Congrats to Colum

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, won the National Book Award for fiction last night.

As those who come to the PEN World Voices Festival know, Colum is also a great conversationalist, and he has talked with several writers in our pages. In PEN America 8: Making Histories, he talked with Arthur Japin*, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and Michael Wallner about “inventing the past” and with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson about “writing myth now.” Fear Itself includes not only “A Code for the Disappeared,” the piece adapted from Let the Great World Spin, but also Colum’s great conversation with Michael Ondaatje, in which Colum asked Ondaatje, “Do you have fun?”

In that conversation with Ondaatje Colum describes his job as a writer in a way that will likely resonate with those who love Let the Great World Spin:

My responsibility, I think—which I’ve learned from you and John Berger and other writers I love and admire—is to talk about the dark, anonymous corners of human experience and about the value of those dark, anonymous corners. And intersecting with those dark, anonymous corners you have these famous lives, these big desires, and big issues.

Congratulations to a wonderful writer.

(Photo of Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje by Beowulf Sheehan.)

* Speaking of Arthur Japin, his novel Director’s Cut, narrated by a filmmaker not unlike Federico Fellini and excerpted in Making Histories, will be published by Knopf in English in February.

Happy Bloomsday from Colum McCann

Mark Sarvas points to a lovely op-ed by Colum McCann, in which Colum describes reading Ulysses cover to cover for the first time, after “dipping into the novel for many years, reading the accessible parts, plundering the icing on the cake.” As he made his way through the novel, his grandfather, whom he barely knew, came alive in his mind as a contemporary of Leopold Bloom’s:

The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

This is something Colum has been pondering for a while; though he hadn’t read Ulysses straight through before, Leopold Bloom has long struck him, I think, as the sort of fictional character who seems more real to some of us than others who actually lived. As he said in a conversation we published in PEN America 8: Making Histories:

On June 16th, 1904, Leopold Bloom walked around Dublin. My great grandfather walked those same streets, but Leopold Bloom is much more real to me now than my great grandfather, whom I never met. Sometimes the characters we create are more real to us than the six and a half billion people in this world whom we haven’t yet met. Do you think that fiction writers might be the unacknowledged historians of the future?

Or, as he says in today’s op-ed: “Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.”

That need to “become the other” is something Colum discusses in his terrific conversation with Michael Ondaatje, which we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. And Colum’s own capacity for empathy is evident throughout his new novel, Let the Great World Spin, which we excerpted in that same issue, and which is eagerly anticipated by many (it comes out next week).

The excerpt we published is not online, but you can read the book’s opening chapter here -- and you can listen to Colum and others read from that opening here.

Conversations @ World Voices

A late addition to the World Voices schedule: new Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio will talk with Adam Gopnik on April 24. (That's Le Clezio in the AP photo on the right, with his wife Marina in 1963.) Gopnik, who will also talk with Muriel Barbery on April 30, proved himself a deft interviewer last year when speaking with Umberto Eco -- the conversation between Eco and Gopnik is in our new issue.

One-on-one conversations between writers are among my favorite festival events -- and we’ve featured several of them in PEN America: George Saunders and Etgar Keret, Aleksandar Hemon and Rabih Alameddine, Elias Khoury and Nuruddin Farah. (Our next issue features a terrific conversation between Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje.)

This year’s festival features several intriguing pairings, perhaps none more intriguing than Enrique Vila-Matas with Paul Auster:

For years Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster have been engaged in an extended literary conversation, spanning continents and several languages. And in the ingenious short story by Eduardo Lago, which borrows its title, Brooklyn Trilogy, from Auster, the two are even brought together as fictional characters. Two years ago, they met in person for the first time and discovered that they do, indeed, share many common obsessions.

For more on Vila-Matas, the place to go on the web (besides his own website) is Conversational Reading.

Other conversations I’m particularly excited about: Richard Ford talking with Nam Le (if you haven’t read any of Nam’s work, read this); Adrian Tomine with Yoshihiro Tatsumi (a great Tatsumi story appears in PEN America 10); Mark Z. Danielewski with Rick Moody; and Péter Nádas with Daniel Mendelsohn (whose long essay on Susan Sontag’s journals I hope to read soon).

See also: Music @ World Voices


PS. Other interviews and one-on-one conversations to look forward to: Nawal El Sadaawi & Anthony Appiah; Meir Shalev & Daniel Menaker; Neil Gaiman & Caro Llewellyn; David Grossman & Philip Lopate; Domenico Starnone & Antonio Monda; Sebastian Barry & Roxanne Coady.

Pictures (and a story) from the festival

Funny story: At the short stories event last week, after the readings and the panel discussion, there was a question and answer session. A woman strode to the microphone and lambasted the assumption, which she felt had been reiterated by some of the panelists that afternoon, that the short story is a less important form than the novel. She mentioned having some experience with the form, as well as with novels and films, but no one-- including those on the panel and those who have written (quite thoughtfully, I might add) about the event-- seemed to realize that the woman speaking was Annie Proulx. (In fact, as she walked past my row and back to her seat, a well-meaning audience member sitting by the aisle bucked her up with an encouraging, "Good job," which I thought was awfully nice.)

So check out Beowulf Sheehan's terrific portrait on the left, and watch for her at a literary event near you. (I also appreciated Proulx's generosity in reading, beautifully, work by Aidan Higgins at the big Town Hall event.) And enjoy his lovely portraits of Michael Ondaatje, center, and Rian Malan, too. All these pictures-- and many more from the festival-- have been added to Flickr.

In other news, Paul Verhaeghen, who translated his own Omega Minor into English and won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, is donating the money to the ACLU, as announced on his blog and reported by Three Percent. His reason: so that the ACLU can use that money "in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it." The ACLU has worked closely with PEN in many of its Freedom to Write campaigns, which you can read about here.

Michael Ondaatje; Davis on Proust; "Urban Virgins"

Amitava Kumar describes Michael Ondaatje’s visit to Vassar, where he delivered the annual William Gifford lecture and told students, “What I love about English is that it is revived every fifty years by someone who is not English”—for example, G.V. Desani, with his novel All About H. Haterr. Also check out Ondaatje’s conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in PEN America 7.

This Space calls attention to The Cahiers Series from Sylph Editions, the fifth installment of which will have three linked pieces by Lydia Davis.

First is 'A Proust Alphabet', which gives an account of several words and issues of particular interest, encountered during the author’s recent translating of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. There follows a short article on the French thinker and novelist Maurice Blanchot, entitled 'The Problem in Summarising Blanchot'. Finally comes a series of dreams and dreamlike moments, recounted in 'Swimming in Egypt: Dreams while Awake and Asleep'. The cahier is accompanied by photographs by Ornan Rotem.

The cahier comes out in a month; in the meantime, you can read Davis’s thoughts on Proust in PEN America 2.

Lastly, as if the new Latin America issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review was not impressive enough on its own, they have also created some fanastic web features, like this interactive map which links to various pieces from the issue-- or this collection of photographs and poetry:

“Urban Virgins” shows a series of paintings by Ana de Orbegoso paired with poems by Odi Gonzales. De Orbegoso has created 5′ tall wearable Spanish paintings of saints and virgins that have been mashed up with photographs of contemporary Peruvian women. Then she has people walk around Cusco, Peru in these costumes, bringing art to the streets.

(And speaking of Latin America, here’s yet another November event: The News from Latin America, hosted by the Overseas Press Club and the National Book Critics Circle, featuring Francisco Goldman, George de Lama, and Peter Kinoy, and hosted by Calvin Sims.)