Jag skulle kunna lyssna i lurarna om jag spelade låtarna i laptopen. Men mitt iTunesbibliotek finns i Macbooken och för att kunna lyssna på Spotify i mini-pc:n som jag skriver på krävs det att man är uppkopplad på nätet.
Jag vill hålla mig nedkopplad när jag skriver. Annars sitter man bara och läser en massa bloggar och mejl istället för att göra det man ska göra. Och så kan vi ju inte ha det.
Så nu ligger Boxarn så nära dörren han kan och lider. Fastän det är en utomjordiskt vacker soulballad i Jamoburkarna: »Your Turn to Cry« med Betty Lavette.
Den får mig att sitta med hjärtflimmer i tre minuter och tre sekunder medan Boxarn ligger och håller för öronen.
* * *
Trettio procent av alla män och hälften av alla kvinnor läser en vanlig vardag en bok. Ännu lite högre är helgsiffrorna.
Dåså, det är fredag, då tycker jag att vi tar och pratar lite mer böcker än vanligt i dag.
* * *
Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om böcker är rätt ofta Michael Connelly. Han lyckas ju i årets »Räven« ruska liv i den Harry Bosch-serie som i ett par tidigare nummer visat tecken på en formsvacka.
Men denna i det stora hela suveräna crimeserie i all ära – minst lika bra tycker jag att Connellys fristående thrillers är.
Den senaste av dessa, förra årets »I lagens limo«, finns nu i pocket. Huvudpersonen i den, försvarsadvokaten Mickey Haller, är en rätt obehaglig typ. Som man ändå gillar. För att ha råd med sin utsvävande livsstil behöver han hela tiden nya lönsamma fall. Den töntiga svenska titeln (»The Lincoln Lawyer« i original) kommer sig av att Haller har sitt kontor i baksätet på en vräkig Lincoln limousine.
Alla Harry Boschfans därute gör klokt i att snabba på med att läsa »I lagens limo«. För nästa Connellybok, »The Brass Verdict«, har i huvudrollerna både Haller och Bosch. Tegelstenen »The Brass Verdict« är Connellys hittills tjockaste bok och släpps nästa vecka i USA med buller och bång och en nyinspelad tv-video där Michael Connelly själv från baksätet på en Lincoln limousine pekar ut bokens spelplatser i Los Angeles.
* * *
För den deckarintresserade pågår på branschsajten Svensk Bokhandel en debatt om kvaliteten på svensk kriminallitteratur. Personligen håller jag, i stort, med om vad DNs förra deckarkritiker Marie Peterson säger där.
* * *
»Min, mina, mitt – dessa possesiva pronomen som är början på alla konflikter, alla krig.«
Bodil Malmsten; »Kom och hälsa på mig om tusen år«
* * *
Dessutom blir »I lagens limo« och alla andra pocketböcker dyrare efter nyår. Sjuttio kronor för böckerna i den dyraste pocketklassen.
* * *
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Hmm ... Noll av honom i mina bokhyllor. Fast helt oväntat var det ju inte. Jag minns att han i fjolårets förhandsspekulationer var lite av en favorit på en del kultursidor.
* * *
Att jag går till Moleskinen och hämtar Bodil Malmstencitat att strössla med här har sin orsak i att jag vill ha hennes nya roman, »Sista boken från Finistére«. Jag vill ha den nu. Den finns nu. Den är beställd. Jag väntar varje morgon på att Ollebo, den bäste av brevbärare, ska komma cyklande med den.
* * *
Jag har inte Lars Norén-frilla längre. Nu har jag samma frilla som han i »Prison Break«.
* * *
Varenda morgon när jag öppnar badrumsskåpet står det där plåsterpaketet och stirrar en i ögonen. I morse var jag så här nära att öppna det.
Men jag resonerade som så att det vore slösaktigt av en att inte först röka upp de tre fyra cigg som fanns kvar i Camelpaketet. Och när jag på eftermiddagen knallade bort till kiosken och hämtade kvällsisarna ... ja, nu har jag hux flux tjugo nya Camel som måste blossas upp innan det kan bli aktuellt med någon omplåstring.
* * *
Nästa år, klockan 13 den 9 oktober, kommer den ständige ut genom den där dörren i Börshuset och meddelar världspressen att årets Nobelpris i litteratur har gått till Paul Auster.

Image by Keaton Andrew Photography via Flickr

Título: O Livro das ilusões
Autor: Paul Auster
Colecção: Vozes do Mundo
Tradução: José Vieira de Lima
Editora: Edições Asa
1ªEdição – 2002

«O acto de escolher e abrir um livro oculta a contradecisão que ocorre em simultâneo: o acto involuntário de não escolher e de não abrir todos os outros livros do universo.»

Pierre Bayard, How to Talk about Books you Haven't Read, Londres, Granta Books, 2007, p.6.

A história de um homem que – após escrever um livro sobre um realizador de cinema mudo desaparecido – na sequência da morte de toda a sua família e de um isolamento depressivo se vê arrastado para a busca desse mesmo cineasta. Uma narrativa fantástica deste autor norte-americano, repleta de reflexões profundas sobre a existência humana e dotada de uma vasta investigação sobre cinema mudo. Por outro lado questiona-se de forma pertinente a produção artística e o uso dos direitos de produção, num mundo em que a arte perde real valor para o comércio e exploração da imagem dos seus criadores. Também uma boa forma de curar uma depressão sem recorrer a fármacos naturais ou não.

Det är gott men drar ner kondisen, med tio procent sägs det, så nu har jag ett nyinköpt plåsterpaket, 21 mg, värstingarna, i badrumsskåpet som jag ska börja kleta på mig vilken dag som helst nu.
Jag vet att det går.
Så sent som i mars knäcktes ett flera decennier långt och tungt Ettanmissbruk med hjälp av sådana där plåster.
Men det är den där morronciggen, efter dagens första dubbla espresso.
Det är den som är så förbannat god att man skjuter upp den där omplåstringen bara en dag till.
Och en dag till.
Och en dag till ...
* * *
Jag har grubblat ända sedan jag såg Junya Satos film »Yamato«.
Varför hade kamikazepiloterna hjälm?
* * *
Man kan inte umgås med kalkoner om man vill lära sig flyga.
* * *
»Intellektuellt arbete byggde denna kropp«.
Tryck på Martina Lowdens t-shirt.
* * *
Man vill ju inte vara sämre än Folk å Rock-Ingo, så nu ger även jag mig in i den ojämna högermarginalgenren. Fast jag gör det på ärans och hjältarnas språk och inte på tocken där utrikiska som Ingo svänger sig med.

Leonard Cohen minns
kvinnan på hotellrummet
som föredrog snygga män
men gjorde ett undantag
för honom

Tom Waits kör
sakta sin Ol' 55
under de slocknande
stjärnorna
och Dolly Parton ser
ljuset från en klar
blå morgon
* * *
Kanske skulle man ta sig en lyssna bara på Van Morrison-vecka nån gång också. I skrivande stund i skrivarstugans cd-spelare är det dubbelmackan Hymns to the Silence. Mannen vailade nyss med rösten och nu viskar han och väser och muttrar och fräser och tungomålstalar och stammar i »Take Me Back«.
* * *
Upptäcker under en rökpaus på skrivarstugans veranda att kamelen på Camelpaketet bara har en puckel och alltså är en dromedar.
* * *
Undrar just om Robert därborta på Södermalm känner till den här nya biografin om och av The Clash?
* * *
Det visar sig att det inte var värre med Chippenskadan än att jag klarar att powerwalka ett varv runt sportfältet med The Boxer. Till och med en bit lätt jogging klarar baksidan på låret.
Tur det – vill fan inte ha tillbaka den där ölmagen som det har tagit så många nyktra år att lubba bort.
* * *
Den nya musiktjänsten Spotify blir man ju nyfiken på.
* * *
Men jag förstår dom. Vem skulle be om ett paket »Dromedar« i kiosken. Själv är jag oerhört noga med att ciggen jag röker ska ha ett tufft namn. Det är inte mycket till image man annars har kvar att vårda i den här åldern.
* * *
Klockan 13 i morgon kliver den ständige ut till världspressen och meddelar att en annan storrökare, Paul Auster, får årets Nobelpris i litteratur.

