Interviews of note: Richard Ford, Danny Glover, Luisa Valenzuela and David Wellington

Danny Glover: a true Hollywood artist

• Who knew that Danny Glover was such an aficionado of art-house cinema? Really interesting interview with him here about the entire alternative career he's built up in interesting movie-making.
• One of my most favorite writers, Argentine Luisa Valenzuela, in interview with Paris Review. Every time I read one of these interviews, I learn something new, even about writers who I'm kind of obsessed with. Valenzuela has long been considered one of the most daring and innovative of Argentine writers. Writing since the 1960s, she's not been translated into English much and is much less known here as a result.
• This book looks like it could be interesting...another zombie affair but still...
• American writer Richard Ford (Blue Met 2014) sits down with Paris Review. I've met lots of writers in my work and Ford stands out, not only for his work, of course, but also for the fact that he was such a kind, engaging and generous man. What a gentleman.

Richard Ford: charmer

Vermeer, A Little Life, Hokusai in Boston and Coming Out Stories: Cultural Digest for August 5

Vermeer and love

• Really interesting interview at The Millions with the writer of one of this year's most buzzed about books, A Little Life. The work has been raved about, the writer seemingly coming from nowhere and creating a literary stir that has been praised almost universally. No, I haven't read it yet but the more I read about it, the more intrigued I am.
• Moving piece in The Paris Review yesterday about Vermeer's evocative & haunting scenes and what they can teach us about love, inspiring Michael White's book Travels in Vermeer.
• I'm really dying to see this exhibition on 18th century Japanese artist, Hokusai, now showing in Boston. Road Trip!
• Happy to see that the Montreal Gazette is doing this video series on Coming Out Stories by well-known Montrealers. 
• Chinese Guzheng player, Bei Bei, mesmerizes with her "strange instrument of beauty." 

Hokusai in Boston

Junot Díaz at Blue Met

Winner of our 3rd Premio Metropolis Azul, Junot Díaz will be at the Festival this year to talk about his popular works, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as well as his other book This is How You Lose Her.

Díaz is one of contemporary fiction's best-known practitioners and a recent BBC critics poll ranked Oscar Wao as the best book of the 21st century.

Díaz's books reflect a changing demographic in US and North American society: his works detail the immigrant experience, the difficulties of assimilation and, in particular, of language-learning. His works are full of memorable and unique protagonists who struggle to fit in but stand out with humour and incredibly colorful language.

A prolific Facebook user, Díaz is also preoccupied with racism and injustice in America today and his Facebook posts reflect his social conscience (and, indeed, much of what interests him as a fiction writer).

"We live in a society where default whiteness goes unremarked - no one ever asks it for its passport - but God forbid a person of color should raise her voice against this smug occult system of oppression, points out whiteness, its operations and consequences - well, in two seconds flat that person is the one accused of being obsessed with race."

It's very interesting to me how our writers reflect our societies and we can learn so much about what is happening in any given society by considering that society's writers (and artists in general) and what interest them. Yet this is also a very delicate line to walk because writers who are overtly political often fall out of fashion very quickly. So there has to be some kind of broad appeal that both reflects the culture but also which stands independent of it.

Díaz will do two events at Blue Met 2015: his main event at the Rialto Theater, in association with, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, will see Díaz on stage with Montreal writer Heather O'Neill (The Girl Who Was Saturday Night). This is on Thursday, April 23 in the evening. Tickets are $10 or $8.50 if you buy them before April 8.  Tickets available online here (service fees may apply) or you can also buy them at the shop: Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 211 Bernard Ouest, in Mile End.

His other event will be on Friday, April 24 at Librairie Las Américas (2075 St-Laurent). This event is in Spanish and will be an onstage discussion between Díaz and journalist Hector Tobar (author of Deep Down Dark: the Untold Story of 33 Men Buried in the Chilean Mine). Tickets here.

Sophie's Choice by William Styron

William Styron is one of those writers for whom I gained an appreciation very early in my life.

I think I probably read Sophie's Choice for the first time when I was about 19 or 20 and I end up re-reading it every 5 or 10 years. Styron is one of those writers who seems to have followed me wherever I go. (I also love The Confessions of Nat Turner, despite all the controversy around it.)

Oddly, I had picked up Sophie's Choice a week or two before I left for Colombia and read the first 100 or so pages but decided not to bring it with me (I brought a book on the Vikings instead which I didn't even open once while I was in Latin America). But on the plane from Cartagena to New York, the people next to me on the plane suddenly began talking about Sophie's Choice and, in fact, the choice that is the great denouement of the novel.

