacíamos dibujos en un rincón.” Eso tiene que ser una carga pesada en la vida. ¿Así lo ve?

Lo veo como una carga de la que es imposible deshacerse. Hay que aprender a vivir con eso. Porque además no se trata solamente de historias personales. Se trata de un nosotros que empieza a construirse tardíamente, con una especie de timidez colectiva, pero también con fuerza y constancia. Nuestra adolescencia coincidió con el supuesto regreso de la democracia, pero un error grande de esos años, a comienzos de los 90, era justamente creer que eso era una democracia, cuando en el fondo todavía gobernaba Pinochet. No sabíamos cómo era una democracia, habíamos nacido en dictadura y por eso aceptábamos, como si fuera un gran premio, esa libertad vigilada, ese remedo de libertad. La democracia empezó verdaderamente a regresar cuando tomaron preso a Pinochet en Londres, en 1998.

“Llegamos al Estadio Nacional. El mayor centro de detención en 1973 siempre fue, para mí, nada más que una cancha de fútbol.” Sus personajes recuerdan el pasado en una forma distinta. ¿Cree que el intento de establecer la verdadera versión del pasado tiene alguna posibilidad de éxito?

No creo que sea un proceso terminado ni que pueda terminar. Supongo que, de distintas maneras, la sociedad chilena entera ha estado buscando esas verdades, y compartiéndolas. Yo pienso que muchos recuerdos felices se volvieron amargos después, por la mediación de otros recuerdos. El niño que iba al Estadio Nacional y tomaba helados y veía partidos de fútbol luego se entera de las cosas que ahí sucedieron y entonces su recuerdo feliz se ensombrece. La felicidad individual se vuelve absurda, vacía, ante la injusticia y la violencia de la dictadura. Pienso que entender el pasado, para quienes no fueron víctimas, de algún modo consiste en estar cada vez más cerca de las víctimas.

“En lugar de gritar, escribo libros.” Empieza la novela con aquella citación de Romain Gary. ¿Ve así el papel del escritor en el Chile actual?

No necesariamente. O sea, sirve para mí, pero no lo proyectaría al rol del escritor en Chile. Me identifico con esa frase, sobre todo porque estuve mucho tiempo pensando en la infancia, en la dictadura, y a veces lo que pensaba y lo que sentía no tenía forma, me parecía incomunicable, era como un grito, como una queja incontenible, una amargura absoluta. Hasta que fue apareciendo una manera de hablar sobre ese tiempo. Creo que escribir un libro es estar dispuesto a mirar hondamente, largamente, en un vidrio que a veces es ventana y otras veces espejo. Cuando encontré esa frase maravillosa de Romain Gary sentí que la suscribía plenamente. Es una especie de lema para mí.

¿Cree que los chilenos de hoy necesitan confrontar el pasado y admitir su papel en el pasado? ¿Cómo se puede hacer esto?

Claro que sí. Interrogando lo que sucede hoy, simplemente. El pasado no ha pasado: buena parte de los problemas actuales de Chile tienen su origen en la dictadura y todavía nos rige la constitución de 1980, que redactaron los militares. Nunca dejas de mirar al pasado, porque el presente necesita de esa mirada para entender lo que está sucediendo.

En una entrevista aquí con PEN Atlas, Juan Gabriel Vásquez dijo que recordar es un acto moral. ¿Está Ud. de acuerdo con él?

Claro que sí. Recordar con precisión, con la mayor precisión posible. Recordar e indagar. Saber no solamente quiénes los nombres de las personas que salen en la foto, sino el de la persona que tomó la foto, y cuándo y por qué. Intentar saberlo es necesario.

El narrador siente vergüenza del hecho de que no perdió a nadie durante la dictadura y de que su familia o apoyaba el régimen o se mantenían indiferente. ¿Diría que la sociedad actual se divide por esas líneas?

Es un sentimiento ambiguo: lo que el narrador desea es entender el dolor, y sabe que nunca lo entenderá suficientemente porque no lo sufrió. Y Claudia también es consciente de que, aunque ha sido víctima, otros sufrieron más que ella. Yo pienso que la sociedad chilena actual está dividida más bien entre quienes quieren dar vuelta la página y olvidarlo todo y quienes desean recordar y siguen buscando imágenes para expresar el pasado y de ese modo el presente.

Su narrador también escribe poesía. ¿Cree que la poesía puede aproximarse más a la reflexión de imágenes del pasado que la prosa?

