I recently finished reading Michael Ondaatje’ Divisadero and found it to be one hell of a book. In case you don’t know who this guy is, he’s a Sri Lankan now living in Canada, and the author of Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient. I haven’t read all his novels, but I’ve followed him since his ‘In the skin of a lion’. In all those books, his prose is beautiful. In fact he’s a poet. Perhaps that’s why I felt his prose strive to be poems. But I didn’t really understand ‘In the skin of a lion’. I mean I understood the story, but I couldn’t understand its 3 main characters. I don’t want to elaborate on this issue. The he wrote ‘The English Patien’, for which he won the Booker Prize. It was a much easier read, even though with it’s countless flashbacks it felt like a labyrinth. It’s characters were much better, much easier to identify with. Especially Coun Almasy, who I think is one of the most memorable literary characters ever. Far more interesting than those Sherlock Holmeses and Harry Potters. The he wrote ‘Anil’s Ghost’, a story set in Sri Lanka in the late 80s. This I think is his best work, even though it wasn’t much different from ‘The English Patient’. But it was more controlled and more straightforward. There were less poetic prose though. But it was emotionally moving than any of his other novels. Divisadero is an unconventional novel in every sense of the word. First we read one story, then stop it, and read another, with only a barely visible link between them. You have to read the whole novel to understand it. In Divisadero, Ondaatje returns to writing excessive poetic prose phrases. And they were absolutely beautiful. There were times I had to stop reading because of the sheer power of words. Read it. You’ll see.

I love this article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal over a month ago. Okay, I’m late to find it, but it is a good read.  The article explores the writing habits of famous writers including Nicholson Baker, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Junot Diaz, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood. Several of the writers still write early drafts by hand, eschewing the computer until the final draft.

I just realised that there is no laid law against reading two books at once, so I have started reading In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje as well. It’s in e-book format, the format that I, to be very frank, loathe with the passion of ten thousand fiery suns. But it is a format I deal with at work, so there. We shall make do, sirs and madams. We shall make do.

Oh. You see what I did there? I’m starting this out with the most inoffensive yet highly impactful writers I know – and they are Canadian! Sweet, witty, altogether masterful Canadians who did not come conquering and did not leave architectural traces of their colonisation behind. I rather love them. And there’s a story in this. I’ll tell you later (yes I am keeping track of these laters even if you are not).

Later.

I believe in conversations.

And the conversations I always learn the most from are those I have with people who are not too much like me. They may not blow me away (I’m afraid I’m sort of granite-like), they may not change my world (I rather like my world), and I might enjoy them more for me than for them (don’t we all), but they certainly add facets and perspectives to my life that make it more deeply worth having. They open windows onto existence that I didn’t know were there, and for someone who likes sunlight as much as I do, that’s reason enough.

I believe the same thing about literature.

Some important people have said that Americans are too insular when it comes to their books; this is, of course, not the case. After all, American books and those closely related to it, from Britain, sell wildly in most other countries, both in the original English and in translation. Most international writers read American fiction: The world is very much in dialogue with American literature. It’s just that American literature isn’t very good at listening back. It pontificates. It talks. It discourses. It shines. It glitters. It amuses. It does all those things really well. But, like so many brilliants, it often neglects to care what the patient and equally intelligent audience might have to say, what’s on its mind, how its day was, whether perhaps it might have something equally brilliant or even more insightful to say.

Most of us here in America know this, too, in those moments when we make ourselves read books more foreign than, say, Canadian ones like Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient, the short stories of Alice Munro, or Margaret Atwood’s many strange and thought-provoking novels. (Her short story “Happy Endings” is still one of my favorites, by the way.) After all, we all get quite excited — albeit that excitement might run the gambit from ecstatic to virulent — when some professor makes us read Kafka, Achebe, Mann, or García Márquez for his survey course. We don’t mind mentioning that we enjoyed Hesse, Remarque, Borges, or Bolaño. Since nobody has ever read him, we love smirking at people who mention how much they enjoy Proust. We acknowledge the worldliness of those who can say they’ve been reading Pamuk, or Ōe, or Eco. We feel good about reading mysteries written by Scandinavians like Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, or Arnaldur Indriðason.

But then we get over it, like we get over the sushi craze or Yellow Tail wine. The books become conversation pieces we might leave lying around coffee tables, to buy five minutes mutual assurances of, yes, look, we are both cultured and interesting, when an awkward silence threatens to mar our hospitality towards the most recent set of guests and the prints of paintings on the wall have exhausted themselves.

But what if, instead of getting bored with such inroads into other literatures because we have allowed ourselves to feel pretentious, instead of finding ourselves embarrassed at one more conversation that boils down to showing that we, too, are open-minded and exotic  – what if we delved deeper, beyond the cliché, beyond the tired checklists, beyond the few outliers that make it here from their roaring successes in Paris, London, or Berlin, the places that matter as much, or more, to the world’s literary conversation as New York does? What if a constant exchange with other literatures became so natural and normal to us that we don’t even need to mention it anymore?

The Dalkey Archive Press has decided to become even more proactive in promoting translated fiction by publishing, for the first time, a collection of short stories modeled roughly on the Best American Short Stories series, except that this collection will include short stories from all over Europe — including such countries as Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Macedonia, and Liechtenstein. It’s edited by Chicago writer Aleksandar Hemon and titled Best European Fiction 2010.