I found this odd: a coincidence that two people were even talking about books next to me (though considering that one was an author at the Festival in Colombia, I suppose not that odd) but even more strange that it was a book I hold so dear AND one that I had just started reading again the week before.

In any case, William Styron, who died in 2006, is in the midst, I think, of a low point in his writing reputation. Often this happens for several years or more after an author dies (Kay Boyle is another writer who had some success in her lifetime but has never really picked up any momentum since her death more than 20 years ago; Czeslaw Milosz is another.). But it's a shame that his reputation has somewhat dimmed: he was such an important part of the American literary scene for so much of the 20th century, if not a controversial one. He was close to James Baldwin and, like Baldwin, very invested in civil rights and in the issues of his day. His themes are somewhat dated now, perhaps, and a novel about the Holocaust seems the last thing the world needs to get excited about.

But one thing that struck me as I read the book this time was how YOUNG these Holocaust survivors were. Sophie, I mean. For us today in this generation, the Holocaust means old people, the elderly, or those long long dead (even my maternal grandfather was too young to fight in WWII and would have been 17 when the war ended and the camps liberated. He lived to a ripe old age.) But in the novel, Sophie is a young woman in Brooklyn just a couple of years after the end of the war, trying to carry on with her life after the horrors she suffered. She was a young and beautiful woman like many women who survived the camps. It's easy to forget that the Holocaust was not about old people but about young people, many of whom had to try and carry on after the camps were freed (in this sense, I am also reminded of Montreal writer, Nancy Richler's fascinating novel, The Imposter Bride)

The other theme which fascinates Styron (maybe more than the Holocaust) is mental illness and the

main character, Sophie's lover, Nathan Landau, suffers from what we might diagnose today as bi-polar disorder. She is the one who has suffered unspeakably yet he is the one, the middle class American Jew, who is plagued with mental illness. Styron captures his ups and downs, his highs and lows and all the havoc he wreaks on those around him. This theme, perhaps, was prescient for Styron to be so interested in (though he suffered very publicly from his own bout of mental illness which he chronicles in his excellent book, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness).

Sophie's Choice is a novel that still continues to speak to me and to surprise me even though I've read it countless times.

At a moment early on in the novel when Stingo hears the French horn coming from Sophie's room upstairs (he's only just met her in the hallway of the building and he is instantly struck with her beauty) he links her history and the music he hears from Nathan's French horn to the destruction of Europe that was what these young people had in their recent memories:

It was music that, among other things, spoke of a Europe of a halcyon time, bathed in the soft umber flow of serene twilights - of children in pigtails and pinafores bobbing along in dogcarts, of excursions in the glades of the Wiener Wald and strong Bavarian beer, of ladies from Grenoble with parasols strolling the glittering rims of vertiginous waltzes, of Moselle wine, of Johannes Brahms himself, with beard and black cigar...It was a Europe of almost inconceivable sweetness - a Europe that Sophie, drowning in her sorrow above me, could never have known.

Gary Shteyngart in Montreal!

One of America's best-loved writers will be here in Montreal very soon!

Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and the memoir Little Failure, will be on stage at the Jewish Public Library on Wednesday, November 5 at 7:30pm. Shteyngart will appear with Eleanor Wachtel from CBC's Writer's and Company. This is really exciting because he doesn't get to Montreal very often so see him while you can!

Shteyngart wrote a really funny piece last week in the New Yorker about his current book tour for promotion of Little Failure. 

Tickets are $15 ($10 for members of the library or students) can be purchased by calling 514-345-6416.

US Publishing and East Coast stories

I've been thinking about the baggage we bring to books we read and how that baggage affects the way we react to them. I'm about halfway through Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs and I had this odd reaction when I first started the book: a sense that I am sick to death of novels set on the East Coast about rich white people. For a couple of days, I forced myself to read it, despite the fact that it was the third or fourth book I'd read in a row about rich white people from the East Coast (including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch which I liked and wrote about, despite what I'm about to say below).

Not every American story is a Manhattan story

It turns out that my feelings (my baggage) were not fair: the book really isn't about rich white people from the East Coast. East Coast, yes, but these are run-of-the-mill people. I have other issues with the book though my initial reaction has really made me think about the way I encounter things I'm reading, particularly since I almost gave up reading it due to my reaction at first.