"Pero no es sólo una división ideológica, sino también cultural", prosigue Auster. "Hay un fundamentalismo cristiano que ha crecido como nunca, gente que cree ciega y realmente que el mundo se hizo en seis días y en la pena de muerte, por poner dos ejemplos... Desde Europa puede verse más jocosamente esto del anti darwinismo y el puritanismo, pero convivir allí con eso se hace difícil... ¿Cómo puedo tener una conversación con esa gente? El espacio común entre ellos y yo es mínimo. En EE UU hay dos mundos que no se hablan".

Ya digo que esta noche se celebra el segundo debate, que estará dedicado a la Economía, un terreno muy propicio a Obama (recordemos que en el primero se habló de Seguridad y Política Exterior). Según los expertos, McCainn, que se ve muy por debajo en las encuestas, endurecerá su discurso y tratará de presentar a Obama como un hombre frívolo y peligroso. Pero también los demócratas están ensuciando la campaña a través un video en el que relacionan a McCainn con un escándalo financiero acaecido a principios de los ochenta.

Es una pena que los asesores de Obama recurran a estas maniobras. Su candidato ya ha demostrado sobradamente que no las necesita, no sólo porque es bastante mejor que McCain, sino porque cada vez parece más claro que los americanos están hartos del discurso del miedo.

En las pocas lecturas que llevo hasta ahora de Paul Auster he encontrado fascinante la permanente búsqueda de la existencia independiente de sus personajes. Para Auster, sólo mediante la construcción de la realidad podemos percibir, racionalizar y comprender al "yo" y al mundo en torno suyo.

En The New York Trilogy encontramos esa exploración de las distintas capas de la identidad y la realidad a través del desdoblamiento de los personajes: el "yo" podría manifestarse en diferentes personajes que interaccionen en el espacio-tiempo, cada personaje una posibilidad del ser. La conclusión podría ser que la identidad es algo íntimo, inaprehensible por los demás.

Si nuestro "yo" es una entidad completamente subjetiva entonces vivimos en un mundo de ideas y nosotros mismos somos la idea que nuestra razón se ha formado acerca de quiénes somos:

The thing and the thought of the thing are one and the same.

(The New York Trilogy)

Asimismo, nuestra razón da una explicación del mundo. Cuando no comprendemos algo imaginamos cualquier historia, por inverosímil que parezca:

… a hole in the texture of things, and one story can fill this hole as well as any other.

(The New York Trilogy)

Del mismo modo, nos forjamos una idea de los demás que encaja en nuestra concepción del mundo. Sin embargo, la idea que nos forjamos del otro puede ser por completo ajena a la realidad del otro, que es la idea que tiene de sí mismo. De ahí que podamos concebir al mismo ser en distintos planos, como personajes diferentes de una historia que interaccionan constantemente sin crear paradojas.

Cada vida es irreductible únicamente a sí mismo. Cada vida es singular y la mejor expresión de la libertad esencial del individuo es su capacidad para desaparecer del mundo sin decir adiós si se desea.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another -for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

(The New York Trilogy)

En The Invention of Solitude Auster se da cuenta de que la persona que fue su padre es una imagen creada por él mismo y que, posiblemente, nada tiene que ver con la persona que realmente fue:

This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of other people.

The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. [...] At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others. Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge.

(The Invention of Solitude)

En la segunda parte del libro Auster juega con la idea reinante en "The Locked Room": el espíritu humano como la imagen de uno mismo encerrado en una habitación que, tal y como San Agustín reflexionó, podría no ser suficientemente grande como para contener al yo:

‘The power of memory is prodigious’, observed Saint Augustine. ‘It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?’

(The Invention of Solitude)

Es en Moon Palace donde Auster centra la acción en el corolario de las ideas anteriores: el individuo que decide aislarse de todo y de todos para encontrarse a sí mismo:

With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing: my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all. This was nihilism raised to the level of an aesthetic proposition. I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom.

(Moon Palace)

La reflexión que hace el protagonista es que existe una dialéctica fundamental entre el "yo" y el resto del mundo, de modo que el primer paso en la búsqueda de la identidad propia es renunciar a esa dialéctica dejándose llevar:

Our lives are determined by manifold contingences. [...] and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance. Two years ago, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle. It wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself [...] but because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself. The point was to accept things as they were, to drift along with the flow of the universe. [...] If I came close to dying, I nevertheless believe that I’m a better person for it.

(Moon Palace)

... todo lo que lleva a Auster a regresar a la idea de la propia mente como el único espacio-tiempo en el que la persona habita, como una habitación cerrada:

The only place you exist is in your head

(Moon Palace)

Yo reflexionaba en su momento sobre que lo importante en este libro es la convicción de que cada uno de nosotros se encierra un universo que renunciamos a descubrir para vivir en la sociedad. ¿Qué ocurre si perdemos el control? Imaginemos que perdemos a nuestra mujer (o marido) e hijos en un accidente aéreo; imaginemos que perdemos todo lo que nos vincula al mundo y nos quedamos solos. La sociedad querrá que mantengamos la calma, que nos reintegremos y asumamos el papel de estereotipos de la dignidad. ¿Qué ocurre si perdemos el control? La sociedad nos castiga, nos aisla como locos peligrosos. No podemos ser de modo natural sino que debemos ser de modo social.

[...] the park offered me the possibility of solitude, of separating myself from the rest of the world. [...] To walk among the crowd means never going faster than anyone else, never lagging behind your neighbor, never doing anything to disrupt the flow of human traffic. If you play by the rules of this game, people will tend to ignore you. [...] a natural and perhaps necessary form of indifference to others. It doesn’t matter how you look [...] On the other hand, the way you act inside your clothes is of the utmost importance.

(Moon Palace)

Esa situación desesperada es la que encontramos al inicio de The Book of Illusions, donde el protagonista pierde a su familia y, con ella, toda referencia, por lo que se encuentra con que:

The world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day.

[...]

Life was a fever dream, he discovered, and reality was a groundless world of figments and hallucinations, a place where everything you imagined came true.

(The Book of Illusions)

El mundo es algo que fabricamos de modo que la realidad no es inamovible ni obstinada sino subjetiva:

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? [...] That’s how he justified what he did. He would make movies that would never be shown to audiences, make movies for the pure pleasure of making movies. It was an act of breathtaking nihilism.

(The Book of Illusions)

Finalmente, la cita de Dashiell Hammet en El Halcón Maltés con la que Auster abre Oracle Night redunda en la capacidad de empezar de nuevo en cualquier momento:

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment -for not reason at all. [...] he has no choice but to submit to this destructive power, to smash his life through some meaningless, wholly arbitrary act of self-negation. [...] without bothering to return home or say good-bye to his family, without even bothering to withdraw any money from the bank, he stands up from the table, goes to another city, and starts his life all over again.

(Oracle Night)

La cuestión que desde hace algunos días me lleva rondando la cabeza es por qué, en ninguno de estos casos, la solución para la autodestrucción sea el suicidio...

Terra/Efe - John Galliano, Woody Allen, a revista Olá e Paul Auster foram classificados nesta segunda-feira pelo escritor peruano Mario Vargas Llosa como parceiros do que ele chama a "civilização do espetáculo", para ele, o que construíram as democracias no Ocidente para fugir da reflexão e tudo o que não seja divertido. Vargas Llosa foi o protagonista de uma conferência organizada pela Sociedade Interamericana de Imprensa (SIP) por ocasião de seu 64ª Assembléia.

