A city that dates back to the 8th century B.C. (Photo: Camille Harang)

On my last night in the village of Lagrasse, my Calcutta companion and his two friends were all on their computers, trying to find a way for me to get to London more expeditiously than winding the long way back to Avignon, then Paris, then the chunnel to London with a combination of trains, cars, and taxis. We had almost given up when we found a cheap flight from Toulouse to Heathrow – saving me a little money and a lot of time.

Cécile Alduy

It was a city I was barely aware of. So it is strange to have it come to my notice twice today, a few weeks since my brief visit there. First occasion: I read Janet Lewis‘s The Wife of Martin Guerre, in which that ancient city plays a pivotal role. Second occasion: Cécile Alduy tweeted me about her New Yorker article today, “Two Schools: Newtown and Toulouse.”

She wrote:

In France, where I was visiting my family for an early-winter break with my four-year-old daughter, the reaction to the Newtown school shooting was one of horror and of bewilderment—“Incomprehensible,” “unbelievable,” “unthinkable,” or, more often, dingue(crazy). Disbelief altered the faces of Parisians usually known for their urban cool. In spite of the biting cold and urgent plans for Christmas shopping, they could be seen, haggard, reading the headlines in the green kiosks of the street newsstands over and over again, or staring at the news channel in cafés that normally cater to soccer fans. When they learned that I’ve lived in California for close to ten years, they’d ask me, “Why? Why?” … The answer, that the American Constitution appears to guarantee a right to bear arms and that no politician is ready to take on the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun lobbies, was met by an uneasy silence. And then this, whispered, looking away: “How can you put your daughter in a preschool in San Francisco and sleep at night?”

Yet, she points out, “French schools are not immune from deadly madness.” Last March, “Mohamed Merah, a self-proclaimed jihadist on an American no-fly list, erupted at the Ozar Hatora Jewish School in Toulouse at 8 A.M., a camera affixed to his belt, and started to fire indiscriminately at the playground with an automatic pistol.”

Sandy Hook Memorial in Newtown (Photo: VOA)

She compares the two cities, the two nations, and their attitudes and their laws regarding guns and violence. Read the rest of it here. Merah, she said, is a terrorist “in the legal sense of the term,” she writes. But Adam Lanza? He, too, spread terror, “though the meaning of his action will remain forever sealed.” As someone said to me, perhaps it has no meaning, and in a nihilistic age, that is its meaning.

Like every other issue in this country, gun control in the wake of the massacre quickly became a polarized tit-for-tat, with blame, snark, threats, grandstanding, and name-calling, all resulting in skyrocketing gun sales.

There was a moment when everyone, even the NRA, realized that something had to be done. I hope that moment hasn’t passed, because I don’t think this is the sort of issue that can be resolved by one side running over the other and shoving something down the opposition’s throat (Cory Booker on the “false debate” here). We’ll need everyone onboard, together, to address this as a nation.

As the years pass on, royalties diminish for most titles, unless the books are made into movies, which is rarely the case in academic publishing. Here’s one thoughtful press’ idea on how to put the “long-tail” checks to good use:

It’s Christmas. On street corners, seasonal Santas ask for small change and hardscrabble charities ask for contributions to their penny jars – because every little bit makes a difference.

The same is true for university presses. Everyone knows it’s a hard time in the publishing industry, but among the hardest hit have been young, unpublished scholars looking to make their mark in the world.

“It’s easy to get published when you’re a senior scholar with a track record. When you don’t have tenure, it’s harder for you to persuade a publisher to take you on,” said Alan Harvey, the director of the Stanford University Press.

This fall, Stanford Press developed its own solution with an Authors Fund. How it works: authors published by the Stanford Press – whether they are employed at Stanford or elsewhere in the academic world – donate some or all of the royalties from their books to help cover the publishing costs of books written by their junior colleagues.

Although the program is only a few months old, about 50 authors have already assigned all their royalties to the fund. Harvey said the first offer came within minutes of the initial email.

Never was it more needed. The plight for young authors is worsening: “It’s getting more and more difficult because, while publishing first-time authors is part of our core mission, we’re expected to operate as a business, so we’ve got to look very carefully at any project with a high level of financial uncertainty,” said Harvey.