Since our Festival is an international festival, I read a good deal of international writers from all over the world. True, I read a good deal from Canadian writers, too, but when I delve into an American novel it's somewhat of a rare treat and I approach American novels as both an insider (I was born and raised in the USA and all my family still lives there) but also as a  foreigner (I live in Canada and haven't lived in the US since I was in my early 20s).

Why are Americans so fascinated with stories about rich upper-class east-coasters? I suppose a big part of it is the fact that the US publishing industry is so based in the east (read: New York City) and editors are culled from the upper classes and Ivy League schools. To me, growing up in the west, the east was always far away, hard to imagine, exotic, dangerous, crowded, full of overdone ladies in fur coats and hard-edged men in $5000 suits.

Perhaps even all these years later, despite having lived outside the west since around 1995, I still hold certain prejudices and assumptions about easterners. And it's not like there aren't plenty of writers who write about Western lives (Sam Shepard, who I've written about recently, Jim Harrison, many others).

All of this leads me back to Claire Messud's book. Again, it's set in the east but it's not at all conforming to my preconceived ideas about books from the East Coast. Still, I find it a puzzling work. I'll write about it another day since that's a slightly different topic and I should finish the book before passing judgement.

Sam Shepard

You know how you get kind of obsessed with a writer and try to read as much as you can in one fell swoop?

Lately, for me that writer has been Sam Shepard.

I've read him before and in the spring, I had some very interesting conversations with fans of his work that I met at a few work functions. Over the summer, I picked up a play here, a collection of stories there until I had quite a nice collection which I started reading through in the last couple of months.

I am just blown away. Funny how when you read something in your early 20s, things can just fly by you. Something about re-reading him now in my early 40s has opened up a whole new world for me. The distances between us all, the ways we disconnect, the ways we try to reach out, the pain of isolation.

Also, since I am originally from the Western US, perhaps his setting felt too close to me when I first approached Shepard years ago. Now that time and distance fall in between, the west is almost exotic, like a song that's vaguely familiar but whose melody and words I've long forgotten.

His collection Great Dream of Heaven is one of those books I intentionally have been reading bit by bit because I don't want it to end. Some of the pieces are short, some just two pages, none more than 10, but they are incredibly self-contained with complex snippets of characters that stay with you for days afterwards.

It strikes me, too, that his writing has fallen out of fashion in certain ways because we no longer find it fashionable to explore issues of class in our art. Or at least not in the dominant culture. And it's not done in any overtly political way: but his stories contains lives of those on the margins, living hand to mouth in small towns and cities in the west.

The premise he starts with is often simple: a woman driving through the midwest with her mother's ashes in an urn in the passenger seat, encountering an injured hawk along the highway. A conversation between a woman being evicted for having too many cats and someone trying to help her. A young boy interviewing his father about the 1980s for a school project. A customer in a fast-food restaurant inquiring about the simple yet complex philosophy behind a painted sign at the counter.

Yet despite the simple settings and lives, he richly creates these complex series of thoughts, never pretentiously, somehow putting on the page things we've all felt or thought or pondered.

His plays, too: Buried Child is moving, mysterious, deeply symbolic, painful.

John Cheever. The Past. Seinfeld.

I came across this book the other day in a bookstore downtown and it brought back happy memories.

I've owned this edition at least twice in my life, one as an undergraduate where I read each story slowly and methodically, almost as if I could break them apart to understand how Cheever's stories worked. His narrators are cool observers, part of the action but also one stepped removed from the emotional core of the plot. Lots of family relationships, suburban New York landscapes, angry conversations. And lots and lots of drinking. Anyone who wants to be a writer should spend time encountering these stories as a young person, I think.

Years later, I came across the same edition of this collection in Asia somewhere. I recall one winter in my 7th floor apartment, staying in bed for a weekend (it was unusually cold and the heating systems don't work that well in Shanghai), re-reading this book again and experiencing the stories as an older reader. They hadn't lost their charm.

This was China in the very late 90s where books were not always easy to get, so good ones tended to make the rounds (along with DVDs and CDs): a friend borrowed this Cheever collection and on more than a few occasions we sat with beers in a bar and discussed various stories in it. Then the book travelled around our little circle of friends. I remember finding it odd that men connected to the stories more often than women (a woman I remember complained that the stories were about old white drunk men who would be the same age and generation as her father).