Para o autor de Pantaleão e as Visitadoras, como "conseqüências" da "civilização do espetáculo", a literatura, as artes plásticas, a crítica, o cinema, a política, o sexo e o jornalismo, desapareceram em sua essência mais pura. Isso ocorre, disse, porque há um total "desdém" por tudo o que lembra que "a vida não só é diversão, também drama, dor, mistério e frustração". Segundo o escritor, no campo do jornalismo, a difusão da frivolidade "se alimenta do escândalo".

"A triste verdade é que nenhum meio pode manter um público fiel se ignora a moda imperante", disse, baseando sua conclusão "pessimista" de que o problema não está no jornalismo mas num estilo de vida que tem no entretenimento passageiro "a maior aspiração humana". A obrigação de pôr a cultura ao alcance de todos teve "em muitos casos" o indesejável efeito do desaparecimento de "a alta cultura", minoritária pela complexidade de seus códigos, em favor de um "amálgama na qual tudo cabe". Por isso, não lhe soa estranho que a literatura mais representativa seja "leve, ligeira, fácil", aquela que "sem o menor rubor se propõe antes de tudo e sobretudo divertir".

Assegurou que não condena a esses autores porque há entre eles, "verdadeiros talentos" como Julian Barnes, Paul Auster e Milan Kundera, mas lamenta que já não se empreendam aventuras literárias como as de Joyce ou Proust. Desapareceram os intelectuais e "praticamente" os críticos, mas a cozinha e a moda ocupam boa parte das seções dedicadas à cultura, um mundo controlado pela publicidade que dá carta de "cidadão honorário" a John Galliano e a seus "espantalhos indumentários". No cinema se privilegia o engenho sobre a inteligência, "e já não produz criadores como Bergman, Visconti ou Buñuel. Coroado como ícone é Woody Allen, que está para um David Lynch ou um Orson Wells como Andy Warhol para Gauguin". Mas é a política, disse Vargas Llosa, que experimentou maior banalização, porque tiques nervosos da publicidade tomam o lugar das idéias, e, assim, Carla Bruni com seu "fogo de artifício midiático", mostram como "nem sequer a França" pôde resistir à "frivolidade imperante".

El protagonista del nou llibre de l'escriptor novaiorquès és August Brill, un crític literari de 72 anys que té insomni i que, per passar les hores, s'inventa unes històries que porten el lector a la guerra civil nord-americana i a la guerra contra l'Iraq.

August Brill intenta combatre l'insomni inventant-se històries en mig de la nit per tractar de no pensar en la mort de la seva esposa, la soledat de la seva filla i la pena de la seva néta. "En una nit en blanc, el cervell es concentra amb el negatiu de la teva vida", afirma Paul Auster, encara que reconeix que ell dorm bé.

L'escriptor nord-americà Paul Auster ha assegurat que els Estats Units és actualment un país "molt dividit" que està immers en una Guerra Civil en què no s'ataca amb "pistola i bales" sinó que la munició es nodreix de "paraules i idees".

Durant la presentació a Barcelona del seu nou llibre, 'Un home en la foscor' (Anagrama, en català Edicions 62),  l'autor ha sostingut que és "com si hi haguessin dos o més països" als Estats Units, i que "alguns estan a les fosques" com el protagonista de la seva novel·la, Brill, perquè no aconsegueixen comunicar-se amb la resta en sostenir idees com la del creacionisme -el 44% dels nord-americans no creu en la teoria darwiniana de l'evolució, ha assegurat Auster referint-se a una notícia publicada avui per La Vanguardia--.

"Com es pot mantenir una conversa de qualsevol tema amb ells?", s'ha preguntat l'escriptor que el 4 de novembre votarà Barack Obama per a la presidència del seu país igual que va fer en la primàries, perquè segons la seva opinió és "un home d'una intel·ligència aguda que sap mantenir la calma fins i tot en circumstàncies de molta pressió".

'Invisible', el pròxim títol de l'autor, ja està acabat i serà publicat l'any que ve.

Neil Young stoned in 1975
high looking at the sky
thinking of Danny Whitten
and marvelling over this
beautiful junkie universe

the moon as a silverspoon
with some lovely cocaine
and the stars in the dark
like golden needle sticks

thinking of what someone said
death´s the greatest fix of all
missing and envying his friend
* * *
Att gamla gubbrockare aldrig lär sig att de ska hålla sig till långsam och värdig lubbning och inte blanda in snabba intervaller. I morse drog det till i baksidan på höger lår. Jag och Chippen typ.
* * *
Att skapa är att göra någonting som ingen annan tror finns där.
* * *
»För att skriva fram en sann berättelse måste man inte sällan, för den stora sanningens skull, vara lite utanför sanningen i de små och mindre viktiga detaljerna. Lägga till, dra ifrån, flytta i tid och rum. För att den sanning man verkligen vill berätta ska kunna komma fram mera sant och starkt och äkta.«
Ernest Hemingway; fritt översatt ur »Ernest Hemingway on Writing«, edited by Larry W. Phillips
* * *
Klockan 13 på torsdag kliver den ständige ut till världspressen och meddelar att Paul Auster får årets Nobelpris i litteratur.
* * *
jag varnar
den här dagen
för att göra ett minsta
misstag
sen du vaknat
Bruno K. Öijer
* * *
På rak arm kan jag inte komma på någon annan kriminalförfattare som likt islänningen Arnaldur Indridason skrivit fem helgjutna böcker på raken. »Vinterstaden«, det senaste mästarprovet i serien om den älskansvärde, melankoliske kriminalpolisen Erlendur Sveinsson finns nu i storpocket.
Med mjuka pärmar finns också de övriga i serien: »Kvinna i grönt«, »Glasbruket«, »Änglarösten« och »Mannen i sjön«.
Se där har ni redan nu alla era julklappsbekymmer lösta.
* * *
Nästa stump har varit med förr, men för minnesklena och nytillkomna tittare går den i repris. Dessutom har jag haft en med mina mått körig dag i dag med begränsade möjligheter att värpa bloggtexter.
* * *
»Mamma hade lagat en oxstek med brunsås och vinbärsgelé och syltlök och glaserade morötter och pappa bjöd på snaps till sillen.
När mamma gick ut i köket för att se till steken, tog vi oss en snaps till.
›Lev som du vill‹, sa pappa, ›men låt mig aldrig komma på dig med att dricka vin till inlagd sill‹.«
Claes Hylinger; »Det hemliga sällskapet«
* * *
Vem är det jag som undrar vem jag är?
* * *
Jag har lämnat − vilket är murvelprat för »levererat« − en liten jobbtext. Sjuhundrafemtio anspråkslösa tecken. Minst sjuhundratrettio av dem var ett rent nöje att skriva.
Jag sitter nu kvar i läsåskrivfåtöljen och hyllar det spanska ordspråket.
»Så ljuvt det är att göra ingenting, och sedan vila.«
* * *
Två skitmål bjöd Brage Falun på.
Kuken, ballen Domnarvsvallen.

Pero hay un verso..., uno grandioso. Creo que es de lo mejor que he leído nunca.

¿Cuál?, me pregunta, volviéndose hacia mí.

Mientras el peregrino mundo sigue girando.

Miriam esboza otra gran sonrisa.

Lo sabía, afirma. Cuando estaba copiando la cita, me dije: Esto le va a gustar. Podrían haberlo escrito para él.

El peregrino mundo sigue girando, Miriam.

Muleta en mano, vuelve junto a la cama y se sienta a mi lado.