Gregory Cowles from the The New York Times Book Review has interviewed Aleksandar Hemon about the collection for the Paper Cuts blog:

Q. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?

It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.

Q. Could you, then, venture to define what makes a story particularly “European”?

Europe is fantastically dense, varied and small by American standards. Everything is within two hours by plane. It takes as long to drive from, say, Norway to Greece as it does from Chicago to Miami. And if you were to drive from Norway to Greece, you would pass through countless different landscapes, cultures, languages, histories. Yet each of these autonomous spaces is bound together by a common überhistory — no country or language or people managed to escape the calamities of the 20th century, for example, or the vast migrations that have been taking place since World War II, peaking in the last couple of decades. It is impossible to retain an ethnically clean space in Europe, despite periodical genocide or the exclusionary policies of European governments. What is European, then, is that cultures and literatures always see themselves in relation to other cultures and languages — sometimes in opposition, sometimes in kinship, often both at the same time.

Q. Do any of the represented countries seem to you to have especially vibrant fiction scenes right now?

I was really impressed by the Baltic countries: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland. Translating those pieces alone justifies the project.

And because, like I said, I am interested in such conversations, I’ve ordered a copy of the book and am expecting it today or tomorrow. I will be blogging about stories and authors from the collection here once a week or so, just to see whether we, as literary people in the U.S., might not want to take up some of these writers on their offer to say something, to open up a window to life that we did not yet know was there. And to explore also whether, perhaps, it would be worth it to us to share those stories with others — our friends, our colleagues, and even, for those of us who also teach, in one of those survey courses.

I love stationery. Probably a little too much. There. I said it.

I thought I ought to acknowledge this, particularly as, for the first time, stationery got a few mentions on the blog, in my post on writing.

First, there was the Wall Street Journal article, How to Write a Great Novel. Reading through it, it was clear that stationery is pretty central for many writers. It’s not just about scribbling on any old sheet of paper – each writer has their own needs and wants, when it comes to what to actually write on, and write with.

Orhan Pamuk writes in graph-paper notebooks. Hilary Mantel always carries a notebook. Kazuo Ishiguro collects notes in a binder. Michael Ondaatje has a thing for notebooks from Muji. Dan Chaon writes on colour-coded note cards.

Margaret Atwood is perhaps less fussy, scribbling away on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers. (Interlude: Working that way reminds me of an interview with Elvis Costello I read. He said that despite buying many notebooks with the intention of using them for lyric writing, they would often be left unused, as he would end up scrawling his ideas on whatever pieces of paper came to hand. He clearly can be in my Stationery Fan Club, as his intentions are good, but it is interesting that he and Atwood are not tied to a particular method for physically writing their work.)

I was then delighted to see that the world of WordPress has a few stationery fans too. Frances Bean commented, “There was nothing like a fresh compilation notebook and the possibility it holds.” There is definitely something special about that new notebook, ready to be filled. Sometimes it almost seems a shame to write in a good notebook. Almost.

So why do I love stationery? From a very, very young age I enjoyed having paper and pencils. Apparently, before I could write, I would scribble on page upon page, convinced I had written a story, and would then ‘read’ it back to my parents. When I was a little older I’d spend hours writing in A4 pads. Sometimes I’d write stories, sometimes I’d make up football scores, sometimes I’d make up entire discographies of imaginary bands. Paper and pencil was a means of channelling my imagination. I was as happy with a new exercise book as I would be with a bag of sweets.

As an adult I’ve continued to enjoy using stationery, especially notebooks. I’m a real sucker for Moleskine notebooks and have completely fallen for their marketing and stories of famous writers and artists using them in the past. I find them wonderfully tactile, sturdy and just right for carrying wherever I go. They are a bit of luxury, but hardly an extravagant one.

I can also be quite fussy with pens, although so far I’ve shamefully stuck to the disposable type. One day I’ll find the right ‘proper’ pen. One day.

My Significant Other shares this love, luckily for me. We’ll happily mooch around the huge Staples superstore near where we live, or smaller shops we find, like the pen shop we came across whilst holidaying in Eastbourne. As silly as it sounds, enjoying stationery has been a lovely, fun thing for us to share.

I suppose when it comes to me actually writing, with this blog or whatever else, I’m far more likely to use my laptop than pen and paper. But my notebooks are still really important to me. I enjoy having something to hand to jot an idea in, or write a list, or to simply play around with an idea. And there is something more satisfying for me to use a notebook for this, rather than a laptop, or smart phone (not that I have one), when I’m out and about. I look forward to, many years from now, looking through those notebooks and reading those snatches of my thoughts, those snapshots of a past me.

So, do you covet particular items of stationery? If you use pen and paper, are you fussy about the pen and paper you use? Does it depend on what you’re writing? Or where? Or do you think this is all stuff and nonsense?

Photo from mrbill via Flickr

The English Patient

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if waking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

I totally missed this from a couple of weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal tracked down 11 writers and asked them how they put together their novels. Here’s the excerpt from Michael Ondaatje:

Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.

Words come easily for the author—the bulk of the work is arranging and rewriting sentences. “I don’t understand this whole concept of writer’s block,” says Mr. Ondaatje, who says he is working on a novel at the moment but declines to elaborate. “If I get stuck, I work on another scene.”

