Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
If you convince a reader, with your novel, that um,
a person, a unique person, is a world that didn't exist
ever before, and will never exist again, and that that, one life, has infinite value...
I think that in and of itself is a lot.
Actually, I didn't grow up in an atmosphere of accomplished
storytelling. I mean, sometimes you hear about families
where the grandfather just told amazing tales. Or the father,
the mother, whatever it was.
I didn't really have that, I have to say. But there were things
that were much more subtle, and there were experiences
that were somehow communicated in underground ways.
Just to give you a sense, a picture: I mean my
grandparents all came from four different places, and those
places had never been returned to, more or less, by any
of them - maybe with one exception.
So they came from one world, they either chose not to
return to it, or they couldn't return to it because the place
didn't exist anymore. So imagine what it is to come
from a nothing.
I mean, when you travel to other places, like Scandinavia,
where you have these families who have lived
in these houses for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And if you ask them, "Where will you be in another 100
years?" it's "Here."
I have no sense, like of that, at all, in my family.
The idea of a home, which is a kind of rooted place
that you come from, and can plan on being in, in the future
wasn't important. It just wasn't part of the vocabulary.
This one came from here, that one came from there...
my mother, because of the winds of history blew her parents to England
she was born in England, she grew up there.
She met my father in Israel, he grew up there, they came
to America. In a certain way, place - the specifics of
geography, were accidental. And therefore, not much
emphasis can ever be put on them.
I guess I'm interested in serious things because it seems
to me that that's what I've always gone for literature for.
It's a relief to me, to open a book, by a writer I love.
Suddenly, all the noise of life, and the smalltalk, and the
pettiness, and the things that are inessential,
they suddenly drop away.
You open a book, I don't know, open Knut Hamsun's
"Hunger." Or open a book by W. J. Sibbhult. Or whoever
you love. Thomas Bernhard. Everything that doesn't
matter is gone, in an instant.
And you're in a world where everything matters, in the
most critical way. And I find that, I wanted to live there.
I wanted to make a life there, and so I guess I tried
to become a writer.
Um, I think there were many things involved, but looking
back, there must have been some sense that not only was
writing a chance to express myself - it's too easy to express,
well, we can 'express ourselves' in a conversation
like this. I think it was something else, I think I recognized
it was a chance to create myself.
To actually decide for myself, who I was going to be.
And thats an incredibly exciting idea.
It's radical in a certain sense. Particularly when you're young, you're 14
years old, and almost everything in your life is decided
for you. Your parents decide, your family, your school.
The peer pressure, your friends. There's this whole world
The cosmos, is pressuring you into a shape.
And then you have this blank page
and on that page you can decide to become anything
and say anything. And you show it to someone or you don't.
And years later, you publish it, or you don't.
But that possibility, absolute freedom as far as you're
willing to go - it's up to you, right?
This chance to become something, to invent yourself,
I think for me has always been incredibly enticing,
and to this day it's probably the most compelling
reason to write.
But as a writer, I could be an old man at the end of his life.
I could be somebody who lives in London.
I could be a Jewish refugee from Germany.
I could be someone from Chile, a country I'd never
been to. I could be anything!
And there is always a sense for me, when I'm creating
a character, or many characters, that I'm escaping
finality. I'm escaping the finitude of life.
That I'm expanding the horizons, of me.
Of my experience in life. So I only have one.
I've only been given one life, unfortunately.
I would have liked to have more. I would have liked to have other choices,
and those choices... but I only can take this particular
route that I've taken in my life. But as a writer,
that's some life.
When I close the door of my office and start work
every day, I'm multiplying those possibilities.
I'm having a chance to live all kinds of things that I
wouldn't otherwise have lived. And I really feel that
I'm living them.
When I become, or writing some character I just read
just now, in the other room. You know, an old man, a father
who feels he's, um, terribly ruined his relationship with
his son. He's somehow never managed to express himself,
to this child, and he's facing his own death,
and how can he right this slightly wrecked relationship?
Is not an experience I'll ever have; could never have, would
never want, in life, necessarily.
But I wanted- because I'm curious about how it is to be
there. I'm curious about that extreme.
And writing allows me that, in a kind of, um,
really often very, very fierce way.
When you find a character in a moment of weakness,
whether it's a moment of failure, or doubt, or loss,
or suffering within himself, you find him often at
his most human. And that interests me.