“Traditional sales channels are slowly closing up – for example, libraries don’t automatically buy these books anymore. Yet publishing books is still part of the requirement for tenure and promotion. We’re caught somewhere in the middle: we are committed to the part we play in the tenure and promotion process – but at the same time we have to live sustainably.”

The Press has had a long history of supporting first-time authors; about 10-15 percent of its lists are first-time authors. “It’s higher, definitely higher, than most university presses,” Harvey said. This labor has borne high-quality fruit: The list of first-time authors published by Stanford Press includes a number of senior members of the Stanford community, such as historians Gordon Chang, Paul Seaver and Steve Zipperstein.

Donations to the Authors Fund may be small – the equivalent of a scholarly penny jar. As published books move into the “long tail” of sales, royalties dwindle and can become more of an administrative burden for authors than a revenue source. The Authors Fund offers authors the option of saving on paperwork while at the same time benefiting the scholarly community.

“The total to date is modest, but it is slowly increasing,” Harvey said. “The point is, it really does make a difference.” For example, even one or two thousand dollars can have an impact on whether a book is published in hardcover or paperback, on the size of the print run or on the list price.

Harvey’s clever solution to new problem (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Moreover, donated royalties continue into the future. “If it supports two books this year, it could well support two books next year – maybe even four books” said Harvey.

“If everyone who made $50 or less (per year) donated their royalties, we’d wind up getting enough to make a real difference.”

Harvey said he would “hesitate to call the Authors Fund entirely unique, given the wide range of fundraising activities among university presses.” But using donated royalties as a penny jar to underwrite new authors is definitely a unique twist for a 21st-century problem.

A marvelous little church with a story to tell. (Photo: Nichole Robertson)

It’s Christmas Eve. The world awaits in joyful expectation the coming of… Les Misérables in a theater near you.

Evocations of the 16th century (Photo: Nichole Robertson)

But please, do me a big favor, in the spirit of the season. Please don’t say this film is about the French Revolution. Many of us have repeatedly corrected the media, Huffington Post included, for this oft-repeated gaffe. No surprise, perhaps, since even Director Tom Hooper seems a little dim about French history.

So let me help everyone sort this out. The French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The principal events of Les Misérables take place in 1832. Different century. The July Revolution two years earlier had put the Orléanist monarchy on the throne, under the popular “Citizen King” Louis-Philippe. Popular for awhile, that is. Despite his unpretentious manners and a character that Les Miz author Victor Hugo commended as “good” and “admirable,” the income gap widened and the conditions of the working class deteriorated. By the spring of 1832, a deadly cholera epidemic had exacerbated a severe economic crisis.

His death pulled the trigger.

In the early morning hours of June 5, crowds of workers, students, and others gathered in the streets of Paris. The immediate trigger was the death of General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who had been a friend to the poor and downtrodden. The crowd had hoped to accompany Lamarque’s hearse before it took the the general home to his native district in the southwest of France. Those mourning and those with a political agenda merged into a mob that numbered in the tens of thousands – some witnesses claimed it eventually grew to 100,000.

The 30-year-old Victor Hugo was nearby, in the Tuileries Gardens, writing a play. Then he heard gunfire from the direction of Les Halles. Instead of going home to safety, he followed the sounds of gunfire through the deserted streets. He was unaware that the mob had taken half of Paris, and the barricades were everywhere in Les Halles. According to Wikipedia, Hugo headed north up the Rue Montmartre, then turned right onto the Passage du Saumon, and finally turning before the Rue du Bout du Monde: “Halfway down the alley, the grilles at either end were slammed shut. Hugo was surrounded by barricades and flung himself against a wall, as all the shops and stores had been closed for some time. He found shelter between some columns. For a quarter of an hour, bullets flew both ways.” Three decades later, he would write about the unforgettable experience in Les Misérables.

I had hoped to visit some of the route during my recent visit to France. Alas, my trip was too brief, and I couldn’t quite figure out what had happened, and where, on my Paris map. I had to make the journey vicariously, later, through Mark Traugott‘s The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press).