Realmente no lo sé. Cuando pienso en ese tiempo pienso sobre todo en imágenes desnudas, o sin elaboración literaria. En fotografías, en documentales. Además de los documentales de Patricio Guzmán, me gustaría mencionar otros documentales que me parecen importantísimos como “La ciudad de los fotógrafos”, de Sebastián Moreno, “Actores secundarios”, de Jorge Leiva y Pachi Bustos, “El edificio de los chilenos”, de Macarena Aguiló, entre otros.

De cierta manera el narrador maneja el material con mucho cuidado – casi con precaución. ¿Eso se basa en su opinión de que la recolección del pasado es un proceso frágil?

Sí. A mí me gusta la imagen del convaleciente, como decía Baudelaire, el que está volviendo de una enfermedad, en cierto modo volviendo de la muerte. Chile entero convalece, despierta, recupera los sentidos. Y el narrador trata de reflejar eso.

La última parte del libro se titula “Estamos bien.” En conclusión, ¿describiría así su generación?

No. Quizás algunos piensan eso, la minoría. Los demás hemos vivido en una crisis permanente que quizás ahora nos fortalece. Ahora que ya no somos hijos o no solamente hijos, sino sobre todo padres. Lo que nos fortalece es justamente la conciencia de esa crisis, de esa precariedad.

The post PEN Atlas – Entrevista con Alejandro Zambra sobre Formas de Volver a Casa appeared first on English PEN.

Ways of Going Home presents your parents’ generation as either victims or accomplices of the Pinochet regime. It was hard to remain neutral. Is trying to establish what happened during those dark years essential to moving on?

It is essential, necessary and also inevitable, and Chilean society has understood it as such. Those of us who were children during those years were able to take shelter in the idea that we were not really there, that we knew nothing; and in one sense it actually was like that. But there were certain things, certain movements, certain ideas that we did understand and that we were able to intuit. I feel that it is extremely important to recover that world which we half inhabited. We could never have known whether our parents were the way they were because that is how adults are, or whether they were actually scared.

Your generation lives with the spectre of the past, yet, as you say in the novel, they were only secondary characters. ‘We grew up believing that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner.’  That must be a heavy burden to live with. Is that how you see it?

I see it like a responsibility or a burden that one can never relinquish, and I suppose one has to learn to live with it. You see, it is not only about personal stories; it is about a first-person plural ‘we’, a community of voices who only begin to define themselves late in life, with a sense of collective shyness, but also with determination and drive. Our adolescence coincided with the so-called return to democracy, and yet the grave error of those years – the early 1990s – was, precisely, believing that it was a democracy, when all the while Pinochet was still very much in power. We had no idea what a democracy looked like; we had been born in a dictatorship and for that reason we accepted the limited freedom – that pastiche of freedom – as if it were some wonderful prize. Democracy only really began to return when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998.

‘We reach the National Stadium. The largest detention centre in 1973 was always, for me, no more than a soccer field.’ Your characters remember the past in a different way. Is trying to establish the real version of the past possible at all?

Well I don’t believe that the process has ended, nor that it can end. I suppose that, in many different ways, the whole of Chilean society has been looking for those truths, those realities, and sharing them. I think that many happy memories later become bitter through the mediation of other memories. The child who used to go to the National Stadium and eat ice cream and watch football matches later learns of the horrible things that happened there and only then do his happy memories darken. Individual happiness becomes absurd, empty, irrelevant, against the injustice, violence and brutality of the dictatorship. I would say that understanding the past – I mean for those who were not victims – in some sense is about getting ever closer to the real victims.

‘Instead of howling, I write books.’ You started your novel with that quote from Romain Gary. Is that how you see the role of a writer in Chile today?

Not necessarily. I mean, it works for me, but I would not project it upon the role of writer in Chile. I can identify myself with that sentence of Gary most of all because as a child and during the dictatorship I would spend much time thinking, and very often what I was thinking and what I was feeling had no form, it seemed to me incommunicable, like a cry of despair, a howl, an unfathomable protestation of absolute bitterness. Eventually I found a way to communicate my thoughts and feelings of that time. I feel that writing a book is opening oneself up to deep inner scrutiny, to a long contemplation in a glass that is sometime a window and other times a mirror. When I came across that wonderful line of Romain Gary, I understood that I subscribed to it fully. It is a type of motto for me.

Do you believe that Chileans today need to face the past, admit to their role in the past? In what way can that be done?