Sí, papá, me dice, estudiando a su hija con una sombra de preocupación en la mirada, el peregrino mundo sigue girando.

Un hombre en la oscuridad, Paul Auster 2008

Es parlarà sobre la darrera obra d'Auster, Un home a les fosques, publicada per Anagrama i Edicions 62.

Lloc: Saló de Cent - Ajuntament de Barcelona Plaça Sant Jaume, 1 6 d'octubre a les 19 h.

]]> http://kikandrun.wordpress.com/?p=1410 Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:26:18 +0000 Kirsten http://kikandrun.de.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/the-night-paul-auster-gave-me-a-smile/ Es hat immer etwas Heikles, ein Idol zu treffen. Ist der Betreffende ein Dummbrot, ist das nicht schön. Ist er ein arroganter Schnösel, ebenfalls nicht. Ist der Betreffende aber genauso, wie man ihn sich immer vorgestellt hat, nämlich ein offenbar hochintelligenter, mit gutem Aussehen und Wortwitz ausgestatteter Zeitgenosse, kann der Abend schöner nicht sein. Und genauso einen Abend hatte ich gestern: Als ich von der Lesung mit Paul Auster nach Hause ging, erschien mir der Regen ein bisschen wärmer als sonst.

Die Gefahr, dass sich der Held meiner literarischen Welt als Dummbrot entpuppte, bestand dabei allerdings nicht wirklich - niemand, der seine Bücher gelesen hat, kann das auch nur ansatzweise annehmen. Aber wer weiß - jemand, der so hochgelobt und verehrt wird, mag ja doch die ein oder andere Starallüre entwickelt habe. Falls das bei Paul Auster so ist, habe ich es mit durch meine mit Tränen der Bewunderung verhangenen Wimpern entweder nicht gesehen oder er hat es an diesem Abend einfach nicht raushängen lassen.

Dabei war die Veranstaltung weit davon entfernt, perfekt zu sein. Das Interessante daran war aber, zu beobachten, wie Auster das ganze rausriss: die meiner Meinung nach nicht glücklich für die Lesung ausgewählten Passagen von Man in the Dark, der heillos überforderte Moderator des Abends und die aus der Überforderung resultierenden, belanglosen oder gar unverschämten Fragen.

Als Auster den Saal betrat, hatte ich Gänsehaut und bekam das Lächeln für eine Weile nicht mehr aus dem Gesicht - allein wegen des Wissens darum, dass ich mit meinem großen Heldn in einem Raum war. Mein großer Held trug einen schlichten, wenn nicht langweiligen Pullover von undefinierbarer Farbe, und es waren noch hunderte anderer Leute da, die die Intimität dieses Moments doch ein wenig störten, aber eigentlich war mir das fast egal. Das mag nun alles übertrieben erscheinen, aber ich hege numal große Bewunderung frü Auster. Ich liebe seine Bücher, ich liebe seine Art zu schreiben, seine Geschichten, eben alles. Ich liebe ihn für den Spruch "Die Welt braucht vielleicht Elektriker und Klempner und Lehrer, aber sie schreit nicht nach einem neuen Dichter." Und dafür, dass er trotz dieser Erkenntnis immer weiter schreibt, wo doch Wörter von einem Moment auf den anderen vom besten Freund zum größten Arschloch im Universum werden können.

Äh - wo war ich? Ach ja, Lesung.

Ob Man in the Dark etwas taugt, vermag ich noch nicht zu sagen. Dafür waren die gelesenen Passagen wohl nicht repräsentativ genug. Doch wie Auster selbst sagte, sei es schwierig "to pull the whole thing apart". Nachvollziehbar, sein eigenes Werk nicht für eine Lesung auseinanderpflücken zu wollen. Dabei wäre es mir ehrlich gesagt vollkommen wurscht gewesen, was der Mann da vorne vorgelesen hätte. Ich wäre auch dahingeschmolzen, hätte er den Befund einer Darmspiegelung vorgetragen. Was vor allem an der Stimme lag - tief, durch jahrelangen Zigarettenkonsum etwa so sanft wie ein Akopads und einfach sehr angenehm. Seine ausgewählten Textpassagen las Auster mit ungewöhnlicher Betonung - den Akzent jeweils auf Dinge gesetzt, die ihm als Autor wichtig schienen. Sein Gegenpart, der Schauspieler Max Volker Martens las dazwischen immer wieder deutsche Abschnitte - mit wunderbarer, schauspielerischer Betonung, aber natürlich ohne das Herzblut des Autors, der monatelang mit diesem Text gelebt hat. Das ist kein Vorwurf, sondern ein Feststellung. Die Faszination ergab sich einfach aus dem Gegensatz beider Vortragsvarianten.

Vorwürfe mache ich dagegen Moderator Till Raether, der entweder sehr unvorbereitet erschien oder es tatsächlich war. Beides wäre nicht zu entschuldigen. Herr Raether schreibt gute Texte, die mir bislang meistens gefallen haben, aber für ein Live-Interview reichte es dann leider doch nicht. Wie kann man jemanden wie Auster fragen, ob er Sprache als limitiert empfinde, weil es in seinem Buch so viel um Filme geht? Ich kann das als Nicht-Muttersprachlerin sicher kaum beurteilen, aber ich empfinde Austers Wortschatz als sehr reich und vielseitig. Der Amerikaner scheint mir ein Autor zu sein, der Sprache liebt und sie als das wunderbarste Mittel überhaupt betrachtet, um sich auszudrücken. Dementsprechend fiel auch die überrascht-ironische Antwort auf die Frage aus, ob er Sprache nicht als viel limitierter empfinde als Film: "No, not at all! I am very happy with what I am doing." Zumal Auster als Drehbuchautor und Regisseur tatsächlich beide Seiten kennt. Und da er bislang mehr Bücher geschrieben als Filme gemacht hat, scheint mir, dass er sein Medium gefunden hat.

Was mich aber vor allem an Auster faszinierte, war seine Art, das Gespräch von dem pseudo-intellektuellen Level zu schubsen, das Raether ihm gern geben wollte. Auf die Frage nach seinem Lieblingsfilm kam zwar zunächst eine Aufzählung international bedeutender Filme, leuchtende Augen bekam er aber nur bei der Erwähnung von The Incredible Shrinking Man, ein Film, der ihm nach eigener Aussage erste Erkenntnisse von Metaphysik vermittelte. An sowas habe ich immer wieder große Freude: Jemand mit herausragenden geistigen Fähigkeiten, der einen anbiedernden Fragesteller nicht direkt niederbügelt, sondern ihm mit einer intelligenten Diskussion über etwas scheinbar Triviales zeigt, wo es langgeht. Auster hat es nicht nötig, pseudo-intellektuell daherzuschwafeln. Aber genauso wenig hat er es nötig, den anderen darauf hinzuweisen, dass er mehr im Kopf hat. Unter dem Tisch allerdings wippte Auster immer wieder ungeduldig mit den Füßen - was aber das einzige Anzeichen dafür war, dass er vielleicht doch nun lieber woanders wäre. (Beim Bier mit mir, versuchte ich mir einzureden.) Leider wurden all die Fragen, deren Antworten mich sehr interessiert hätte, nicht gestellt: Ich hätte gern gewusst, wie Auster arbeitet, wie er recherchiert, was ihn inspiriert.

Mein ganz persönlicher Höhepunkt aber war natürlich die Signierstunde. Dummerweise war es auch für gefühlt 3000 andere Leute der Höhepunkt des Abends. Aber egal: Ich habe nun ein signiertes Exemplar von Man in the Dark in meinem Bücherschrank, ich bekam ein Lächeln, wechselte mit meinem Literatur-Gott die bedeutungsvollen Worte "thank you" und ging, wie alle Frauen vor mir, mit debilem Grinsen nach draußen in den warmen Herbstregen. Das Buch wird das erste sein, was ich mal aus meiner brennenden Wohnung rette.