Mr. Ondaatje, who started out as a poet, says plots often come to him as “a glimpse of a small situation.” His 1992 novel “The English Patient” started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.

Sometimes he goes through an “anarchic” stage, cutting out characters or rearranging scenes. “Some writers know what the last sentence is going to be before they begin—I don’t even know what the second sentence is going to be,” says Mr. Ondaatje, whose most recent novel, “Divisadero,” came out in 2007.

How to Write a Great Novel: Junot Diaz, Anne Rice, Margaret Atwood and Other Authors Tell – WSJ.com

A couple of our participants read and reviewed The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje for the WWII reading challenge.  Here are excerpts from their reviews; click the links to read the complete reviews.

Kathy from Bermudaonion’s Weblog says:

Even though the writing in this book is beautiful, the story was slow for me.  I read this book years ago (when the movie was released) and re-read it recently.  I enjoyed it more the second time around, but still didn’t feel any great affinity for it.

And Amy from My Friend Amy says:

The English Patient is not the kind of book you pick up and think you will read through easily. At first I wasn’t too worried, it wasn’t that long and I figured I would read it quickly enough. I was very wrong. It took me quite awhile to read this book as I often had no idea what I was reading. I had to go back and reread sections and I was still confused. I had a hard time latching onto any timeline or cohesive plot. If I didn’t have the images of the film in my mind, or if this wasn’t a book club pick, I would never have been able to complete it.

**Attention participants:  Remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**

Dear B.G.:

Has Glenda Jackson returned to the screen? The last I heard she had retired to work full time as the Labour Member of Parliament  for the constituency of  Hampstead and Highgate in the London. But I recently caught a glimpse of her, or at least I think it was her, in a movie trailer with Daniel Day Lewis. What is the movie? And why haven’t I read about her comeback? -- Curious in Kelowna

Dear C.I.K.:

Ms Jackson is still lobbying for her British constituents and as far as I know has no immediate plans to return to the screen. The actress with the striking Touch

NINE: It's Judi, not Glenda

Of Class bob in that movie trailer is the inimitable Dame Judi Dench, who may be channeling Glenda, for all we know. And you’re right, it is Daniel Day Lewis. The movie is directort Rob (Chicago) Marshall’s screen version of the Broadway musical Nine, which of course was the stage version of Federico Fellini’s 8½. So Day Lewis is playing a role originated on screen by Marcello Mastroianni and on stage by Raul Julia (and most recently Antonio Banderas.) And in the movie the key women in his life are played by Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson and Ms. Dench. Anticipated as a spectacular gift to fans of movie musicals, Nine is scheduled to open here on Christmas Day.

Dear B.G.:

Is it true that Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel Divisadero is being made into a movie? And if so when will it open? – Ondaatje disciple Benjamin K.

Dear B.K.:

I won’t be surprised if Divisadero eventually reaches the big screen.  In the meantime, the Necessary Angel theatre company, director Daniel Brooks and

BALABAN: next weekend

the author himself are rethinking his novel as a play, with a view to a 2010/2011 opening with subsequent touring. Title of the stage production is When My Name Was Anna, and you don’t have to wait to 2010 to sample it. Next weekend Liane Balaban, Maggie Huculak, Tom McCamus and Amy Rutherford are set to appear in three work-in-progress presentations of When My Name Was Anna, directed by Brooks, at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace. For more information, click here.

Dear B.G.:

I saw a Broadway musical a few years ago called 10 Million Miles. It didn’t last very long, and we didn’t keep the Playbill, but I’m sure

10 MILLION MILES: guess who?

the male lead was Justin Timberlake. My wife saw your blog about Glee and says the male lead was the guy who plays the teacher, Matthew Morrison. Can you settle this domestic dispute? -- Hoping I’m Right

Dear H.I.R.,

Sorry, you lose. 10 Million Miles is one of several Broadway shows, including Hairspray and South Pacific, in which Matthew Morrison appeared. But he did have a Timberlake look about him in that show, so don’t beat yourself up too badly. Morrison, who is also a rapper and a beat box hoofer, loves performing on stage for a live audience. But he’s equally passionate about Glee, and with good reason. “More people saw the pilot of Glee,” he notes, “than saw me in the entire ten years I was on Broadway.”

Dear B.G.:

Did I miss the Gemini Awards? I read somewhere that Geminis were handed out in Toronto this month, but I was sure that this year’s show was supposed to be in Calgary. What happened? – proud Canadian TV addict

Dear P.C.T.A.:

Yeah, it does get confusing at times. Fear not, you haven’t missed the boat – or the show, for that matter.  The 24th Annual Gemini Awards Broadcast Gala is just two weeks away, and will be broadcast live on Global and Showcase at 9pm

MONTEITH: Calgary-bound

ET/PT Saturday November 14 from the BMO Centre in Calgary. Presenters flying in to Alberta for the show include Hugh Dillon (Flashpoint,) Erin Karpluk (Being Erica,) Jessica Lucas (Melrose Place,) Amber Marshall & Graham Wardle (Heartland,) Mark McKinney (Less Than Kind,) Cory Monteith (Glee,) George Stroumboulopoulos and Rick Mercer. Host for the evening is Ron James, who BTW has two Gemini alumnus on his show tonight: Eric Peterson (Corner Gas) and Deb McGrath (Little House On The Prairie.) So don’t forget to set your PVR.