No wonder I was confused. Traugott’s map of the insurrection shows that Lamarque’s funerary procession made a wide arc around the city’s right bank. The insurrection affected both sides of the Seine, but the flash points were here, on the right bank.

Dragoons had been under orders to refrain from the use of deadly force, but when a shot rang out from somewhere, the crowd began to throw stones at the military. The cry “To the barricades!” resounded through the streets. But what, exactly, did that mean?

According to Traugott:

“Insurgents began uprooting the saplings planted to replace the larger trees cut down during the July Days. They also scavenged planks and beams from nearby construction sites and improvised tools for prying up paving stones. These classic raw materials were natural choices because they added mass, helped knit the structure together, and were usually found in abundance right at the site of the barricade construction. Between 5 p.m., when the first sporadic gunfire was exchanged, and 6:30, when pitched battles were initially reported, dozens of barricades had been completed on both the right and left side of the Seine. Individual structures took as little as fifteen minutes to erect.

“Even as the first barricades were going up, a frantic search for arms began. Some rebels had to be content with sabers, staffs, or scythes, but rifles were the weapons of choice, and bands of insurgents boldly seized them from small patrols of soldiers encountered in the streets. Others joined in pillaging the premises of Lepage frères, the largest of several Paris gunsmiths whose establishments were looted.”

Why, you may ask, have I chosen to illustrate this post about a doomed revolt with the elegant photos of Nichole Robertson over at Little Brown Pen?

This little gem of a 16th-century church is Église Saint-Merri. The insurgents staged a desperate last stand in and around this church, at the heart of the district where the fiercest fighting took place.

Empty chairs at empty tables. (Photo: Nichole Robertson)

The insurgents pleaded for help, but no help came. The citizens of Paris were not as quick to join the revolution as they were to join the unruly funeral procession. In the theatrical production of Les Miz, the army officer warns the insurgents via a loud-bailer:

You at the barricade listen to this!
No one is coming to help you to fight
You’re on your own
You have no friends
Give up your guns - or die!

And it was true. According to Traugott, “The casualty toll among the insurgents, mounting as high as 800 dead and wounded, was particularly heavy because the people of Paris withheld their support, leaving most of the committed insurgents of June 1832 to pay for their rebellion with their lives.”

If nothing else, please remember is that that the whole point of the French Revolution is that the revolutionaries won. Remember the beheading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Robespierre et al.? In 1832, writes Traugott, “The last guns were silenced a barely twenty-four hours after hostilities had begun.”

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Fond of Elvish…

Lovely piece in the New Yorker about J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings, and just in time for the current hubbub about Peter Jackson‘s adaptation of The Hobbit, the movie. I’ve never understood the Tolkien craze – I took an unsuccessful stab at The Hobbit as a teenager, and indulged in a weekend binge of the movies a few years back just to get the hang of it – but Erin Overbey goes some way to explaining the devotion to me:

We love to think about the dorky minutiae: how Hobbits invented the art of smoking pipe-weed, why trolls speak with Cockney accents, whether Middle-Earth is spherical. These elements aren’t distractions; they’re the magical details that elevate Tolkien’s books. People may come to Tolkien for the Milton-esque struggle between good and evil, but they stay for the fresh mushrooms and the Elvish.

Apparently, so did W.H. Auden, one of Tolkien’s early champions and defenders. In 1926, he heard Tolkien reading from Beowulf so beautiful that he decided on the spot that Anglo-Saxon was worth pursuing – it shows in Auden’s poetry. He also became a close friend of the Oxford professor. Thirty years later, he wrote in the New York Times about The Return of the King, the third installment of the Lord of the Rings cycle:

I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect. A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien’s forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.

Perhaps the most memorable bit of Overbey’s piece is her description of Auden’s invitation to speak at a Brooklyn Tolkien Society in the 1960s. He looked, according to a witness, remarkably like “a Tolkienish wizard surrounded by a crowd of young and eager Hobbits.” Overbey writes:

So was he.