Well yes, I think so. By questioning what is happening today, simply enough. The past has not passed: a significant proportion of today’s problems in Chile have their origins in the dictatorship, and we are still bound by the constitution of 1980, which was written by the military. Don’t ever stop looking at the past, because we need that contemplation of the past in order to understand what is happening in the present.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez in an interview here for the PEN Atlas said that he sees remembering as a moral act? Would you agree with him?

Absolutely. To remember with accuracy, with the sharpest precision possible. To remember is to explore. To remember is to know not only the names of the people who appear in the photograph, but the name of the person who took the photo, when they took it, and why. To try to know all that is necessary.

Your narrator is embarrassed about the fact that he lost nobody during the dictatorship, his family were indifferent or supportive of the regime. Is society nowadays divided along those lines?

Well it is an ambiguous sentiment: what the narrator wants is to understand the pain, and he comes to realise that he will never understand it properly because he never suffered it. Claudia is also aware that although she was a victim, many others suffered far more than her. I think that it is better to say that Chilean society today is divided between those who want to turn the page and forget the whole sorry business and those who want to remember, and who are seeking images to express the past, which in turn expresses the present.

Your narrator writes poetry as well. Do you believe that poetry might be closer than prose to reflecting the essence of images from the past?

To be honest I have no idea. When I think about those years I think above all in bare images, with no literary embellishments. I imagine photographs, documentary films. In addition to the documentary films of Patricio Guzmán, I would like to mention other documentaries that seem to me of crucial importance: “La ciudad de los fotógrafos” [“The city of photographers”] by Sebastián Moreno; “Actores secundarios” [“Secondary players”], by Jorge Leiva and Pachi “Bustos, “El edificio de los chilenos” [“The Chilean Building”], by Macarena Aguiló, among others.

There is a sense that your narrator handles his material very carefully, almost tentatively. Is that because you believe that recollection of the past is a fragile process?

Yes. I like the image of the convalescent, as Baudelaire said, he who is returning from an illness, returning, in some sense, from death. The whole of Chile is convalescing; it is awakening, recovering its senses. And the narrator tries to reflect that.

The final part of your book is entitled We Are All Right. Is that ultimately what describes your generation?

No. Perhaps some people think that, but they are a minority. The rest of us have been living a permanent state of crisis that perhaps only now is making us strong. Now that we are no longer children, now that we are not only not children but are parents ourselves, what makes us strong is precisely the consciousness of that crisis, that precariousness.

Additional Information

Alejandro Zambra is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. He currently teaches at the School of Literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. His first novel, Bonsái, was awarded the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006 and attracted much attention in Chile. Zambra featured in Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 and was selected as one of Granta’s best young Spanish-language novelists in 2010. The book is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

You can read more about Alejandro’s new book on Granta’s website.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A – Alejandro Zambra, author of Ways of Going Home appeared first on English PEN.

You wrote this book and many others when you lived away from Colombia. Do you live there now? Do you need that distance to write about your country and why?

Yes, I do feel that I need the distance, or needed it in order to start dealing with my country in fiction. It took me six years of living abroad to understand how to write about Colombia, and I’ve said elsewhere that the problem was solved through distance, both geographical and chronological. It’s hard to say why, but I do know that in 1996, when I left Colombia, my city had just been through a long decade of harrowing violence, and one of the consequences of those years was, for me, a sort of alienation. My imagination (my literary imagination) rejected my country, or rather was rejected by it. That changed over the years of living abroad.

Antonio sounds like a voice of his generation. Do you feel that your generation is lost in some ways because of the Colombian drug wars and the violence that ruled Colombia and Bogota for so many years?

No, I don’t think my generation is lost, but my last novel is in part an exploration of that question: how did those years of extreme violence shape us? How were our lives affected by the fact of being born at the same time as the drug trade? My generation was born in the early 70s, as the first planes with marijuana left Colombia for the United States. We grew up at the same time as the cartels. Does that have an effect on you? These questions became important for me.

Bogota seems to me one of the main characters in your novel. Do you feel as strongly about that city as Antonio?

I feel strongly about the city that lives in my memory. It’s not the whole city, but a sort of enclave in which I moved during my university years: the city centre, where some of the most important events in the history of my country took place, was also the area where I spent most of my time as an adult, before leaving Colombia in 1996. The city of the book is the city I remember. It might not be the city that exists right now. But that doesn’t really matter.

What is, for you, the role of novels when dealing with the past?

Well, novels do tend to be places where we remember things that would otherwise be forgotten. Literature tends to do this: to resist the world’s tendency to move on, to forget. Whether it’s our individual past or that collective past we call history, the novel preserves things. Furthermore, we all know how the passing of time makes us see historical events in a general, collective light. When novels deal with the past, those events recover their particular, individual quality: they become, once again, things that happened to individuals.