Have a great weekend!

-/-

OUR TOWN: Art director Pat Flood moderates a Theatre Museum Canada free-admission workshop on the state of artistic collaboration in contemporary

HYATT: at Statler's

Canadian theatre tonight at 7 pm at the Design Exchange … filmmaker Omar Majeed is here this week for Q&As after Royal Cinema screenings of his new doc, TAQWACORE: The Birth of Muslim Punk Rock. Novelist and Muslim convert Michael Muhammad Knight, the guy who penned the book that gave birth to underground Muslim bands, will join him in a panel discussion on Saturday … Chicago-based singer and songwriter Susan Werner — she of ‘agnostic gospel music’ notoriety — is set to perform in her first Toronto concert in three years at Hugh’s Room this coming Sunday. To mark the occasion she’ll accompany herself on a

BEDFORD: as Lady Bracknell

baby grand loaned to Hugh’s Room by Skydiggers member Michael Johnston … and my spies tell me Pam Hyatt has agreed to join piano man Ken Lindsay for another serenade of cocktail hour show tunes this Thursday at Statler’s.

STRATFORD ON SALE: They’ve had a phenomenal season with great ticket sales, but if you still haven’t been to the Stratford Festival this year, here’s a deal you definitely need to know about. Right now you can buy $29 tickets for plays or $39 tickets for musicals on any of the remaining performances until the Stratford season ends on November 8. See Colm Feore

CULLEN: at the Forum (photo: David Hou)

as Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac, catch Brian Bedford’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest, follow Sean Cullen in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To The Forum, choose from Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and West Side Story, or choose them all — but don’t delay, because this special offer ends tomorrow, October 20! So click here for the Stratford

ONDAATJE: Divisadero workshops

season calendar and order your tickets now.

FOOTLIGHTS: Acclaimed theatre director Daniel Brooks is working with acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje to adapt the latter’s most recent novel, Divisadero, for the stage. Ondaatje fans can get to see three workshop productions of When My Name Was Anna, the theatrical adaptation, at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace November 6-8.  To order tickets, click here … Sampradaya Dance Creations hosts the world premiere of its newest work, Samvad, collectively

TRUJILLO: opening tonight

created and performed by dancers Meena Murugesan, Nadine Jackson and Shelly Ann McLeod, this weekend at the Enwave Theatre … and one fan who attended a preview performance of Memphis, a new musical about the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s, says he was “FLOORED by the choreography! The lighting design was spectacular, and some of the vocal performances were brilliant!” Has choreographer Sergio Trujillo summoned up his Jersey Boys magic to light up New York again? Fingers crossed. Memphis, which also features a brand new score with music by Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan, opens on Broadway tonight at the Shubert Theatre.

MAPLE LEAF JOKES? WE’VE GOT A MILLION OF ‘EM:

Q: What do the Leafs and the Titanic have in common?
A: They both look good until they hit the ice.

TOMORROW:

The good that men do.

(And the women who do it with them.)

.

This is an excerpt from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.  One of the story lines in the novel is about explorers looking for a mythical desert oasis city.  Madox – the man who kills himself in the excerpt below – is a quiet explorer who has just returned to his wife back home, his work interrupted by the war’s incursion into the north African desert.

One of Ondaatje’s themes is nationalism.  When the Church becomes a propaganda arm of a warring state, civilized people kill themselves.  At least this civilized man does.  The uncivilized demur and look for profits.  And the flunkie priest in his robes blathers on.

It was July 1939.  They caught a bus from their village into Yeovil.  The bus had been slow and so they had been late for the service.  At the back of the crowded church, in order to find seats they decided to sit separately.  When the sermon began half an hour later, it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war.  The priest intoned blithely about battle, blessing the government and the men about to enter the war.  Madox listened as the sermon grew more impassioned.  He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart.  He was dead immediately.  A great silence.  Desert silence.  Planeless silence.  They heard his body collapse against the pew.  Nothing else moved.  The priest frozen in a gesture.  It was like those silences when a glass funnel round a candle in church splits and all faces turn.  His wife walked down the centre aisle, stopped at his row, muttered something, and they let her in beside him.  She knelt down, her arms enclosing him.

/…/

It is important to die in holy places.  That was one of the secrets of the desert.  So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.

~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje, before a reading at the Chamber Of Commerce in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Here is a list of winds and sandstorms in the Middle East and North Africa described by Michael Ondaatje in his beautiful book The English Patient.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives.  There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome.  The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia.  The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues.  These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise.  The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days — burying villages.  There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition.  Th haboob — a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain.  The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic.  Imbat, a breeze in North Africa.  Some winds that just sigh towards the sky.  Night dust storms that come with the cold.  The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days — the ninth plague of Egypt.  The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.

There is also the ——, the secret wind of the desert whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.  And the nafhat — a blast out of Arabia.  The mezzar-ifoullousen — a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.”  The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.”  The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle.  As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

Other, private winds.