Teoría I (de Brooklyn a la Mancha)

Sobre el final del Capítulo VIII de la Primera Parte del Quijote, da comienzo el delicioso entretejido de las categorías de autor, narrador y personajes, juego de espejos que, junto con otras maravillas, contribuyó a la fama de la obra maestra de Cervantes.

Paul Auster revisita este procedimiento en Ciudad de cristal (City of Glass, 1985). Esta novela integra la Trilogía de Nueva York, obra donde Auster replica ese mismo juego de espejos hasta lo inextricable, convirtiéndolo en uno de sus encantos principales. En la trilogía de Auster hay nombres que se repiten pero que no necesariamente designan a los mismos personajes. Hay personajes que escriben con seudónimos y luego asumen falsas identidades; hay intercambios, duplicidades, nombres de la vida real —el del autor, el de su hijo— intercalados entre los de la ficción, y también nombres de la ficción que refieren a otras obras de ficción (William Wilson, por ejemplo, referencia literaria que cae como anillo al dedo para esta clase de juegos con la identidad).

El interés de Auster en el Quijote se explicita en el décimo capítulo de su novela: en él, un personaje que es escritor, vive en Nueva York y se llama Paul Auster, desarrolla una teoría personal para explicar quién sería el autor del “libro dentro del libro” de Cervantes. "Auster" se lo explica con tranquilidad al personaje principal, Daniel Quinn, que ha venido a visitarlo a su propia casa.

Según “Auster”, don Quijote no está loco, sino que se hace pasar por loco; su objetivo es engañar a Sancho, único testigo posible de todas sus andanzas; éste, analfabeto, no puede escribirlas, pero sí puede contárselas al barbero y al cura; a su vez, ellos la escribirán en castellano y le darán el texto a Simón Carrasco (sic; Auster debió decir Sansón Carrasco), el bachiller de Salamanca, quien las traducirá al árabe para que luego Cervantes encuentre ese manuscrito en Toledo, firmado por un inexistente Cide Hamete Benengeli… Cervantes lo mandará traducir al castellano y luego escribirá la historia de El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha. Es así como Quijano —siempre preocupado por la posteridad de sus andanzas— consigue que alguien escriba sus aventuras. Según Auster, el motivo por el que este “Cuarteto Benengeli” se tomaría tantas molestias es hacer que Quijano llegue a leer su propia historia y, de esa forma, enfrentándolo a lo absurdo de sus actos, lograr sacarlo de su locura.

No hay testigos permanentes

Sin embargo, en la novela de Cervantes, hay un momento en el que don Quijote queda solo y desnudo, haciendo una penitencia en medio de la Sierra Morena (Capítulo XXVI de la Primera Parte). Para dar cuenta de su actividad en solitario, el capítulo arranca afirmando: “dice la historia, que…”.

¿Quién habría recogido esa historia? Aquí fallaría la teoría de Paul Auster: Sancho no siempre acompaña a su amo. El único testimonio de los actos de don Quijote en la sierra son los versos que él dejó escritos en la corteza de algunos árboles. Por lo demás, dentro de la narración, ¿qué personaje podría conocer y referir lo hecho —y, más aún, lo pensado— por don Quijote cuando queda solo, si él mismo nunca se lo cuenta a nadie? En la Segunda Parte (Capítulo LXVIII) hay una situación similar: es de noche y Sancho duerme; don Quijote se pone a cantar junto a unos árboles, esta vez incluso sin escribir los versos en sus cortezas. Nadie lo ve… ¿quién recoge esa historia?

Cervantes es consciente de este tipo de problemas, y los arregla con un oportuno comentario de Sancho en el Capítulo II de la Segunda Parte. Sancho le informa a don Quijote que Sansón Carrasco, bachiller de Salamanca, le ha contado que:

“…andaba ya en libros la historia de vuesa merced, con nombre del Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha; y dice que me mientan á mí en ella con mi mismo nombre de Sancho Panza, y á la señora Dulcinea del Toboso, con otras cosas que pasamos nosotros á solas, que me hice cruces de espantado, cómo las pudo saber el historiador que las escribió”.

Con este asombro de los personajes que se leen a sí mismos se asume y se salva el problema de quién recogió esos sucesos que ellos vivieron a solas. Es la forma que encuentra Cervantes para hacernos ver a sus lectores que el asunto no se le ha pasado por alto. En vez de corregir aquellos otros episodios, aumenta la maravilla del texto al ponerlos él mismo en duda, en este comentario de Sancho.

Federico Jeanmaire, en su libro Una lectura del Quijote (Seix Barral, 2004), destaca un fragmento del Capítulo XLVIII de la Segunda Parte donde pasa algo similar: “Aquí hace Cide Hamete un paréntesis, y dice que por Mahoma que diera por ver ir a los dos así asidos y trabados desde la puerta al lecho…” (se refiere a don Quijote y a la dueña Rodríguez). Al respecto, dice Jeanmaire (pp. 213-214):

“Cualquiera daría lo mejor que tiene por haber visto la escena. El problema no es ése. No. El problema reside en que Benengeli es el único que aparentemente ve todas las escenas que narra. Aquí parece que no es así, que el abismo del sistema narrativo se hace todavía más complejo, que incluso puede haber un narrador anterior al moro, y el moro sólo sea el primer eslabón en la larguísima cadena de copistas de la historia. […] La cadena de narradores tiende a la infinitud a partir de este extraño paréntesis de Cide Hamete. […] Otra maravilla. Una más. Y que, en tres líneas termina clausurando el posible conflicto que hubiese podido quedar abierto entre algún lector por demás exigente y su particular lectura de la omnisciencia narrativa del libro”.

Creo que es cierto lo que afirma Jeanmaire respecto de la existencia de una “cadena de narradores”: para comprobarlo basta con recordar que el narrador del primer capítulo establece que no es él solo sino muchos los autores que han escrito sobre don Quijote de la Mancha (las negritas son mías):

“Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, ó Quesada (que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que de este caso escriben) aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quijana.”

“Los autores que de este caso escriben”: plural. Efectivamente, Cide Hamete no sería el primero en escribir sobre don Quijote. El moro consulta otras fuentes, además de recurrir a "las memorias de la Mancha", como se ve en el Capítulo LII de la Primera Parte:

“Pero el autor desta historia, puesto que con curiosidad y diligencia ha buscado los hechos que don Quijote hizo en su tercera salida, no ha podido hallar noticia de ellos, á lo menos por escrituras auténticas; sólo la fama ha guardado en las memorias de la Mancha, que don Quijote, la tercera vez que salió de su casa, fué á Zaragoza…”.

Esas “memorias”, que son depositarias de las acciones de don Quijote inhallables en los documentos escritos, podrían justificar la expresión “dice la historia, que…”, con la que se da cuenta de los momentos de soledad de don Quijote en la Sierra Morena.

El narrador dice: "el autor desta historia". No es casual que en Ciudad de cristal, Paul Auster también utilice el recurso de referirse alguna vez a “el autor de esta obra” así, en tercera persona: es otro cruce con Cervantes. También lo es que Daniel Quinn, el personaje principal de la novela de Auster, lleve las mismas iniciales que Don Quijote...