That's where I want to go.
It's not to rub my nose in it, or rub the reader's nose in these difficult things,
it's because I think that we have an opportunity to
sit with those difficult things for a while. We also find a
way to transcend them.
I also don't mean to be overly hopeful - but I do
think that there is something
in facing these things, which, constantly in life
we're given opportunities to turn away from.
Whether it be death or whether it be something
about ourselves, which we've hidden from ourselves
all our lives, but which our entire life is built on this lie.
That interests me in a character, and that's the spot
that I'm drawn to, that lie or that place under which the
entire structure- you know, that is hidden under the
whole structure of the character - what happens
if you move it, does the character fall?
Or can she find a way to build herself again in a new way?
I'm not a writer because I'm interested in solipsism, or in solitude, frankly.
I'm really interested in, and really care for that moment
when one transcends that and has the most possible
most profound contact, communication with another person.
How close can you get to another person?
That's always interested me, and it's there from the first book.
"A Man Walks Into a Room" is an experiment, where a memory is extracted from one mind
and transplanted to another mind to see, is there some way
to shortcut to empathy? Because what is empathy
after all, but being in somebody else's shoes.
Knowing what it feels like to be another person.
And the experiment is a complete failure. And I think
for me, what I was really asking- I was 25 when
I wrote that book, I had just started to write.
It was the first fiction I ever wrote. But I was asking
the question, "is there anything else that can do what
literature can do?"
"What can literature do that nothing else can do?" is another way to ask the question.
And that is it gives us the opportunity to stand
in another person's inner life and feel what it is
to be him or her, in the most intense way.
I don't think there's anything else in life that gives us that.
And that interests me, that the possibility of contact,
of understanding, of empathy, of compassion...
My books are always leading towards that, but they begin
with characters who are solitary.
because I think - I might be wrong because I've only
ever been inside my own mind - but I think it's quite
an effort to make that kind of real, profound contact
with another person, to truly understand them.
There's so many layers to get through. But I think
all my characters are yearning for that, or leaning
towards that moment with another person.
I'm particularly moved, not by the way the past impacts
us, or shapes us... we know it does, there's no way around
it. We're all, in such deep ways, chiseled and shaped, just stamped by the past,
by our parents, by our grandparents, by history.
Okay, so we know that to begin with.
Then what do you do with that?
What really moves me, is not that, in and of itself, but
how people respond to it by somehow, recreating themselves.
So if you look, all 3 of my books, (and I didn't know this
writing them, but now that I have to look back and answer
journalists' questions about them I see that) they're
all in some ways about this idea, maybe it's a kind of
overly optimistic American idea, (I don't know, I never
thought about it until just this minute), but the idea
that we make ourselves, to some degree.
Yes, the past shapes us. But what then?
Take a character like Leo Gursky.
Who, by sheer imagination and willpower, reinvents
himself and his life, and his past, to make it bearable.
I think he says at some point in "History of Love," um,
'The truth is the thing that I invented so that I could survive.'
And Alma does it with her younger brother to make this
kind of hero out of her father.
And Sampson Greene, in "Man Walks Into a Room,"
he has this enormous loss that he suffers.
24 years of his life are gone but he has to find a
new coherence in order to create a sense of self again.
Or in "Great House," where you have this title story,
which is one of the most beautiful stories from Jewish history I think,
which is what happens to the Jews in 1st century A.D.
when Jerusalem falls, and everything that they were -
Judaism was a national idea. It was based on a place,
and based on rituals around the temple.
These things are lost and destroyed- who can these
people be? And the answer to that is so beautiful.
Ok, we'll replace sacrifice at the temple with prayer.
Which is internal and we can carry it with us anywhere.
When we've lost the city, but we can translate the city
into the most intricate book in the world - which became,
after many centuries, the Talmud.
And we can carry it under our arm and suddenly,
Judaism became something internal and portable.
So these moments of radical reinvention
of an individual, of a whole people, I guess
that's what moves me most, because I must feel
in some way that it isn't sufficient, it isn't acceptable
to simply inherit the past. To be shaped by it.
It's not fair. How can we live like that?
What choice do we have?
It seems that we have to have some say in the matter
of who we are. And I don't think that we have complete say
obviously, I'm writing all the time about the burden
of inheritance, I guess you might say.