Seeing you
I want no other life

originally from: Michael Ondaatje’s poem Secular Love
discovered on: arcadia’s blog

…acesta ar fi cuvantul care ar rezuma cel mai bine primul roman publicat de Michael Ondaatje in 1976. Nu prea stiam la ce sa ma astept, mai ales ca dupa ce am citit Divisadero am ramas cu pareri amestecate in privinta scriitorului. Dar cineva s-a gandit ca mi-ar placea atmosfera New Orleansului inceputului de secol XX asa ca l-am lasat pe Ondaatje sa-mi mai spuna o poveste, cea a lui Buddy Bolden, trompetist asociat cu inceputurile jazzului din a carui muzica nu a ramas insa nimic inregistrat. Pana acum viata lui a capatat contur prin marturiile celor care l-au cunoscut, zvonuri sau diverse documente neoficiale astfel incat citind cartea sau cautand detalii despre Buddy Bolden ai impresia ca e vorba de o legenda si nu un personaj real.

In Coming through Slaughter confuzia e accentuata si de modul in care Ondaatje fragmenteaza capitolele cu descrieri ale New Orleansului, interviuri ale cunoscutilor lui Bolden sau ale celor care au cantat cu el, anchete ale politiei, versuri, rapoarte ale spitalului de boli mintale unde a fost internat in ultima parte a vietii.  In privinta personajelor secundare, exista in carte o multime de povesti interesante, mi-a placut mai ales cea a lui  Ernest J. Bellocq, un fotograf care a ramas cunoscut pentru fotografiile prostituatelor din Storyville dar de care pana acum nici nu auzisem.

Pentru prima carte publicata cred ca Ondaatje a riscat destul de mult, sa lase subiectul in plan secundar si sa experimenteze atat de mult cu forma romanului. Nu ma intelegeti gresit: jocul de oglinzi care lasa sa se intrevada viata lui Bolden e interesant si toate acele divagatii sfarsesc prin a contura un alt personaj sau un detaliu important din viata muzicianului dar cred ca in final depinde ce asteptari ai ca cititor. O persoana interesata de viata lui Bolden ar putea fi dezamagita pentru ca de-a lungul lecturii nu stii ce e adevar si ce fictiune in romanul lui Ondaatje asa cum esti si avertizat la sfarsitul romanului de micile ajustari ale datelor sau faptelor. Dar daca citesti cartea de curiozitate, ca experiment sau pentru atmosfera New Orleansului jocurilor de noroc, al prostituatelor si jazzului, ai putea sa le dai dreptate celor care o considera “the finest jazz novel ever written”.

Man Booker Prize is to the literary world what Oscar is to Hollywood. This prize is awarded to the writers from the Commonwealth countries. My first ever Booker Prize read was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I believe that book’s every sentence deserved that coveted prize. The second book I read was DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. It was awesome but due to bold language and Texan accents not many people liked it (here). The third book was Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I loved the flow of the book.

From Pakistan in 2007 Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted (It was one of the final six books) but unfortunately it couldn’t win so Pakistan has yet to claim a Booker Prize winning author.

This year’s Booker Prize was awarded to British writer Hilary Mantel for her 16th century political saga Wolf Hall. I’ll try to get my hands on it.

Some other famous Booker Prize winning novels are Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie. The Famished Road (1991) by Ben Okri. The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje. Life of Pi (2002) by Yann Martel etc.

Trivia

Including authors with dual citizenship, the United Kingdom has the most winners of the prize at 25. Second is Australia with six winners (counting both Coetzee and Carey twice); Ireland and India each have four winners. [Wikipedia]

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner’s daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.

On September 12:

1575 English explorer Henry Hudson was born.

1846 Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning.

1848 Switzerland became a federal state.

1888 French entertainer Maurice Chevalier was born.

1913 USA athlete Jesse Owens was born.

1943 Sri Lankan-born Canadian author Michael Ondaatje was born.

1981 the All Blacks and Springboks played the third test at Eden park in spite of flour bombs which were dropped from the air.

Sourced from NZ History Online and Wikipedia.

I interviewed Michael Ondaatje in October 1992. He had just published The English Patient and was in Norwich for the annual UEA writers’ festival. We met at the station hotel, a gloomy building overlooking the River Wensum, and talked for an hour or so in its deserted foyer lounge - the only distraction, as I recall, a parade of swans drifting by outside the window. Their sinister elegance made a fitting backdrop for a writer whose work, to that moment, had been full of Dainty Monsters (the title of his first collection of poetry in 1967), paradoxical presences echoing a dualism never fully reconciled, but marking him out and making him an instructive, pertinent, but also rather tantalizing subject: an odd mixture of the old-fashioned and new-made, a poet of intimacy and of the mysteries of the human heart, but also one intent on the multitudinousness of life. Ondaate seemed, then, something rare among contemporary writers: a romantic postmodernist. Much of our discussion about the uses of lyricism or emotion in writing, and about multi-stranded story, reflects this – and dates the interview (such ideas are now commonplace); while the abrupt shifts in conversation - many avenues are opened but not pursued - make the piece rather scrappy. But I think it’s worth including here not least for the way in which it tries to grapple with contemporary arguments about the possibilities of novel writing. My memory of the afternoon is a little hazy. I had a streaming cold and expected Ondaatje to show me the door the minute I started sneezing. In the event, he was friendlier than I had a right to expect, and at the end of the interview scribbled down the name of a herbal medicine he thought I should try.