Do you believe that the role of the writer is to ‘bear witness’ and to explore traumatic events? Do you see this attempt to get to the dark places of one’s memory as healing or destructive?

I don’t believe writers have a role. Writing fiction is a very strange thing to dedicate your life to, and the motivations are diverse and not always conscious. I can speak about me and only me, and say that my motivation is simple: to understand. WG Sebald, a writer who is important for me, says somewhere that “memory is the moral backbone of literature”. And I agree: remembering is a moral act.

Antonio jeopardises his family life to find out the truth about Ricardo. He does not ultimately find out why Ricardo was killed. Why did you decide to leave the ending open?

Because the other option would have changed the genre of the book: in the Colombia of the 90s, finding out the reasons for a murder would have been almost like science fiction.

Ricardo Laverde is introduced to the drug trade by a volunteer from American Peace Corps. Is that role of Peace Corps in starting the drug trade a fact or pure speculation?

It was one of those unspoken truths that exist in every society. I grew up “knowing” (please notice the inverted commas) about those episodes, but I wasn’t able to find the proof while writing the novel. Of course, novels are not just about things as they happened, I thought, but also about things as they might have happened. So I decided my novel could be the place where that piece of unspoken truth could be spoken. After publication of the book, all the witnesses I needed, all the people who saw it happen just as I tell it, came up to me to confirm that things did happened as they are told in the novel. Which gave me a strange satisfaction, even if I insist on the novelist’s privilege of imagining probable realities as much as factual ones.

What is happening in Colombian literature at the moment? Which Colombian writers would you like to see introduced to the British audience?

There’s an extraordinary writer, a contemporary and a friend of García Márquez, who died in the 70s. His name is Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and he wrote two short books, a novel and a short story collection, which deserve to be known all over the world. I should also mention R.H. Moreno-Durán, author of two or three of the best Colombian novels of the last decades. He died in 2004.

About the author

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. He was nominated as one of the Bogotá 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation. His previous books include The Informers, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Secret History of Costaguana, which won the Qwerty prize in Barcelona. His books have been published in fifteen languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.

About the editor

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

Additional Information

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America, he is known as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically, intellectually and politically active climate for which mid-century Colombia has become known.  His books in English are currently out of print.

Rafael Humberto Moreno-Duran  (1945 – 2005 ) was a novelist , short story writer,  essayist and playwright. He is considered one of the most important 20th century Colombian writers.   Books in English are not available.

The Sound of Things Falling is translated by Anne McLean. Annehas translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás Eloy Martínez. She has twice won the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction: for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 (which also won her the Valle Inclán Award), and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009. She lives in Toronto.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A – Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling appeared first on English PEN.

Spotkania z Arturem Domoslawskim zorganizowane są w Wielkiej Brytanii miedzy 19-26 września.

Dlaczego zdecydował się Pan napisać biografię Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego? 

Bo miał fascynujące życie – przeżył kilka epok historyczych w różnych częściach świata, był świadkiem tylu przełomowych wydarzeń w Europie, Afryce, Azji i Ameryce Łacińskiej, że można by obdarować jego doświadczeniem kilku reporterów i pisarzy. Bo był najważniejszym dziennikarzem swojego czasu w Polsce, a na świecie jednym z najważniejszych. Bo był mi bliski – zarówno osobiście, jak i intelektualnie, światopoglądowo. Wreszcie – ponieważ mimo ogromnej sławy niewiele o nim wiedzieliśmy, a to, co miał do powiedzenia o świecie – mimo podziwu dla jego talentu pisarskiego – nie było w Polsce zrozumiane i przemyślane.

Czy fakt, że był Pan zaprzyjaźniony z Kapuścińskim, utrudnial pisanie jego biografii? 

Czasem to pomagało, a czasem utrudniało. Pomagało, ponieważ rozmawiałem z nim intensywnie przez ostatnich 9 lat jego życia i „nasiąkłem“ jego sposobem myślenia. Utrudniało wtedy, gdy natrafiałem na zdarzenia, które – jak sądziłem – część czytelników może odebrać jako negatywne, choć niekoniecznie ja sam tak je odbierałem. Wtedy pojawiało się wyzwanie: jak opisać takie zdarzenia wiernie, a zarazem z empatią i zrozumieniem. Każdy autor biografii, który znał swojego bohatera i był z nim w przyjaźni, musi zmagać się z takimi trudnościami, nie jestem wyjątkiem.

