I love hearing authors speak about their works, listening to them explain where their inspiration came from, why they chose to approach the subject matter in the way they did and how many pages they discarded along the way. I don’t even need to have read any of the author’s works; what particularly fascinates me is their approach to the creative process and gaining an insight into what makes them tick.
During the last year, Booker Prize winners Ben Okri and A.S. Byatt, as well as Herta Mueller and Gao Xingjian, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, have been among the authors I have heard in Brussels.
So what sticks in my mind? In the case of Mueller, it is the way that writing and research have allowed her to understand what she never understood as a child growing up in totalitarian Romania. It was only later in life that Mueller realised the significance of small details such as the way her mother had peeled a potato with as fine a skin as possible or had taken pleasure in eating; for a woman who had been deported to a work camp, it was important not to waste food and to show that she wasn’t starving.
Mueller said her mother never talked about her experience in the camp and would simply say “I don’t know” when asked questions about it; her daughter wasn’t sure if the memories had been suppressed or if words simply couldn’t express the experience. In her 2009 book Atemschaukel (Everything I Possess I Carry With Me), Mueller explores such memories through the experiences of her late friend Oskar Pastior, who was a similar age to her mother and endured five years in detention.
As for Byatt, what inspired me was her curiosity and her desire to unearth as much as she could about people, objects, events, whatever it may be. Her research for her most recent novel, The Children’s Book, included learning more about the lives of children’s books’ writers, accumulating “heaps of books” about pottery and ceramics, and pursuing her love of decorative arts museums such as the V&A in London.
It was also fascinating to hear her explain how she feels a “deep anxiety” about stealing real lives for literary purposes; what she finds herself doing instead is mixing up so many people that she creates a new person, a bit like a “jigsaw.” Nor does she like to make direct use of events that happen in real life. What she prefers is being alert to repeated patterns, the same thing happening at least twice, because at that moment she realises she has stumbled upon a phenomenon that can be worked into her writing.
If you want to keep an eye out for future authors speaking in Brussels, the best place to look is the Passa Porta website. As for the next author to pass through town, it’s Turkey’s Elif Shafak tomorrow, June 25. Details are on this link. To read an earlier blog entry about Amitav Ghosh, click here.