KW: Gunter Grass talked of migration as the most common experience of the twentieth century and I wanted to begin by asking you about your own – from Sri Lanka to England, and from England to Canada. You were eleven when you arrived in England, what did it feel like?

MO: It was pretty much a culture shock for me.

KW: Had you visited before?

MO: No, I’d never left. My main image was of a country that was always under snow. The few photographs I’d seen had snow in them so it was quite a shock when I arrived, I think in September, to find there was no snow. But there was this culture shock which happened to me twice in one decade. The one in England was stronger because I didn’t want it – to come here and go to school.

KW: Was it a boarding school?

MO: No I wasn’t a boarder, luckily. I think that’s what saved me, some of my family were here.  So I had my daily life, and the Sri Lankan connections were still there. But it did feel very strange. I remember the first day of school was a nightmare, all these strange customs and rules and pieces of clothing.

KW: And the cold, did it bother you? I remember Wilson Harris, who I interviewed for a film, telling me he found England so exotic, coming from Guyana – just the way the seasons change. 

MO: Well it was exotic. And I got totally caught up in it because I had to forget my past: in order to deal with the present I had to forget my past.

KW: And were you cut off from your immediate family for that period?

MO: No, because my mother and brother and sister were all here. I was only a boarder for the last year. I didn’t feel cut off from the life I’d lived as a child, which was not so much grand as just very free  and all over the place.

KW: You said in one interview that you felt England seemed like a place where if you began a job you’d have to stay stuck in it for the rest of your life, a very static place, and this was why you decided to move on to somewhere else.

MO: Yeah. I think when I finished school I felt like that. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. I just didn’t want to do what seemed possible to me here at the time. It was pre-Sixties, pre-Beatles, so it was a couple of years before eveything changed. And it felt like we were at a certain level that seemed a nightmare to me. We had no money and no contacts or even real skills as far as we knew. So it was a job in a chartered acountant firm or something like that, which I knew nothing about.

KW: And what about the other kids at school? What sort of a place was it?

MO: It was a real mixture, a public school, one of the early Eleven Plus ones. It was not just the aristocracy or anything like that.

KW: And why did you make your escape to Canada?

MO: My brother had been earlier.

KW: Salman Rushdie talked of his school days in England, and of the advantages he had being hybrid – being mixed and complex enough to grapple with modernity. Do you feel the same?

MO: Well I think he’s right. But I still don’t fell capable of grappling with modernity – even if I am a hybrid! It certainly makes it easier to be aware of the ironies of  place, though. You do have a double vision. I guess that’s what he’s talking about, though I don’t know that it necessarily teaches you, or gives you the gift of being able to deal with it.  A person from one location who’s seven generations at that location is just another kind of person, someone who grew out of a place and can write a book like Ulverton¹. Then there are those who can deal with a place as this strange mixture.

KW: Maybe there’s a difference between someone like Rushdie who’s Anglo-Indian, trying to reconcile two distinct cultures, and someone like yourself who’s family were widely mixed over three hundred years.

MO: Right, mine is much more complicated, that’s probably true. Even when I go back I’m still not quite sure what the hell we were. I spent a day with one of my family members telling me about our background. It was just a strange thing, involving Holland and the French Revolution and it was even more complicated than I thought – he didn’t know who the hell he was!

KW: In Running in the Family [an autobiographical work of 1982 about his extended family in Sri Lanka] you talk about this group of people who were distinct from the English community there. Was yours a very closed community?

MO: No. It wasn’t a community to do with race at all. It was a nice mixture. There was a sort of class system I expect, but it was complicated. I was reading a piece in the Guardian about the burghers in Sri Lanka, saying I was not a burgher because I had Tamil blood, which is perfectly true, and they saw that as a block for me. The burgher class is another complicated thing – Dutch colonial.  But it felt very free. I just didn’t feel any limitations when I was growing up.

KW: What about the situation with the Tamils then? Were you aware of it?

MO: No. You had very different kind of Tamils. There were those who lived in Jaffna, and those in Columbo who were part of a [broader] culture that I was a part of: I was part Singhalese, part Tamil, and this other mixture.

KW: Which writers have influenced you?

MO: It is a very eclectic group really. Whan I began to write I was reading Yeats and then [William Carlos] Williams, more obviously. But that was much later on, about fifteen years after I began to write. I think someone like Marquez wasn’t an influence but was a little delight, more of a recognition.

KW: And when you were younger?

MO: I used to read anything – pot-boilers, spy novels. I didn’t read any poetry, I didn’t read any serious literature.

KW: And what about the reading you had to do for school? Did you see it as something imposed on you?

MO: Shakespeare? No, I loved it. I had an odd career at school because I was very good at English. Then O Levels happened and I did well in English but failed Maths, and the system they had to deal with this was to make me drop English and take Maths. So I didn’t do English at A Level. It was totally frustrating and what happened to me then was I read on my own: the Ian Flemings as well as Sartre.

KW: What about the relationship between writing and research in your work – is there a pattern? I wonder, for instance, in regard to The English Patient [1992], how far did you conceive of the story before you began your research? Or did you just begin reading around and feel your way through it?

