Sheila Heti's first time, Mathias Énard in Granta, Atwood censored?, Assassination of Trotsky, Mia Coutu on Cecil the Lion: Cultural Digest, Monday August 24

Heti: amazing things happen while crashing in dad's basement

• Paris Review interviews writers on their first writing experiences. Here Sheila Heti talks about how she started out thinking she'd be a playwright but started writing stories while living in her father's basement. The first in the series is an interview with Tao Lin (I like his novel, Taipei).
• French writer Mathias Énard in Granta with a creepy little story that I've been thinking about for days.
• Odd goings-on: Margaret Atwood's article on Stephen Harper appears on National Post website, then disappears, then reappears again...
• Mental Floss retells the story of the assassination of Leon Trotstky. Long fascinated by the life and death of Trotsky, I didn't learn anything new here but it's still a story that I can't help but read again. I love all the intrigue, but all the peripheral characters are interesting too (people who include Frido Kahlo and Diego Rivera). For me, the best (fictional) version is Cuban writer Leonardo Padura's take on it in his novel The Man Who Loved Dogs.
• Mozambiquan writer, Mia Coutu (Blue Met 2013) spoke last week with The Guardian about Cecil the Lion, his legacy as a white African, and his latest novel, Confession of the Lioness. His book The Tuner of Silences was one of the best things I read in 2013.

Mags gets censored?

Cuba and Literature

I am so happy to hear about the US finally getting their shit together and opening up to Cuba. On one hand. It's great for the world's cultural scene, naturally, because Cuba hits way above its population and status in terms of culture: its writers, musicians and painters have enormous cachet in just about all corners of the world except the USA.

On the other hand, good-bye Cuba. In a way. No, it'll still be Cuba, but with US trade and business

deals and given its close proximity to Florida, in another 10-15 years, it'll be a pricey tourist stop with million dollar colonial remodels and beach resorts like no other (it already has the resorts full of Quebecois). That's a shame, I guess, in a certain way (maybe good for Cubans though)...

When we did a Cuban Writing Series at Blue Met a few years back, we did it precisely because we knew that in just a matter of years, Cuba would be changing. I'm also gratified to know that many of the writers we featured went on to gain even more acclaim: in The New Yorker, at other Festivals around the world.

Once again, I will give a shout out to some Cuban writers whose work I love: Leonardo Padura and Reynaldo Arenas. Arenas died ages ago but his book Before Night Falls is one of those books I re-read every few years and find new things to think about. He was an extraordinary talent. There was a great piece about him in The Paris Review from earlier this year which prompted me to pick up his book again and read through it just before the Festival. Again, I'm amazed. The book tells the story of Arenas escape from Cuba (in dramatic fashion), his childhood prior to that, and his life in New York as he lay dying. I think this book is out of print now which is a huge shame.

And Padura's star continues to rise: he's one of those writers who has managed to create crime writing to a new level: making it both mysterious and engaging but also literary and highly intelligent. That's not an easy feat to pull off. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago about The Man Who Loved Dogs (about the final days of Trotsky). And I really like his novel Havana Fever. Though his books are often set (his crime novels anyway) in contemporary Havana, there is something very 19th century about them: no texting, no email, people have actual face to face conversations. Oh, and books are a huge part of his characters' milieu.

Oh, and one passing recommendation: Alejo Carpentier. Probably Cuba's best-known writer, his works are hard to call novels in a certain way and they are also rich in ideas, symbolism and sheer intelligence. This book The Lost Steps is another one of my favorites, the kind of book you dip in and out of over years, every once in a while going back and reading long passages for their beauty and all that they invoke. It tells the story of a NYC composer who escapes from his empty life with his mistress and journeys into the heart of South America: the rough and tumble jungle where no humans have made their mark:

(Friday night)
Death was still at work in that house with its eight grilled windows. It was everywhere, diligent, looking after all the details, making the necessary arrangements, placing the mourners, lighting the candles, taking pains to see that the whole town should find place in the vast rooms with deep window seats and broad doorways, the better to contemplate its work.

(Translated by Harriet de Onis)

Leon Trotsky by Joshua Rubenstein

Trotsky is a figure who fascinates and has for a long time. There are movies about him (including one that alludes to him consistently since Jay Baruchel's character believes he is Trotsky reincarnated). And many many books. I was in a bookshop the other day and this biography of Trotsky called out to me so since I was in between books, I nicked it off the shelf and started reading it on the metro that afternoon.