He began by talking about his personal relationship with Tolkien and the major influence his former professor had had on his life. Tolkien, he said, had originally fallen in love with the Finnish language, which has affinities with Elvish, because it has “fifteen or sixteen cases.” (“Fifteen!” one of the young attendees exclaimed.) Auden went on to tell the group how Tolkien had often admitted that he really had no idea where The Lord of the Rings was going when he first started the trilogy. In fact, Auden said, he wasn’t even sure how the pivotal character of Strider would develop as the narrative grew. Auden also let his rapt audience in on Tolkien’s fascination with “the whole Northern thing.” For Tolkien, Auden said, north is “a sacred direction.”

The nerdy group of lawyers, students, businessmen and military men snacked on unspiked eggnog and non-alcoholic cider – and also on fresh mushrooms, a preferred Hobbit dish. “The discussion spanned a variety of Tolkien-related topics: the correct method of writing in Elvish, the best way to assemble an accurate cosmological model of Middle-Earth.”

“What was he really like?”

In case you missed it, a recent Times Literary Supplement article reviewed four new biographies of John Keats – one of them Denise Gigante‘s The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (we interviewed Denise here).

“What was he really like?” asks Jonathan Bate. “When, and under the influence of what shaping forces, did he become a great poet? Any literary biographer who can answer those two questions will have achieved the holy grail of Life-writing. The second will always be a matter of literary judgement, but the first becomes a great deal easier to explore when there is a cache of letters, diaries and intimate recollections.”

He concludes with special attention to The Keats Brothers:

But it is Gigante’s The Keats Brothers that comes closest to answering the question of when Keats became a great writer. It was in the summer of 1818, when he went north and began writing long letters, first to [brother] Tom and then to George and [sister-in-law] Georgiana. Previous biographers have recognized the importance of the walking tour with [friend Charles] Brown – the impressions of Wordsworth country, the visit to the tomb of Burns, the extraordinary vision of an old peasant woman, “squab and lean”, smoking a pipe as she is carried along by “two ragged tattered Girls” – “What a thing would be a history of her Life and sensations”. But Gigante’s method of writing the Lives of John and George in parallel allows her to bring into focus the key fact that other biographers sometimes forget: that the reason why Keats went north in the first place was to say goodbye to George as he set sail for America from Liverpool. George’s distance – and, soon after, the even profounder absence created by Tom’s death – was the primary force that shaped Keats in the year from the autumn of 1818 when he wrote his greatest poetry.

As Christopher Ricks reminded us nearly forty years ago in Keats and Embarrassment, John “always made an awkward bow” (that is the last sentence of his last surviving letter). The astonishing thing about the parting in Liverpool – and neither Nicholas Roe nor Denise Gigante dwells on this as fully as they might have done – is that he didn’t wait to see off the ship. He didn’t even know the name of the ship. Together with Brown, the surrogate brother, he slipped away at dawn. He couldn’t bear to say goodbye.

Denise’s fame has crossed the Pacific. She sent us the review of a Chinese interview about her newest effort here. The piece discusses her interest in association copies, and the way they intensify the bond among readers and writers. As for the future of the book, it cites her earlier comment: “In the end, we will always be tactile creatures.”

Hey! That’s exactly what she told the Book Haven here.

John Adams over at The Gentle Rereader offered such an elegant coda to our recent post on the Literary Review‘s bad sex award (we wrote about it here and here) that we couldn’t leave it alone in the comments section, where he had put it for us. Here it is:

Barzun’s big thoughts on bad sex in books

Prize-giving as ridicule doesn’t seem to be having the intended effect. Even badly written sex sells. Eros calls for something better. As ever, Jacques Barzun looks deeper into a question, in this case of sex scenes in books. In Venus at Large: Sexuality and the Limits of Literature he concludes:

“Since sexuality is of our very being, sex cannot be called illegitimate, immoral, or uninteresting. But it is terribly limited; and its appeal being unfailing, it is – or it ends by being – a cheap device. When, moreover, sex is present to make up for deprivations in the culture of a whole age, it becomes a burden to literature. As Shaw said in praising the purity of Poe, ‘Literature is not a keyhole for people with starved affections to peep through at the banquet of the body.’ One is permitted to think that the glut of sex in our prose and verse fictions will remain as the special mark of our work, the brand of the times on our genius; and one may perhaps imagine further that sooner or later a Cervantes will come, who in a comic saga of sex will bury our standardized bedroom adventures like so many tales of chivalry.”