MO: Both, I guess. That period [the Second World War] always interested me. I’d read stuff in the past but not in the light of working on a novel, so I began the book with some common knowledge of the desert exploration and the war and so forth. But it usually begins with the mystery of knowing who is this person in the plane [this is how The English Patient starts] and then gradually you’re writing. It happens simultaneously. I don’t spend six months researching a chapter and then six months writing it.

KW: There is often in your writing a sense of things gathering in the dark and looming out at you. Is that something you do consciously, to reflect the discovery of character?

MO: No, it just tends to happen [laughs]. I mean I wasn’t even aware of it until the end of In the Skin of A Lion [1987] where there are several scenes like that. And, of couse, there are some in this one [The English Patient] too.

KW: But even in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid [1973] there are descriptions of strange bodies surrounded by total blackness. And that seems to be an image of the way the writing happens.

MO: Perhaps it might be to do with the fact that sometimes I’m just not sure what’s beyond the candle flame. It’s almost like we wait for the scene to emerge, or the plot to emerge, or the character to emerge. So it may be a subconscious thing of…

KW: …framing?

MO: Yeah.

KW: I was thinking of the Formalist notion of ‘making strange’. If you surround everything with this blackness, perhaps that’s a way of making people re-look?

MO: Yeah, see the scene in a different way. No, I don’t really think like that. I’m not really thinking of the reader when I’m writing those things. It’s much more to do with me trying to clarify something perhaps. Or a boy at the end of a dark field coming towards the light, something like that. And often in those scenes I don’t really know what’s at the other end. So it’s a surprise to me as to what’s going to happen.

KW: There’s a passage in In the Skin of a Lion about the dyers, where people of different races stand in vats of different colours. You say: “this is a scene I could paint, but it would be wrong to paint the scene because what you would be doing would be aestheticising what’s happening”.  You not only given us the scene, you give a lot of information about the harshness of the situation for the workers. I wonder, do you think this is a danger - here, of course, it’s one you address directly – a danger of aestheticising or making pretty in your very lyrical kind of writing?

MO: I think there is a danger of that, for sure. And it always worries me, and I’m very conscious of the photograph which doesn’t really capture anything except this image, whether it’s a blur or whether it’s an interesting face. But what does it say in the end? What does this painting say in the end? So it’s almost like each scene is another version of the photograph, or from a different angle, or trying to get at some kindof understanding or context.

KW: But even by giving a series of shot rather than one, that still doesn’t necessarily convey ‘hard’ or material information.

MO: No, no, it doesn’t. Often not at all. And there’s a context of history, or a social context of language sometimes that gets hidden, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m conscious of that and know it’s a problem.

KW: The question is of the lyrical effect overwhelming the intellectual crunch.

MO: Yeah. I think that’s a problem and I’m not sure how to solve it yet.

KW: But then often what I’ve thought is behind that argument is authoritarianism – a sense of what the novel should be. And your writing is in some way about stretching this limited notion of fiction. Do you think the novel has endless possibilities, or are there limits to how far you can push it?

MO: Well there may be limits but I don’t know what they are yet [laughs]. One is always trying to go a bit further. And I think that you’re right in their [some critics] belief that the novel is a novel of ideas, where there’s a secure narrator who tells us what to think, which I don’t like very much. In that sense, in my work there may not seem to be an intellecteual point of view, but to me it is there - by connecting the dots, perhaps. 

KW: Maybe it’s laziness, a fear of having to make that connection for themselves?

MO: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. It always surprises me when a reader sees a certain charater in a certain way as just being pyschologically unrealised when, to me, that person is realised a lot more psychologically than in the average novel when we’re told that this person comes from this kind of family and therefore he is this kind of person. I never believe those things. Because in some odd way, where we come from does not really affect how we think of ourselves. I think we’re influenced a lot more by small things, by small habits that we create ourselves – a horrible moment on a bridge [this is a scene from In the Skin of a Lion] - all those things govern us.

KW: Is this the the old tension in art between energy and order? There’s an intensity and energy in a lot of your images, and maybe if you’re not going to impose an authoritarian narrator or guide then the tension between the two slackens in some way.

MO: I think the narrator is there, in some sleepy way [laughs]. It’s there. The problem is that you don’t want to be too shaped. In fact some people think the books are too shaped.

KW: In an interview on the Late Show with your fellow Canadian, Michael Ignatieff, he put it to you that your novels don’t cover the full range of human experience, particularly that they lacked any sense of evil in people. There was perhaps some implication that you aren’t writing a real man’s novel like Amis or Mailer, wrestling with the tough stuff.  Is writing in a lyrical or magical vein, do you think, somehow antithetical to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”?

MO: I do see evil in us a lot, but I don’t see it in individual humans. I see it more when groups form, or p0litical groups form - I’d say these are the villains. It’s something outside.

KW: You don’t have any idea of inherent evil?

MO: No, I don’t think so. It may also be an element of not wanting to. I’ve tried to write about [laughs] evil characters and I get bored with them. It’s so uninteresting. I don’t want to waste my time on those guys.