I mean, if you think of your own memory, or the memories
that are passed down to you from your parents and grandparents,
that's not really what happened - what you remember is not really what happened.
You've taken this enormous portion of time, however many years you've been alive,
and you've just
blacked out huge portions of it that were
useless to you, or didn't quite work, and didn't fit
in with the narrative, but then you chose these moments,
you illuminated these moments (very few of them) and
you strung them together to create this coherence.
And that's who you are. That's the story you tell yourself.
You're a fiction writer. We all are, right?
But that fiction, is the fiction of the self.
This goes back to my idea of writing as the creation
of self. I'm sure it's not only writers who do it - I'm sure it's not.
I think that is how we create who we are.
And it's something a little frightening, but it's also
something, I guess quite empowering.
Because then the past isn't something that lands on your
head and that you have to deal with the rest of your life,
and just live under the shadow of it. No, you have
this imagination, make something out of it.
I haven't written poems for many, many years, and I hope
I'll go back to them. I don't think of myself
as somebody who wrote poems and then
stopped, and moved onto something else.
But I have to say that the shape of a novel seems to
fit me, at least at this point in my life, it seems to fit me
very well. I think it has something to do with the fact
that as a form it's so poorly defined.
And because of that, because we can only say 'it's a long
story with a beginning and an end,'
what more can we say about it. I feel I have an opportunity
I'm being asked by the novel, to reinvent it,
every time I sit down to write one, and I find that
very exciting. I think poems, they're more well-defined
in a way.
At least I couldn't find that same freedom, writing them,
and it was because I couldn't find it, because I kept hitting
a wall, that I stopped and began to write my first novel.
Not thinking that I'd become a novelist, just thinking that
I might be able to find a window of escape, to be free
again, in my work.
And lo and behold, I found that, but I found much more
than that, I found that in the novel, there was a sense
of imperfection, that it could never be perfect, because
the form is not defined.
None of us can think of the perfect novel, I think every
novel has flaws. So that's a relief.
I feel comfortable with certain kinds of failures, knowing
in advance that they're going to exist.
My novels have never had any kind of plan or blueprint
that I've made up in advance, they're complete
improvisations, and for the most part,
particularly the last two novels, which are
polyphonic, so they're made up of different parts
that begin to interlock together
to create this whole, um...
in the beginning, the first maybe 20-30 pages of those books, I wrote
slightly out of order, maybe I discovered Leo Gursky, or Alma Singer, or in "Great House,"
I discovered all four characters at the same time.
And once I knew that they were going to be the novel,
I wrote the book in exactly in the order you read it,
so I never knew it was going to happen.
I wrote the entirety of one character's experience,
then the next one, but then the next one began to echo
with the first one, and I began to find all these patterns
between them, and I would sometimes extend the pattern,
or I would sometimes perversely break the pattern,
if it seemed too inauthentic somehow, too forced.
But for me, it's a little bit like writing music. How could you
know in advance, until you get there and discover
the harmonies between these remote parts of the novel?
And for me it's always with a sense of creating this larger
shape, this larger whole.
I simply couldn't write it any other way.
The other thing, is I would be completely bored!
Why would I write the book if I already knew what was
going to happen?
I've never understood that.
Well, it's like there are certain strands of life, of personal
experience, that are used, but they're woven into something
that would be unrecognizable
to anyone, even who knew me intimately, I think.
When I'm writing a novel, I think there is a kind of
longing to create a home in the way that I'm describing.
This elusive idea of "home," which I've never quite had.
There's a sense that somehow, by bringing all these
strands together a bit like a mockingbird - some bits of
glittery personal things, but also complete inventions,
and things that fascinate me or move me
or sadden me; if I can find some form that they can be
perfectly woven together into this kind of architecture,
then that would be "home."
At least for the time being, while I'm writing the book.
As soon as it's finished, I can't live in it anymore.
The door is closed and it gets published and I have to
"move," I guess, so to speak.
I really think of the novels, spatially, as these kinds of
houses with rooms that I'm building, as if from
the inside, and I'm pulling all these parts together...
but you're right, to say- to suggest that it comes
somehow from this diasporic experience
of a life scattered all over the globe. How do you pull
those pieces back and form a whole again?
I think that's an obsession, in some way
that you can find in all of the books.