Before reaching that conclusion, though, he surveys a broad array of literary sex examples before distinguishing those from sexuality:

“Sex – that is to say the particulars of the act – is an inescapably trite and insignificant event for literature. … Sexuality is on the contrary the very atmosphere in which all literature breathes and lives. But sexuality can be made palpable in thousands of ways, ancient, modern, and still to be discovered. There is surely more to the sexual instinct and its derivatives than the rapid mechanical transaction we have been given as its sum and summit. There are tendernesses and hesitancies, sensations and fantasies that are not of the readily nameable sort, and the language for them does not as yet exist. It is the business of art to create it.”

(Excerpted in A Jacques Barzun Reader, Michael Murray, ed., HarperCollins, 2002, pages 175–186; full essay in Encounter magazine, March 1966, pages 24–30.)

Thank you John and Jacques. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. In fact, we didn’t.

“My ancestors are an absence.”

Poet George Szirtes and I have something in common, besides the memory of speaking about Czesław Miłosz last week at the glorious British Academy on Carlton House Terrace (the site a longtime residence of Prime Minister William Gladstone).

We share a heritage. The Szirtes family left Hungary in 1956, when George was an eight-year-old. My family left a generation earlier, and it was only in recent years I had a chance to visit Budapest. He returned to Hungary in 1984, although “there had been a brief, curtailed family visit in 1968 when the invasion of Czechoslovakia sent us scurrying out.” The 1984 return proved decisive in forming him as a translator – for which we are grateful, for not many venture into that alien tongue, whose closest antecedents are Turkish and Finnish.

He is mostly known, however, as an English-language poet, and has won a long list of awards, most notably the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Author and poet Bethany W. Pope (a recent Twitter acquaintance of mine) interviewed the poet-translator for Quarterly Conversation. Here’s a snippet:

B.W.P: Translation seems to me like something very similar to what I do when I write in the person of my ancestors. In my collection A Radiance, I wore their psyches as a way of inhabiting the people I love and bringing them closer. Has the fact that you were forced out of Hungary influenced your need to reconnect with your heritage in this way, and is that what you are doing when you engage in an act of translation?

G.S: It wasn’t so much the language I was reconnecting with back then as with a spirit of place that was, I felt, latent but unembodied in my own work. That is a more precise way of putting it than I felt at the time. The language was in the place. Since then I think it is likely that the language itself has reoccupied part of my neural system.

My ancestors are an absence. I never knew any of them as people and have no record of them in terms of documents. Two or three photographs, that’s all. I have no dynastic sense except in that I am of a race of people that have generally been chased from place to place and are occasionally murdered, which equips one with a vulnerability based on expectation. [Writer Gyula] Krúdy didn’t have that problem. He had a Hungarian version of it: the evanescence of location.

B.W.P: How has living and working so long in the UK influenced your take on Hungarian culture? I was wondering if existing for such a long time outside of it made it easier or more difficult to connect with the writers with whom you work?

Gladstone slept here.

G.S: I really only know Budapest culture at first hand. Capitals are not the same as the provinces. Budapest offered so many possibilities. There was a democratic resistance there before 1989 that was intelligent, deeply read, ironic, inventive, affectionate yet brusque. I think that culture has turned out to be more brittle than I thought it would be, but I could be wrong. In terms of their relationship to me, they were welcoming of me, but my nine months there in 1989, under the historical pressure of that year, showed me I could not be of them. In terms of my working relationship to them, they have given me far more than I could have hoped for. My “real” life is in my immediate family and in the English language. They have enriched that language for me, by entering it with me. They have expanded me. There’s nothing difficult about working with them.

Read the rest here – including an account of that 1984 trip.

She’s honored. (Photo: Elena Torre)

Some time ago, we announced the Literary Review‘s finalists for the one of the world’s most dreaded competitions – a prize for the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel. The awards ceremony for the 20th annual award finally took place last week at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, where 400 guests raised a toast to the winner.

