PEN World Voices: The Secret Lives of Cities

The Secret Lives of Cities brought together authors whose work has focused on particular city: Recacoechea on La Paz, Al-Mohaimeed on Riyadh, Goldman on Guatemala City, and Furst on Minneapolis.

Though Al-Mohaimeed (who spoke with the help of an interpreter) and Recacoechea made striking comments, they were handicapped by lack of fluency in English, so Furst and Goldman tended to dominate the discussion.

Furst, though a native New Yorker, had set his novel The Sabotage Cafe in Minneapolis, a city he had never lived in. Recacoechea objected that this couldn’t be done, but Furst maintained that he knew enough from many visits there to catch the personality of the place. In fact, he found New York the hardest place to write about. Like the narrator of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, he would have to give a hundred different versions of New York to convey what he knew.

Furst knew Minneapolis at least in part because of the “many ex-girlfriends” who have lived there. A city is made up of the mindset of those who live there, he said, and there is a psychological war between various factions to be “the mood, the mode, the idea” of that city. “The kids in my book,” he said, “are anarchist fuckups, who see the possibility of creating a space of disruption to keep the city alive.”

Furst’s book is set in the Dinkytown neighborhood near the university, and through the eyes of a woman returning there after twenty years away, he describes how the vegan whole-wheat pizza joints and the head shops where you could buy a feather-tipped roach clip have given way to boutiques with cute names and Japanese restaurants with bland teak walls.

Goldman was a volcano of fluent description. I haven’t read his fiction so I can’t comment on the way he draws characters, but he describes Guatemala City like an investigative journalist. A beefy man with a plain face, Jenn thought he was the kind of harmless-looking fellow that people might spill their secrets to. His latest book is a work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder, which Lieve Joris (at the panel on genocide) had mentioned having read. 

One of Goldman’s riffs began when the moderator, Matt Weiland, made a comment about the experience of someone who lives in a city, a “city liver,” then cocked his head, realizing that sounded odd.

“Guatemala City is hard drinking, so city liver is there,” said Goldman. “It’s a lawless city,” he went on. Seventy percent of the cocaine that reaches the US is transshipped there. Squatter slums have grown on the horrible muddy inclines around the city: a pulsing, perverted life. There’s space for enormous creativity, effervescence, “criminal busyness.” Crib houses are packed with stolen Indian babies from the highlands, being fattened up for the US adoption trade. Chop shops are dug into the ravines, Goldman said, and cars stolen in New York City may end up there. The city is extremely murderous. More people were killed there in 2006 than in Afghanistan. The gangs are medieval in their arcane structure and fervor. The city is pulsing with a very, very dark life.

“Frank is working for the tourist board of Guatemala,” Weiland said dryly.

PEN World Voices: Reading the World

As the title should have alerted me, this session was a collection of short readings rather than a discussion of some literary or political topic. My attention span for being read to is limited – I go to readings more to see what the author looks and sounds like, and for the Q&A, rather than for any particular nuance in the reading itself – but this group was varied enough (and each one brief enough) to keep me focused.

Peter Carey read from the beginning of his new novel His Illegal Self, after calling the modernistic podium “terrifying” because it wouldn’t hide his restless legs. (“I’m a fidgety fellow,” he said.) The Norwegian writer Halfdan Freihow read from a book called Dear Gabriel. Written in the form of a letter to an autistic son, the book is referred to as a novel in the PEN program, but in its details and the way Freihow spoke about it, it seemed at least strongly rooted in reality. Francesc Serés, an author who lives in a Catalonian village with sixteen inhabitants, read from a story that begins with a man standing on pool table and hurling the balls at a mirror behind the bar: a few lines in Catalan, then at greater length in a flowing and heavily accented English

My favorite segment, though, was Janet Malcolm’s reading from her new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. I’ve always found remarks about Stein much more interesting than reading Stein herself (though wasn’t it Stein who said “remarks are not literature”?), and Two Lives contains some juicy remarks, some of them about the difficulty of reading her. Malcolm’s subject, at least for this part of the book, was a Stein scholar named Ulla Dydo, the author of a 659-page work over which, Malcolm says, hovers the question “Is Stein worth the effort to read her?”

Dydo had studied a Stein work called “Stanzas in Meditation,” of whom someone wrote that it was perhaps the dreariest long poem in the world. Dydo noticed that throughout the manuscript of the poem the word “may” had been crossed out, often violently, and replaced with “can,” or in different contexts with “today” or “day” – often to the detriment of the sound and sense. The reason came to Dydo in a dream while she was staying in a spartan hostel near the Beinecke Library. “May” was the name of Stein’s lover in an early and forgotten autobiographical novel called QED, and a vindictive Alice B. Toklas had forced her to take out every “may” in the long poem.

Startling as it is in itself, Malcolm noted that it lends credibility to the passage in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast when he recounts a visit to Stein’s home in which he hears Toklas speaking to her in a way he had never heard a human being speak to another. Some have assumed that this was Hemingway’s revenge for snide comments by Stein, but in fact may have been (whatever Hemingway’s hangups about gay people) evidence that lesbians can be just as sadomasochistic as anybody.

PEN World Voices: Short Stories

Tall and striking in an elaborately figured dress or robe, Radikha Jones of the Paris Review began this session with a spirited defense of the health of the short story, noting that her own magazine receives 1,200 submissions a month. But the short-story authors on hand quickly undermined her position.

Ingo Schulze noted that his publisher didn’t want the word “stories” on the cover of one of his books. Etgar Keret said that the fragmented nature of reality in Israel caused readers to avoid short fiction and bury themselves in epic novels. Abdourahman Waberi said he was encouraged to write whatever he wanted, so long as he called it a novel.

Only Young-ha Kim reported that he comes from a country – Korea – where the short story is held in high regard. An annual prize of $10,000 goes to the best short story, and writers must show prowess in that form to be taken seriously. There are four Chinese characters, he said, that refer to murdering someone with a very short weapon, and that’s the challenge of a good short story. Keret put it a little differently: a short story that works is like killing someone with a toothpick rather than an atomic bomb.

The titles of these authors’ collections were irresistible: 33 Moments of Happiness by Schulze, The Girl on the Fridge by Keret, and The Land Without Shadows by Waberi. (Young-ha Kim had also published a novel called I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.)

I was especially happy to see Waberi, who is the first author from Djibouti whose work I’ve been able to find in English. He read from a story called “The Seascape Painter and the Wind Drinker.” I bought his book after the reading and chatted with him a bit as he signed it.