Around a third of the way into Teju Cole’s new book, Known and Strange Things: Essays (Faber and Faber), a collection of his previously published non-fiction, there is a fascinating conversation with Aleksandar Hemon. Nigerian-American Cole has previously published the extremely well-received Open City , is a photography critic, and has expanded the literary space on social media, especially Twitter. Hemon, a Bosnian-American novelist and short story writer, has among his much-awarded books The Lazarus Project . In this conversation conducted mostly over email, Hemon aims to get a grip on Cole’s mastery of diverse literary forms, and brings up his love of poetry and one his favourite poets, Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011.
Elsewhere in the collection, Cole has an essay on Transtromer, calling his work “one of my ports of refuge”, suggesting that the best times to read his poetry “are at night, in silence, and alone”, and recalling how it sustained him during the dark Bush-Cheney years.
But here Hemon asks if he writes poetry. Not in a conventional way, answers Cole, though poetry affects his way of thinking. And he says that he imagines Hemon making “notes of the odd and remarkable moments in a way similar to a poet.” Hemon replies that he does not, in fact, make notes, drawing a surprised response from Cole: “I could have sworn you were an inveterate note taker. It leaves me ever more impressed with your writing then, because whenever I come across one of your intriguing turns of phrase, the little genie of writerly envy in my head says, ‘He must have been saving this one for a while.’”
A touch of irony It’s a reminder of how much our appreciation of prose and poetry is informed by our imagining of the writer’s mind and method, in a way that literary criticism alone cannot fully convey. Each reader brings an interpretation to the book and takes away so much more or less than what the writer had intended. But what may be the writer’s expectations of the reader’s input? Richard Cohen’s page-turner, the invitingly (if misleadingly) titled How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into The Minds Of Our Greatest Writers (Penguin Random House), has a chapter that focuses on the importance of that question in an entirely different way.
In a chapter on irony, Cohen, veteran publisher and editor, attempts to define irony, while noting that it’s a “tricky word”: “A short formal definition would be that irony is a tension between what something is supposed to mean and what it actually means.” Moreover, he points out, “…what’s on page says something of value but leaves more out… the reader is expected to add what’s missing.” But after referring to the use of irony by great novelists, he returns more tantalisingly to the idea of the reader being invited to fill in what the writer leaves unsaid.
He revisits in detail the plot of The Luneburg Variation , a short novel published in the 1990s. Written by Paolo Maurensig, an Italian businessman, it was something of a mystery story, beginning with a man being found shot dead at his home near Vienna. The novel wheels back to the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, of the Holocaust and the horrors at the concentration camps, and progresses from then to the present with a progression of games of chess, including use of a chess strategy called the Luneburg Variation. The novel ends abruptly and its open-ended ending allows, or perhaps invites, the reader to fill in the explanation or lack of it for the man’s death. Cohen suggests that having come so far into the plot, it is the reader’s obligation to construct the ending in a way that’s true to the writer’s effort. But you wonder if any two readers’ interpretations completely overlapped. (The novel, incidentally, left some readers uncomfortable with its use of the Holocaust backdrop — a reviewer in The New York Times said it left him “vaguely uneasy, uncertain over the use of history’s greatest single act of evil as a device” in the mystery narrative.)
Another recognition Yet, such is Cohen’s ability to force us to appraise our own agency as readers that in another chapter, on plagiarism, before you know it he has gone past standard-issue definitions of the offence to focus on the outrage of living persons at having themselves used as models. He recounts how Salman Rushdie’s father was stunned to parts of his himself being represented in the character of Ahmed Sinai in Midnight’s Children . Rushdie junior finally appealed to his erudite wisdom and sophistication to persuade him to let it go, but another writer, Michael Holroyd, actually withdrew a novel when his father’s reaction to a fictionalised depiction of himself was too overwhelming.
Cohen’s most intriguing anecdote is, however, tucked away as a footnote. He refers to the controversy over Joe Klein’s Primary Colors , originally published anonymously and which lightly fictionalised Bill Clinton’s presidential bid. A woman subsequently alleged that Klein had based a character who had an affair with the candidate on her, arguing that the fictional character’s legs described hers. Writes Cohen: “In fact Klein had used as inspiration the legs of his literary agent, Kathy Robbins (my wife).”
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