KW: So would you say, then, this political belief that human beings are not inherently evil is knitted to the lyricism of your writing? That such writing can’t …

 MO: …deal with evil? Well I don’t know because hopefully the books are not just lyrical. There’s also a sterness of information or a baldness of facts I put in sometimes, but it’s more subtle. For instance, someone like Lord Suffolk [a character in The English Patient] seems to be a genial, amiable person, but in a larger context, he’s not. So it’s a more subtle judgement. We see him walking across a field and the way he behaves with Kip he seems quite pleasant and likeable. I was liking him in those scenes. That’s the problem we have: someone who we like can be traitorous or worse. It’s hard sometimes to separate these things. I mean, Patrick [from In the Skin of a Lion] doesn’t understand that at the very end of the book, he’s not political: the gestures he makes are more personal than political.

KW: And yet Alice [a political agitator in In the Skin of a Lion]…

MO: …yet even she doesn’t really influence Patrick: he’s altered by her, but he’s not altered by her.

KW: Philip Rahv² used to talk about their being two sides in American literature - the Palefaces and the Redskins. Although his division between Jamesian sensibility and Whitmanesque energy doesn’t fit now precisely, you could make an argument for a similar two-sidedness in North American writing today, with writers like you and Louise Erdrich on one side, and Auster and Pynchon on the other.

MO: I think it’s just a matter of the way you see things. Someone like [John] Berger was very interesting to me and his statement, “Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one”, I think that’s what in a way unconsciously I’ve been writing, that’s why I use the quote [as an epigraph in In the Skin of a Lion], because it is that kind of multi-voiced portrait. There’s no one specific narrator in the book, it shifts. In a way in In the Skin of a Lion, Hana is the gatherer of the story and in this one [The English Patient] maybe it’s Caravaggio. There seems to be always a character in the book who is gathering or detecting his way towards a portrait, or making a mosaic or a collage or something like that. It’s not just one photograph or one person.

KW: [Milan] Kundera was quite suspicious of the notion of the lyric in the novel and compared the poet to the revolutionary in the sense of them both being treasonous. The surrealist Paul Eluard talks about the alignment of what he saw as aesthetic and political intoxication, and there being in both a refusal of the real.

MO: That’s interesting. I actually came to the novel a bit late. So I can only write the kind of novels I write at the moment. I don’t think someone like Amis can write only the novels he can write: I’m just not sure he’s interested in writing different kinds – but I suspect he is, I know I am. I did not think I could write a book like The English Patient when I first began to write. I never even imagined writing a book like that or In the Skin of a Lion. So to go from the lyric form to a larger sequence of poems, and then to Billy, that is half-prose, and then to a sort of a novel [Coming through Slaughter, 1976 about the jazz trumpeter Billy Bolden], it’s trying to enlarge this sphere of what is possible. I don’t see myself as writing the lyrical novel, it’s just what I can write. The lyricism may be the way I can get, not towards lyricism, but the way I can get towards an emotional state in the characters, as opposed to a lyrical state. I would prefer to replace the word ‘lyrical’ with the word ‘emotional’. Because I think that’s what we are governed by, or affected by: we make decisions in moments of excitement or terror or passion or whatever it is. We also make intellectual, more reasonable judgments, too. But what interests me is that kind of emotional depth.

KW: There are influences of cinema and music in your writing. There’s that often repeated remark about writing that aspires to the condition of music, hoping to achieve an emotional truth.

MO: Yeah, but I think one of the problems when using a sombre or a lyrical music is we get to an emotional state, but it’s only someone who doesn’t get to that state, who is on the sidelines, who will say, “Yes, it is a beautiful piece of music”. The intent of the musician or the composer is not to write something beautiful but to reach that emotional state. It’s lyrical in the sense that there’s no naturalistic baggage there. But that’s just because I want to write a three hundred page novel and not a six hundred page one. I do have a much larger physical landscape, even it it’s just in my head. Or sometimes it’s on paper and then it’s a case of seeing how much I can remove from the story and how agilely. It’s like a stage set. You know if you have too much on a stage set it takes four minutes to change a scene. So it’s also to do with that speed of thought.

KW: Which is also quite like cinema – elliptical?

MO: Well in cinema it can take you three days to make a cut, and the cut takes what? – a second.  I think it’s more like a theatre with very few props.

KW: You’ve made films yourself…

MO: …documentaries. That’s all I’ve done.

KW: I see that somebody is adapting The English Patient. Are you going to be involved? What are you feelings about that?

MO: I think I have to give it away. I can’t watch over my shoulder the whole time. One part of me is fascinated, the other part is worried about it: you have to remake it, every rule of narrative changes, it’s a completely different art form to a book. I know people have talked about the influence of film on my work but, to be quite honest, I don’t really see it that much – apart from the obvious influences we’ve all got.

KW: But in In the Skin of a Lion you talk about about the cinematic tropes of fate and timing.

MO: But that’s the silent movie. Before words.

KW: And yet those qualities seem strong in your writing.

MO: Maybe that’s true. It’s certainly true in that book about fate. Yeah, I believe in fate, sure.

————————–

¹ Adam Thorpe, 1993.

²  Rahv was a Marxist critic who wrote initially for New Masses and co-founded Partisan Review in 1934. The essay I’m referring to is ‘Palefaces and Redskins’ (1939), Image and Idea, 1948, in it he describes the redskins as concerned with “the lowlife worlds of the frontier and big cities”. Ondaatje has written books about Billy the Kid, Buddy Bolden, and Toronto’s immigrants and criminals.