And the winner is … Canadian writer Nancy Huston, with her novel Infrared. I know, I know … you want me to deliver the goods. Well, here’s the Literary Review‘s version of why they bestowed the award on Huston:

“Sentences from the novel such as ‘Kamal and I are totally immersed in flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements’ caught the judges’ attention. One long passage in particular stood out:

‘He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water, my self freed of both self and other, the quivering sensation, the carnal pink palpitation that detaches you from all colour and all flesh, making you see only stars, constellations, milky ways, propelling you bodiless and soulless into undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate…”

My goodness, I don’t think it’s all that bad. Is that the worst they could do? I think the other finalists were daffier – go here and see if you agree. (By the by, John Updike received the lifetime achievement award in 2008.)

A friend recently protested against the Literary Review‘s anti-award, saying it inhibited writers from trying to describe sex at all. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. Gone are the days when a writer like Henry James could describe the sexual fever of a hand brushing across the back of another. Gone are the days when Jane Austen could convey more passion with a blush more than most of today’s writers can express with an orgy. We’ve lost the ability to describe the range of nuances in affection, love, devotion, rejection in our haste to describe the relentless interlocking of body parts.

According to Literary Review editor Jonathan Beckman, that’s exactly the reason why former editor Auberon Waugh founded the prize in the first place: “He was genuinely convinced that publishers were encouraging novelists to include sex scenes solely in order to increase sales. The award’s remit was ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Paris-based Huston has received more conventional awards, such as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and Prix Femina, but she seems to hold a special place in her heart for her newest distinction. In a statement read at the ceremony, she announced, “I hope this prize will incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers’ bodies in all states of array and disarray.”

To which we can only add: Please no. Not that. Anything but that.

Huston is married to the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov. On Twitter, Elif Batuman responded: “I just learned that the winner of this year’s Bad Sex Award is married to Tzvetan Todorov and it is ROCKING MY WORLD.” No further explanation offered. After all, it was only a tweet.

A place for “Literary Friendships.”

It was not an easy interview, but Colm Tóibín did his gamely best to interview László Krasznahorkai at the London Review of Books inaugural event for “Literary Friendships” last week.

The event was sold out and crammed into the LRB bookshop on Bury Lane, which were already with crammed with books.

Until recently, Krasznahorkai was better known by reputation than by output in the West. Susan Sontag called him “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville.” W. G. Sebald said, “The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.”

Satantango, first published in Hungary in 1985 and now regarded as a classic, was finally published in English this year, translated by the Hungarian-born English poet and translator George Szirtes.

“I had to write only this book and no more. You try to write only one book and put everything you want to say in one book, to create my own literary world with my sentences,” Krasznahorkai told last week’s audience.

The Irish Tóibín made a stab at describing Krasznahorkai’s style, which he saw as “removing the need for objects in novel and seeing whether a novel can live in a different space.”

Tóibín described the novel as “a secular space,” yet this one “deals with spiritual questions rather than material questions.” God “interferes” with the novel and its characters.

“Bringing God into the novel, it’s dynamite,” Tóibín said. Comment?

The Hungarian Krasznahorkai demurred. “Hmmmm,” he said. Then again, “Hmmmm…” Finally, he concluded, “The question is wonderful, but I couldn’t answer. It’s too difficult for me. I’m not that clever.”

Maybe Tóibín should have read last August’s Guardian article for a clearer, post-communist spiritual statement from Krasznahorkai:

He gestures to the computer sitting on the table at his elbow. “This is the result of 10,000 years? Really? We have microphone, laptop, this technical society – that’s all? This is sad, and very disappointing. After so many geniuses in the human story from Leonardo to Einstein, from the Buddha to Endre Szemerédi, these are fantastic figures, and their work is unbelievably important and we cannot do anything with it – why?”

According to the LRB website touting the event, he remains an optimist: “You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, anymore than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life.”

Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, close to the Romanian border. Tóibín quoted Auden saying that a writer’s childhood should have as much neurosis as a child can take. “I was absolutely not a normal child,” replied the Hungarian writer.

“I chose that.”

For awhile, he lived in a village in the countryside “very far from Budapest, very far from the next village,” a place that was filled with “houses with peasants and tiers,” he said, switching briefly to German to refer to the cows and livestock that cohabit the spaces. “Rain and an absolutely hopeless sky. … no heaven, no questions about heaven. Only how can I drink the next pálinka? What can we eat?”