Teoría II (de Córdoba a Brooklyn)

En la Segunda Parte del Quijote, Cervantes va entretejiendo cada vez más estrechamente la ficción con la realidad. ¿No sería divertido especular que el Quijote falso de 1614 no fue compuesto por un tal Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, sino que también fue obra del mismo Cervantes, quien lo habría compuesto —o encargado a un ghostwriter— y luego publicado con seudónimo para enriquecer su propio juego de “fantasía y realidad” por el lado de la realidad? Dice Paul Auster en Ciudad de cristal: “después de todo, el libro [el verdadero Quijote] es un ataque a los peligros de la simulación”. De ser así, ¿no perfeccionaba Cervantes la demostración de esa tesis haciéndose pasar como víctima de una simulación que pretendía robarle su propia creación, el Quijote? Además, el ardid también hubiera funcionado como promoción para la verdadera Segunda Parte de Cervantes, donde éste podría resarcirse de sus propios insultos, enalteciendo su honor al contestarse a sí mismo en el prólogo...

Es poco probable, lo sabemos. Lo único seguro al respecto es que a cierto escritor de Nueva York, esa posibilidad le encantaría.

When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last year's best-seller, we translate. Reader, actor, editor are translators of language out of time.

George Steiner, 'After Babel'

Així doncs, feliç Dia del Traductor a tots. (Deixeu-me, però, que feliciti especialment els qui vivim o intentem viure del tema.)

Aquestes paraules encapçalen un llibre que estic llegint, i del qual hauria de parlar més un dia d'aquests.

-------

Afegits:

D'una banda, una notícia publicada a l'Avui, a partir d'una entrevista als presidents de TRIAC i ATIC. El titular és una mica de llagrimeta, però diu quatre coses bàsiques prou encertades.

De l'altra, una frase de Paul Auster, cortesia de Rodamots d'aquest matí:

Els traductors són els herois ocults de la literatura, els instruments sovint oblidats que fan possible que les diferents cultures puguin comunicar-se i entendre que, des de qualsevol racó del món, tots vivim en un sol món.

After finishing my favourite author’s latest novel, I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s a slim novel of insomnia as seventy-two year old August Brill reports two of his strategies of dealing with his failure to fall asleep. Brill is living in a house of three generations of mourning, having recently lost his wife, while his daughter Miriam has been abandoned by her husband and the boyfriend of his grand-daughter, Katya has been killed in Iraq.

Brill’s first strategy is to tell the story of Owen Brick, a man summoned from our world to fight a war in an alternate world where the north-eastern states do not accept George W. Bush’s victory in the 2000 election. There was no 9/11 in this world and there is no war in Iraq, but there is instead a second civil war. The nightmarish war-torn America is perhaps a self-parodying indictment against Brill (and Auster) and all the other progressives who are certain that everything would have turned out better if only Bush hadn’t been president.

The story arc of Owen Brick is an engrossing one. Piece by piece he comes to understand more of the alternate world as he tries to escape his mission to assassinate the author of the war : August Brill. These sections are reminiscent of Auster’s lyrical post-apocalypse, In the country of last things. But in an unsatisfying move, Brill extinguishes the story quite suddenly, before Brick has a chance to reach Brill’s own home and confront him.

It’s this sense of a half-finished narrative within the novel that leads me to think Man in the dark is most comparable with Auster’s 2004 novel Oracle night, where a similar thing happens. Both seem deliberately unsatisfying.

Brill’s second strategy is to tell Katya (who can’t sleep either) the story of his marriage. It is a fascinating story, with obtuse parallels to Owen Brick’s story. Brill can now bring the wisdom of seventy-two years to analyse the way he lived as a younger man and the painful mistakes he made:

I’ve thought about this for years, and the only half-reasonable explanation I’ve ever come up with is that there’s something wrong with me, a flaw in the mechanism, a damaged part gumming up the works. I’m not talking about moral weakness. I’m talking about my mind, my mental makeup. I’m somewhat better now, I think, the problem seemed to diminish as I grew older, but back then, at thirty-five, thirty-eight, forty, I walked around with a feeling that my life had never truly belonged to me, that I had never truly inhabited myself, that I had never been real. And because I wasn’t real, I didn’t understand the effect I had on others, the damage I could cause, the hurt I could inflict on the people who loved me. (153)

Brill’s story manages to put Katya to sleep, leaving him to reflect in the last few pages of the novel on the horror of Katya’s boyfriend’s death. Perhaps it’s the shocking horror of the details of this that are actually the animating force behind the rest of the novel and its much slower horrors.

The novel finishes with Brill telling Miriam that the poet she is writing about, Rose Hawthorne, had one (and only one) good line: As the weird world rolls on.

If it sounds like it doesn’t all hang together, that’s because it doesn’t. In this novel Auster presents life as a bundle of narratives, some true, some imagined, some complete, some incomplete and all of them held together by the rather fragile and diverse unity of a person’s mind. Beyond this, I don’t get it. But neither could I put it down.

7/10

So went an attempt some time ago to explain to my wife why I spend so much time reading, and get stressed out when I'm not reading.  It is, admittedly, a fairly stupid reason for anxiety, given the other more pressing issues we have to worry about and, more to the point, the command (it is a command, you know) from our Lord to be anxious for nothing (which, of course, we immediately turn into one more thing to be anxious about).  But even so, there it is:  a long, long to-be-read list which seems only to grow with time.

This fall doesn't help.  All of my favorite authors, it seems, have new work coming out.  José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño (even the dead ones!).

Some of these will skip to the head of the line and some will land in the ever growing list, competing for my time with hundreds of others, not to mention those other things I have to do, such as work and, you know, spending time with actual people (whatever you think of Garrison Keillor, I do appreciate the little blurb he stuck at the beginning The Book of Guys: 'Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life...A book should not be used as a substitute or an excuse.')

For now, to whet your (or, at least, my) appetite, here is a recent interview with Marilynne Robinson from The Paris Review (HT:  Per Crucem ad Lucem):

When Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, she was unknown in the literary world. But an early review in The New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration,” wrote Anatole Broyard, with an enthusiasm and awe that was shared by many critics and readers. The book became a classic, and Robinson was hailed as one of the defining American writers of our time. Yet it would be more than twenty years before she wrote another novel.
In the interval, Robinson devoted herself to writing nonfiction. Her essays and book reviews appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, and in 1989 she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, a scathing examination of the environmental and public health dangers posed by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England— and the political and moral corruption that sustained it. In 1998, Robinson published a collection of her critical and theological writings, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, which featured reassessments of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Calvin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Aside from a single short story—“Connie Bronson,” published in The Paris Review in 1986—it wasn’t until 2004 that she returned to fiction with the novel Gilead, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, Home, came out this fall.
In person, even when clad in her favorite writing attire—a pair of loose pants and a sweatshirt—Robinson carries herself with a regal elegance. While she is humble about her accomplishments and the acclaim they have brought her, the force of her intellect is apparent. In her nonfiction books, as well as in her recent novels, she passionately engages public policy as well as philosophical and theological scholarship. Her experience in academia—she wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II at the University of Washington—made her a devout reader of primary texts, which remain the touchstones of her thought and conversation. Such intellectual pursuits clearly delight her. Her extemporizing on, say, Karl Marx’s Capital is often punctuated with laughter and blithe phrases such as “Oh, goody!” When a question gave her pause during our interview, she’d often shrug and say, “Calvin again,” and then look away as if the sixteenth-century Frenchman were standing in the room waiting to give her advice.
Robinson is a Christian whose faith is not easily reduced to generalities. Calvin’s thought has had a strong influence on her, and she depicts him in her essays as a misunderstood humanist, likening his “secularizing tendencies” to the “celebrations of the human one finds in Emerson and Whitman.”
Her novels could also be described as celebrations of the human—the characters that inhabit them are indelible creations. Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide. Robinson dwells on how each of the three is changed by their new life together. Gilead is an even more intimate exploration of personality: the book is given over to John Ames, a seventy-seven-year-old pastor who is writing an account of his life and his family history to leave to his young son after he dies. Home borrows characters from Gilead but centers on Ames’s friend Reverend Robert Boughton and his troubled son Jack. Robinson returned to the same territory as Gilead because, she said, “after I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters—I feel sort of bereaved.”
Gilead and Home are both set in Iowa, where Robinson has lived for nearly twenty years, teaching at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. For this interview, we met on six occasions over a five-month period. During that time, Iowa City seemed to experience every extreme of weather: two blizzards, frigid temperatures, hail, fog, spring rains, and severe thunderstorms. Shortly after our final meeting, the Iowa River reached record-setting flood levels.
Robinson leads a relatively solitary life. She is divorced, and her two sons are grown with families of their own. Her intellectual and creative ambitions leave little time for socializing. “I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself,” she said. But she also has both a cell phone and a BlackBerry and during our conversations the world would occasionally intrude to interrupt her stream of thought. At one point her BlackBerry beeped to tell her she had an e-mail, and she said it was from a former student. “Blurbs,” she said. “I owe the world blurbs.”
—Sarah Fay

INTERVIEWER Are there any unpublished Marilynne Robinson novels lying around that we don’t know about?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON In college, I was in a novel-writing class and I started a novel, which I loathed and detested the minute I graduated. It was as if worms had popped out of it or something. It was set in the Middle West, where I had never been—a little midwestern town with a river running through it. Isn’t that odd?