As biographies go, it's OK. It's hard work as a biographer, particularly of someone like Trotsky, when so much of his life and career were wrapped up in causes that today seem obscure and rather pointless. I'm not saying they were pointless, but that they seem pointless in their minutiae: how many details, for example, do we need about all these long ago dead parties that wanted to change the world, parties that even at the time the vast majority of people didn't even know or care much about.

(One thing occurred to me as I read this, though: we often hear about this segmented society we live in today where we all get our news or read the feeds from points of view that we largely agree with. So conservatives watch Fox or Sun news and liberals watch MSNB or read Bill Moyers Twitter feed, etc. so we only hear opinions that reflect a point of view we already accept. And that this is a bad thing. But back when newspapers were king, particularly in the early part of the 20th century, newspapers often had very myopic views and biases and they fed into these large social movements. So there were left-wing radical workers newspapers and traditional papers that maintained the status quo and what paper you read determined your political outlook and makeup, etc. (or vice versa which was probably more likely the case).

This occurred to me reading this biography of Trotsky because he wrote a lot and if Trotsky is remembered today for one thing, it's the fact that he was a real writer, not just an agitator or political upstart who wrote on the side. And the papers and journals and reviews he wrote for all had very specific political leanings and points of view: even literary journals championed certain writers who championed certain causes. None of these were "mainstream" (at least not in the way we understand that term today) but there were countless ways to get news from all levels of society.

When we hear about the death of journalism or how journalism has changed so much that it's hardly recognizable, we forget that journalism, really, is a very new kind of art and even 70 years ago was radically different than it is today (or, indeed, than it was in the 70s which is often considered the "height" of journalism). Ideas of free speech are radically new but the powerful influencing how the message is distributed and/or shaped are not new at all.

Who knows how journalism will continue to change and evolve as society (and technology) changes and evolves.)

Back to Trotsky: he was a champion of causes that many would find admirable today: he really did
seem to want to fight for the rights of the poor, the downtrodden, those without any rights. At least early in his career. (Later, things became more complicated).

But to me, the most fascinating part of Trosky's life is his final years in Mexico City before an assassin cut him down. It's an amazing story that, again, has been told and retold so often that fact is not longer that distinct from myth. But despite this being an adequate biography, fiction often seems a more interesting way into a larger than life figure's life story. I'm thinking about (Blue Met 2012 author) Leonardo Padura's book The Man Who Loved Dogs which chronicles the final years of Trotsky's life in Mexico (as be befriends artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera) and other political revolutionaries. It's an excellent novel and I think I'd re-read that before I read another dry biography about his life.

Leonardo Padura coming into his own...

I was so happy to see this Jon Lee Anderson piece on Leonardo Padura in the New Yorker last week. I've been writing about Padura for a while, before he even came to our Festival in 2012. His events didn't get as much buzz as I'd have liked and I was pounding the pavement with his books, trying hard to sell them and sell his events, but his participation lacked the buzz that some other events had.

This is a tricky part of programming a literary festival: of course, my job is to "sell" all the events and writers associated with the festival each year, but the public and the media seem so fickle at times, and it's not always easy to predict which authors will capture the public's imagination or interest. And every year, naturally, I have my favourite books or authors that I try hard to get the public and media interested in. It doesn't always work.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to sell Padura again: he truly is one of the most interesting writers working today, not only in Cuba but in the Caribbean broadly. He writes these almost 19th century crime novels that present a complex and intricate view of life in modern Havana. Because his characters live in Cuba, there are no smart phones or Internet so the novels recall the past in tone and function. His novel Havana Fever shows his protagonist, Mario Conde, as he adjusts to his retirement. He becomes involved in book selling (which sets up a beautiful metaphor about the role that books play in modern life) and then comes across an article about a mysterious bolero singer who disappeared in the 1950s.

Padura has also written a more political novel (as of yet untranslated into English) as well as a book on Hemingway. As Anderson puts it in his piece, "For Cuba's intellectuals, and for its professional class, a new Padura book is as much a document as a novel, a way of understanding Cuban reality."