Czy, wedlug Pana, Kapuściński byl wybitnym pisarzem, jak również wybitnym reporterem? 

Tak, był jednym i drugim. Niektóre jego książki to książki stricte dziennikarskie – i również w nich bywał wybitnym pisarzem. Jeden z najwspanialszych reporterskich i zarazem literackich opisów to np. odpływające z Luandy drewniane miasto, spakowany w skrzyniach cały dobytek Portugalczyków opuszczających wybijającą się na niepodległość Angolę. To jeden z momentów, w których reportaż staje się wielką literaturą.

Ale w dorobku Kapuścinskiego są również książki, które traktowano jako reportaż, a były one – choć miały elementy reportażowe – literaturą sensu stricto. Sądzę, że to przypadek „Cesarza“, ktory jest wspaniałym traktatem o władzy osnutym na motywach dworu Hajle Sellasje, ale jednak przede wszystkim literaturą. W latach  siedemdziesiątych Polacy czytali tę ksiażkę jako metaforę dworu Edwarda Gierka. Jeden z przyjaciół Kapuścińskiego powiedział kiedyś, że „Cesarz“ to najwybitniejsza powieść polska w XX wieku. Myślę, że Kapuściński nie miałby nic przeciwko takiej klasyfikacji.

Czy Pana zdaniem fakt, że Kapuściński byl pisarzem zza żelaznej kurtyny, sprawił, że jego wyobraźnia jako reportera byla bardziej wyostrzona?

Myślę, że miejsce urodzenia i ta czćść losu, ktorego czlowiek sam nie wybiera, może obdarować dodatkowym wyostrzeniem widzenia. Ale nie sadzę, żeby akurat życie za żelazną kurtyną wyposażało kogokolwiek w jakąś specyficzną mądrość niedostępną dla innych. Kapuścińskiemu dało po prostu wiele doświadczeń, które potrafił przetworzyć w literaturę.

Co w sztuce pisarskiej Kapuścińskiego powoduje jego niezwykłą popularność?

Jest pewnie kilka takich rzeczy. Jedną z nich jest odwoływanie się do emocji i wyobraźni dostępnych czytelnikom w różnym wieku, o różnym wykształceniu, o różnym doświadczeniu. Po drugie – uwodzicielski styl i melodia zdań. Po trzecie – opowiadanie o skomplikowanych zjawiskach świata: władzy, rewolucjach, wykluczeniu w sposób dostępny szerokiej publiczności, za pomocą obrazów, historii, a nie abstrakcyjnych, analitycznych pojęć.

Dlaczego, według Pana, postać Kapuścińskiego w Polsce była poza krytyką?

Myślę, że w Polsce lubimy mieć nieskazitelnych bohaterow, świętych, stawiać im pomniki, a potem się do nich modlić. Tak też było z Kapuścińskim. Był wielbiony powierzchownie, choć z pewnościa autentycznie –  jako rodak, któremu się udało zagranicą. Niestety, jego refleksje o świecie są słabo w Polsce przemyślane, a to, co miał ważnego do powiedzenia, jest ignorowane. Bo przecież ze „świętym“ się nie dyskutuje, „świętego“ się  nie krytykuje. To ma konsekwencje – paradoksalnie Kapuściński wcale nie jest w Polsce dogłębnie znany, rozumiany, przemyślany.

O czym, wedlug Pana, pisałby Kapuściński dzisiaj? Ktore tematy bylyby dla niego szczegolnie istotne? 

Myślę, że zafascynowalaby go arabska wiosna. Kapuściński opisywał masowe ruchy na rzecz wyzwolenia – politycznego, społecznego. Bunt przeciwko dyktaturom w świecie arabskim byłby niewątpliwie jego tematem. Inna sprawa, czy w zaawansowanym wieku miałby siłę podrożować. Możliwe, że nie. Miał jednak kilka pomysłów na inne książki, których nie zdażył napisać: o Bronisławie Malinowskim, o Ameryce Łacińskiej, o mieście swojego dzieciństwa – Pińsku.

Czy uważa Pan, że Kapuściński ma w Polsce swoich następców? I kogo poleciłby Pan czytelnikom i wydawcom brytyjskim? 

Myslę, że Polska ma bardzo dobry reportaż, ale trudno mi wskazywać następców. Niech zrobią to wydawcy i czytelnicy.

The post Artur Domoslawski, autor książki Ryszard Kapuścinski; Non-Fiction, rozmawia z redaktorką PEN Atlas, Tasją Dorkofikis appeared first on English PEN.