INTERVIEWER What eventually drew you to Iowa City?

ROBINSON The Workshop. I didn’t have any realistic conception of Iowa at all. I never expected to live in the Middle West because I had the same prejudices that other people have about the region. But when they invited me to teach here I thought it would be an interesting thing to do. So I came.

INTERVIEWER Were you told that it would compromise your creative energies to teach creative writing?

ROBINSON Yes, of course. But everything compromises your creative energies. Years ago I accepted a grant from the American Academy that was supposed to support me for five years without teaching. I lasted about a year and a half before I nearly went crazy. Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.

INTERVIEWER When you were little, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?

ROBINSON Oh, a hermit? My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. There we were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I’ll be the painter, you’ll be the poet.

INTERVIEWER Is it true that Housekeeping started as a series of metaphors you wrote while you were getting your Ph.D. in English literature?

ROBINSON When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. When I entered the Ph.D. program, I started writing these metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected. I could see that I had created something that implied much more. So I started writing Housekeeping, and the characters became important for me. I told a friend of mine, a writer named John Clayton, that I had been working on this thing, and he asked to see it. The next thing I knew, I got a letter from his agent saying that she would be happy to represent it.

INTERVIEWER Were you surprised?

ROBINSON I was, but these things always came with little caveats. She said, I’ll be happy to represent it but it could be difficult to place. She gave it to an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who wrote to me and said, We’d be very happy to publish it but it probably won’t be reviewed.

INTERVIEWER But then it was.

ROBINSON Anatole Broyard—God love him—reviewed it early because he thought no one would review it and he wanted to make sure it got attention.

INTERVIEWER How did you approach creating the characters of Ruthie and Sylvie in Housekeeping?

ROBINSON In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

INTERVIEWER Was your family religious?

ROBINSON My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact. We would talk more politics than anything else at the dinner table. And they were very Republican politics, I need hardly say. Or perhaps I do need to say.

INTERVIEWER What did your father do for a living?

ROBINSON He worked his way up in the lumber industry the old-fashioned way. The lumber industry was dominant in that part of Idaho. When you fly over the Rocky Mountains now, you see terrible clear-cutting, but back then there wasn’t the level of exploitation that there is now.

INTERVIEWER How did your family come to settle in the West?

ROBINSON We have a family legend about homesteading relatives in the nineteenth century—coming in covered wagons—dark forests, wolves, American Indians coming to ask for pie. My great grandmother was one of the first white people in a certain part of eastern Washington, and supposedly she would see an Indian standing outside the door, and she would go out, and he would say, Pie. That’s just a story, but the women in my family always bake pies. And they’re vain about it.

INTERVIEWER Do you bake pies?

ROBINSON I used to bake pies, when I had people to eat them. But I don’t any more.

INTERVIEWER What was your best pie?

ROBINSON Lemon meringue, which is a family tradition.

INTERVIEWER You’ve published only one short story, “Connie Bronson,” which appeared a few years after Housekeeping. Have you written others since then?

ROBINSON I wrote that story in college. I had a sort of fondness for it because it seemed to me to anticipate Housekeeping, though I had written it more than a decade earlier. So when The Paris Review asked me for something, I sent it off. I am actually interested by the fact that I never feel any impulse to write a short story. It is such an attractive form.
“Connie Bronson” has for me now the interest and charm of anyone’s juvenilia—that is, almost none at all.

INTERVIEWER In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?

ROBINSON I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

INTERVIEWER You said that Ames came to you as a voice. How did you know that it was your next novel?

ROBINSON I was at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown at Christmas time. Some students had asked me to come to do a reading. I reserved several rooms at an inn in the sunniest part of Provincetown, so that my sons, neither of whom was married at the time, could spend Christmas there with me. But they got delayed, so I had several days there by myself in an otherwise empty hotel, in a little room with Emily Dickinson light pouring in through the windows and the ocean roaring beyond. I had a spiral notebook, and I started thinking about this situation and the voice. And I started writing. Frankly, I was happy for the company.
I ended up writing that book like a serial novel. I would write thirty pages or so and then send it to the editor, and then write thirty more pages and send it to the editor.

INTERVIEWER Do you write longhand normally, or on a computer, or both?

ROBINSON On Gilead I went back and forth. Housekeeping I wrote longhand. I didn’t have a computer, and I’ve always been distracted by the sound of a typewriter.

INTERVIEWER How long did it take you to write Gilead?

ROBINSON I wrote it in about eighteen months. I write novels quickly, which is not my reputation.

INTERVIEWER Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

INTERVIEWER Ames believes that one of the benefits of religion is “it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore.” Is this something that your faith and religious practice has done for you?

ROBINSON Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

INTERVIEWER Is this frame of religion something we’ve lost?

ROBINSON There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We’re cultural creatures and meaning doesn’t simply generate itself out of thin air; it’s sustained by a cultural framework. It’s like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

INTERVIEWER How does science fit into this framework?

ROBINSON I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don’t merge in a comprehensible way, that’s a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

INTERVIEWER Are religion and science simply two systems that don’t merge?

ROBINSON The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can’t quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER You’ve written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It’s a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it’s always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.
The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

INTERVIEWER But doesn’t science address an objective notion of reality while religion addresses how we conceive of ourselves?

ROBINSON As an achievement, science is itself a spectacular argument for the singularity of human beings among all things that exist. It has a prestige that comes with unambiguous changes in people’s experience—space travel, immunizations. It has an authority that’s based on its demonstrable power. But in discussions of human beings it tends to compare downwards: we’re intelligent because hyenas are intelligent and we just took a few more leaps.
The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don’t behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.

INTERVIEWER Did you ever have a religious awakening?

ROBINSON No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.

INTERVIEWER How would one learn to see ordinary things this way?

ROBINSON It’s not an acquired skill. It’s a skill that we’re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it.

INTERVIEWER On occasion you give sermons at your church. How did that come about?

ROBINSON If we need someone to give a sermon because the pastor is ill or out of town then typically they ask someone from the congregation to give the sermon. Since I write about these things, often they ask me.

INTERVIEWER Do you ever get nervous being the sub?

ROBINSON Yes, I do. You’re talking within a congregation. They know the genre. There are many things that the sermon has to resonate with besides the specific text that is the subject of the sermon. In my tradition, there’s a certain posture of graciousness you have to answer to no matter what the main subject matter of the sermon is.

INTERVIEWER Graciousness?

ROBINSON The idea that you draw a line and say, The righteous people are on this side and the bad people are on the other side—this is not gracious.

INTERVIEWER Your new novel Home is set in the same time and place as Gilead and incorporates many of the same characters. Why did you decide to return to their story?