“I had the feeling that this kind of people only lived down below. They were not 30 or 60 years old, but 6,000 years old, without names. Everyone was the same, every fate was the same – like rain. A drop came down, and then another.”

“I chose that. I was 19 years old.” He compensated by reading Dostoevsky, Dante, and ancient Greek literature.

Before 1989, he said, “Hungary was an absolutely unreal, crazy country. Abnormal and unbearable. After 1989, it became normal and unbearable.” In what he called “Old Hungary,” there was “very big misery – the mood was unbelievably sad and hopeless.”

He’s not worried about finding readers. “Most of us need only ten, maybe six on a bad day,” Tóibín agreed.

He knows his place.

George Szirtes was in attendance (in fact, it was the night before our talk at the British Academy), and the affable translator was invited up to the podium for a few words:

“It was slow. I had headaches regularly,” he said describing the process of translating Krasznahorkai’s work. He thought it would take a year and a half. It took four. His first words on meeting Krasznahorkai were an apology. Not to worry, said Krasznahorkai, “it took me six years to write.”

As he’s translating, Szirtes asks himself, “What is this sentence up to? What is it looking for? … When you turn it into English, what kind of noise is it?” The noise in translation is not the same as the noise in the original: “The noise is distinctly related, but transplanted.”

And, after four years of translation, he tackled Tóibín’s questions: “I know that world more, but it’s a visionary world – a visionary world looking for order. The characters are not looking for God, but looking for their place.”

The session continued with questions from the audience, but Krasznahorkai made a plea to the audience as he asked for questions.

He put his hands together, prayer-like, “Only I beg you, nothing about God.”

Can culture save a people from annihilation? It did. (Photos from the film.)

Can culture make a difference? It did once upon a time…

In a Christmas season where war is all around us, I have a gift recommendation that celebrates the power of non-violence – a Gandhian update for the 21st century.

I’ve become friends with Estonia, thanks to the savvy and sophisticated Estonians I’ve met in the course of my work, the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves‘s witty Twitter spat with Paul Krugman (I wrote about it here), and my article on the Estonia’s Museum of Occupations – though I’ve only been as close as neighboring Lithuania and had a quick drive through Latvia.

Nevertheless, I attended a recent Stanford screening of The Singing Revolution, a 2007 documentary film by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty, from a sense of solidarity and duty, rather than any real enthusiasm. I thought it was going to be, well, a bit drippy. I was wrong.

It was sensational – powerful, moving, uplifting, with an absolutely gripping storyline. And the music is downright addictive.

Estonia, a nation of about 1.3 million people, is one of mankind’s oldest residences, yet has lived under almost continuous occupation in modern times, with the Swedes, the Poles, the Danes, the Russians, and others taking turns. In the 20th century, the Soviets, then the Nazis, and then the Soviets again, swallowed the small nation that had enjoyed a brief, interwar independence.

What did the Estonians have to resist such a brutal and murderous totalitarian power? Their weapon of choice was song. Estonians like to sing. Obviously, not everyone is a singer, but training in choral music is pretty much nationwide, and everyone is at least exposed to it. And after all, most people can sing, even if badly. It’s better than baseball.

Even the New York Times was impressed:

Under the Soviets, especially, Estonian culture was brutishly suppressed, but it welled up every five years in July, when Estonians gathered in Tallinn for the Estonian song festival, which often drew upward of 25,000 people. The images of these festivals are moving already; the force of the singers and the precision of their conductors are stunning to behold.

But the emotion swells further when Estonians defy their occupiers by singing nationalist songs. This bold act reclaimed Estonian identity and set the stage for a series of increasingly daring rebellions under the Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who advocated glasnost and got more than he bargained for.

“If 20,000 people start to sing the same song, then you cannot shut them up. It’s impossible,” said one participant in the uprising. The New York Times again: “Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing “La Marseillaise” in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution.”

The DVDs are available here (and if you recognize a familiar voice in the narration, it’s Linda Hunt).

Meanwhile, please do yourself a favor. Watch this video. It will make you happy. Promise.