I see it all on a continuum. I don't think
of music, of painting, as separate
from books. They do different things in different
ways, but they all take me to that same place,
which is that place apart.
Um, that place where things have a chance of being meaningful.
You know, it's a kind of consolation because otherwise
life happens in this haphazard way.
And you don't have time to put the pieces together
to assemble them into some kind of meaning...
Then you write or you stand in front of a painting,
that just moves you, so profoundly, because it means
something. It's you, and on its own. I don't know,
think about paintings that I keep returning to in my life.
Like Rembrandt's "Late Self-Portraits" which
I think I keep writing- I think I've written about them in
all 3 novels, maybe even the same one.
But I just had the chance to see my favorite of those
portraits; it came to New York, to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, for a few weeks. And I went to it
many days in a row, just to see this old friend.
You stand in front of that, and again, it's that same
feeling of just suddenly being in touch
with the most essential things.
I think that so many things are being lost, so quickly,
that we almost don't have a measure for it.
I mean, what is it, 15 years on now? That we've all been
on the Internet? And Google is only, what as old as 2002,
it's not that old. Ten years on, our brains have changed,
in such shocking ways, and one of the things
that's gone, as we all know, is our concentration.
Instead of deep-reading, where you have a chance to
make these complex connections and allusions
and find meaning, we've all been trained to think
very, very fast. And I think that's scary.
Obviously, this kind of experiment, has unwittingly
been done on this younger generation -
not our children - maybe our children by the time
they're a little bit older, will have figured some of this out,
but kids a little bit older than them, teenagers -
have basically been sort of guinea pigs for what it is
to be raised, not in a world of slowness, where things
have happened at the pace that they've been happening,
more or less for the past hundreds, thousands of years.
It hasn't changed, all that much, until now!
Um, and we'll see what has happened to them.
And you see not just real difficulties in their relationships
to each other, but the absolute inability to
concentrate in a long piece of writing.
As a novelist, it's incredibly sad, of course, and there
are all kinds of things that make it harder
and harder and harder, for the kinds of books that
I love, grew up with and that I still value,
to find new readers.
You know, the loss of bookstores and
the rise of e-books.
There are fewer and fewer chances for a person
to stumble into a bookstore and discover
a writer who changes their life.
Or have to have the patience to find the space, a corner
in their life that's quiet enough, and slow enough
to actually be able to read it.
I find all of that sad.
But by the same token, I have to imagine
that something will slowly begin to correct itself.
I don't think that people will stop reading.
Maybe less people will read.
I think there will always be - at least in my lifetime, in our
lifetime - I think there will always be an audience
for the kind of novels that matter to me.
And that's enough. I don't think I need tons of people.
I wish that everyone loved the kinds of novels
that I love, but as long as some people love them
and they can still be in print, I guess that's enough.
Well, I guess I think that the writer is at his or her
best in the work, and I think the work is always
in some ways political, because it's always about
relationships between people. And it's also
always championing the individual over the masses.
Every novel which gets a reader to care about one person
and his or her unique world, is doing something
quite political in that, I think. Not meaning to,
necessarily, that's not necessarily the main goal.
But it is, inevitably a kind of political act.
If you convince a reader with your novel, that
a unique person is a world that didn't exist ever before
and will never exist again, that that one life
has infinite value, you're teaching them something
political, I think. So yes, maybe
that's a kind of vague thing,
but I think that, in and of itself, is a lot.
It does make it harder, yeah. Everything makes
it hard - getting older makes it hard.
Having written one book and not wanting to write
the same book again.
Being aware of all the ways in which a book can fail,
which I didn't know the first time I wrote a book.
Yes, it's harder, but it gets more and more
serious, um, the stakes are higher,
not because of anyone else,
not because of any awards
and not because of an audience, but for myself.
I have a better sense of myself as a writer.
I mean, after three books, I can say,
"Okay, now I think I have an idea of what I want
to do." You know? And I'll probably say that, always,
because with each book, I learn something.
It gets deeper... life as I get older, as we all get older...
I think it becomes more profound.
You have children-it changes everything.
You get older, people start to die around you-it
changes everything. Your parents
become ill - whatever those things are,
life is not as light as it was when you're young.
I think if you're a kind of writer who wants to write about
those things, the work just keeps opening
new ground under you...
new abysses, that you have to get lost in.
Um, so yes, it gets harder.
But I think I'm up for that.
Thank you.