I didn't buy the book that I saw downtown the other day (I have no idea what happened to the two earlier editions of it I have owned, I suspect I loaned them to someone and they vanished into someone else's life). I didn't buy it because this time of year I simply have too much that I have to read for work and I don't need more distractions. But also, part of me likes the fact that the stories represent a time from my past(s), that the memories I have of them are associated with a very specific part of my history and for now at least I don't want to interfere with that. It's like coming across an album you used to like from high-school or college: you can still appreciate it but that music represents a different time and place.

You don't hear terribly much about John Cheever these days. I vaguely remember references to him on Seinfeld (he had exchanged love letters with George's uncle, I think...?) and I know that the Library of America did a great edition of his works a few years back.

Chad Harbach and the Baseball Novel

I must admit that I am not a huge sports fan. I have been to baseball and basketball games and had a perfectly fine time. When I lived in Seattle back in the 90s, I followed the Mariners and rooted for them at the occasional home game. I have developed an interest in hockey after being in Montreal a number of years, but I've never been much on "the baseball novel" or the sports novel.

Yet last week in Berlin, I found myself anxiously looking forward to seeing American writer, Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding, probably one of the best-reviewed "baseball" novels in a generation or more.

The room was huge and though the attendance could have been better (probably under 150 people were there, in a space meant for four times that number), those lucky enough to attend were, I think, pleasantly surprised at how charming and affable Harbach was on-stage.

Interviewed by Priya Basil, Harbach initially rolled with the contention (Basil's) that the pairing of the book's main themes, sports and homosexuality, was an odd choice. He seemed sincere in explaining how it happened organically throughout the long process (the book took 10 years to write) of developing it.

A young Australian woman told me after the show that she had seen Harbach interviewed in Sydney by a terrible interviewer who seemed woefully unprepared (note to those who want to do interviews or host events: be prepared! We often refuse to use an interviewer again once they give off the appearance of ill-preparedness during a Festival event.). Basil is a good interviewer if she is a bit stiff at times. Her thorough lack of baseball knowledge (she spoke about it as if it were some exotic 19th century sport played by coolies in a desert) was charming though and added humour to her interaction with Harbach.

One aspect of Basil's approach is to tell Harbach what a critic has said about his book (often something off the wall) and then get his reaction. A little of this goes a long way but Basil definitely chose the right quotes to throw at the writer who happily answered in a thoughtful and very intelligent way (the references to Homer were an absolute thrill and so effortless by Harbach). What I really do appreciate about Basil is her thoughtful questions which reflected, I think, a close and thoughtful reading of Harbach's book.

A baseball novel, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily something that would strike me as my cup of tea, but after listening to the discussion, reading some fascinating reviews (not all glowing, by any means), and hearing Harbach read from the book myself, it's definitely on my must-read list over the next few weeks.

Gore Vidal: "A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

Gore Vidal was one of the first American "shit-stirrers," mucking up and challenging media, politicians and the tendency towards American provincialism.

Famously contrary, he has never been afraid of challenging his own milieu, his own friends, even his own weaknesses.Who else could get away with such bold assertions such as:

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

"It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."


Now 85 years old, Gore Vidal came of age in a time and place that seem almost unreal now: by the age of Mad Men and Civil Rights and the sexual revolution, he was already well into his 30s and 40s. Thus for his generation, television was the big social changer and he was no fan.

"Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel."


This kind of hostility seems antiquated today when even hostility towards the Internet generally seems like a debate from an earlier time. One wonders what he would have to say about social media, ebooks, constant streams of information, and Google copyright, etc.

His book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare seems like a writer very conscious of his advancing years, showing private moments of his rather public life in a very "Vidalian" way. It's a lovely book full of photographs: his early years, as a teenager, old telegrams, magazine articles, etc, a compendium of his life and career that is highly visual and entertaining. For any Gore Vidal fans, it's a must-have. It also makes me nostalgic for a time and place where memories were associated with objects, actual things you could touch and feel and hold and not just digits on a screen.

An interesting Quebec connection, too: Montreal born writer John Glassco's 1970 book, Memoirs of Montparnasse, tells the story of a group of artists and writers in 1920s Paris (retold in Brian Busby's excellent biography of John Glassco), heavily centered around American writer Robert McAlmon (a very close friend of Kay Boyle, another American writer whose work I adore). Robert McAlmon grew up in the midwest and one of this better known works (As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period) tells the story of his early life in South Dakota and his friendship with Eugene Vidal, Gore Vidal's father (Gore Vidal challenges McAlmon's portrayal and memories in his own memoir, Palimpsest.)