ROBINSON After I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters—I feel sort of bereaved. So I was braced for the experience after Gilead. Then I thought, If these characters are so strongly in my mind, why not write them? With Jack and old Boughton especially, and with Glory also, I felt like there were whole characters that had not been fully realized in Ames’s story. I couldn’t really see the point in abandoning them.
Then I had to make sure that the chronolog y clicked and certain phrases that occur in the first book occur in the second. For example, the dinner party—Ames is there but doesn’t say a word about it in Gilead. It’s completely consistent with Ames as a character that he would not choose to report a situation that he found painful or that he thought would reinforce unfortunate memories. But I wanted Home to be a freestanding book. I didn’t want it to be a sequel. I wanted it to be true that you could pick up either book first.

INTERVIEWER Whereas Gilead reads almost like a meditation—John Ames is writing it to his son—Home has a different personality.

ROBINSON So much of the novel is dialogue. I was really surprised. I kept thinking, I’ve got to stop doing this—it’s just one dialogue scene after another.

INTERVIEWER Do you plot your novels?

ROBINSON I really don’t. There was a frame, of course, for Home, because it had to be symbiotic with Gilead. Aside from that, no. I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.

INTERVIEWER The focus of the novel is Jack, but it’s told from Glory’s point of view. Did you ever consider putting it in his point of view?

ROBINSON Jack is thinking all the time—thinking too much—but I would lose Jack if I tried to get too close to him as a narrator. He’s alienated in a complicated way. Other people don’t find him comprehensible and he doesn’t find them comprehensible.

INTERVIEWER Is it hard to write a “bad” character?

ROBINSON Calvin says that God takes an aesthetic pleasure in people. There’s no reason to imagine that God would choose to surround himself into infinite time with people whose only distinction is that they fail to transgress. King David, for example, was up to a lot of no good. To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can’t believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.

INTERVIEWER How do you write historical figures in your novels?

ROBINSON My unvarying approach to anything is to read the most primary and proximate material that I can find. I try to be discreet in my use of historical figures. My John Brown is only a voice heard in the darkness.

INTERVIEWER Does your faith ever conflict with your “regular life”?

ROBINSON When I’m teaching, sometimes issues come up. I might read a scene in a student’s story that seems—by my standards—pornographic. I don’t believe in exploiting or treating with disrespect even an imagined person. But at the same time, I realize that I can’t universalize my standards. In instances like that, I feel I have to hold my religious reaction at bay. It is important to let people live out their experience of the world without censorious interference, except in very extreme cases.

INTERVIEWER What is the most important thing you try to teach your students?

ROBINSON I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies. I don’t see any reason in fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination.

INTERVIEWER Do you read contemporary fiction?

ROBINSON I’m not indifferent to contemporary literature; I just don’t have any time for it. It’s much easier for my contemporaries to keep up with me than it is for me to keep up with them. They’ve all written fifteen books.

INTERVIEWER What is your opinion of literary criticism?

ROBINSON I know this is less true than it has been, but the main interest of criticism seems to be criticism. It has less to do with what people actually write. In journalistic criticism, the posture is too often that writers are making a consumer product they hope to be able to clean up on. I don’t think that living writers should be treated with the awe that is sometimes reserved for dead writers, but if a well-known writer whose work tends to garner respect takes ten years to write a novel and it’s not the greatest novel in the world, dismissiveness is not an appropriate response. An unsuccessful work might not seem unsuccessful in another generation. It may be part of the writer’s pilgrimage.

INTERVIEWER Do you have any writing rituals, habits, or peculiarities?

ROBINSON I dress like a bum. John Cheever would wear a suit and a hat and go down from his apartment to the basement of his building with an attaché case. But that’s not me. I like to be as forgetful of my own physical being as I can be.

INTERVIEWER Do you write in your study or do you occupy every room of the house?

ROBINSON I do a lot in the study, but the couch also, and so on. It’s nice to be able to move around and not be completely bound to one place or another, the way some people are. Although I do stay inside my own house. That’s crucial.

INTERVIEWER Why is that crucial?

ROBINSON Because I can forget my surroundings. And I don’t get distracted by thinking, Who chose that painting? I know who chose that painting.

INTERVIEWER Does writing come easily to you?

ROBINSON The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.

INTERVIEWER Do you keep to a schedule?

ROBINSON I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not something on my mind that I really want to write about, I tend to write something that I hate. And that depresses me. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to live through the time it takes for it to go up the chimney. Maybe it’s a question of discipline, maybe temperament, who knows? I wish I could have made myself do more. I wouldn’t mind having written fifteen books.

INTERVIEWER Even if many of them were mediocre?

ROBINSON Well, no.

INTERVIEWER Do you keep a journal or diary?

ROBINSON At various times in my life I’ve bought a little finely ornamented volume with a clasp, and written a couple of days’ worth of reflections. And then I come back to it and I think, What an idiot.

INTERVIEWER What about revision? Is it an intensive process or do you let the first draft stand?

ROBINSON If I write something and don’t like it, I basically toss it. And I try to write it again or I write something else that has the same movement. But as far as going back and working over something that I’ve already written—I really don’t do that. I know there’s a sentence that I need, and I just run it through my mind until it sounds right. Most of my revision occurs before I put words down on the paper.

INTERVIEWER Does that happen when you’re sitting at your desk or on the couch or do you write in your head all day long?

ROBINSON If I’m writing, I write in my head all the time. But as far as inventing, I try to do that only when I’m physically writing. If I get an idea while I’m walking home on the bridge, I think, Close that down, because if I think through a scene, I’ll wreck it by the time I get a pen in my hand.

INTERVIEWER Most people know you as a novelist, but you spend a lot of your time writing nonfiction. What led you to start writing essays?

ROBINSON To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out—I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea—or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that’s true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn’t be learning anything new.
In this culture, essays are often written for the sake of writing the essay. Someone finds a quibble of potential interest and quibbles about it. This doesn’t mean the writer isn’t capable of doing something of greater interest, but we generate a lot of prose that’s not vital. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

INTERVIEWER How do you decide on a topic for your essays?

ROBINSON It almost always comes as a surprise. I got to Marguerite de Navarre because I was reading a translation of Dante’s Inferno and I started looking into the context in which it was written. The Albigensian Crusades, which killed an enormous number of people, occurred just before Dante wrote Inferno. Whether Dante was influenced by Albigensianism or not I don’t know, but it was the Inferno that made me remember Albigensianism and made me start reading about the culture of southern France and discover Marguerite de Navarre, who was an older contemporary of Calvin.

INTERVIEWER Have you gotten to a point where you welcome that kind of indirectness?

ROBINSON I’ve learned to trust it. I worry about participating in the consensuses of opinion because frankly they don’t bear out very well. When I notice something that seems like an anomaly to me, I try to sort it out. It’s an impulse. I think, Gee, this might lead me to refurnish my mind in a certain way. I find the alternative undignified: you have your little life and live through it and trip along and fall into your grave.

INTERVIEWER In your essay “Facing Reality,” from The Death of Adam, you point out that many Americans have a poor sense of American history—or history in general.

ROBINSON We archaize Abraham Lincoln—he’s somehow premodern—at the same time that we use Marx to epitomize modernity. Yet the two of them were engaged in the same conversation. The slave economy and the industrial economy were interlocked. Marx is considered modern because he describes an ongoing phenomenon, industrialism, which once again is starting to resemble slavery—child labor and so on. You take a course as a sophomore in college called Modern Western Civilization and you get Marx and Nietzsche, but you don’t get Lincoln. The fact that they were all wearing frock coats and stovepipe hats doesn’t register.

INTERVIEWER You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

INTERVIEWER Do you suffer from anxiety?

ROBINSON I probably experience less anx