Cosi Fan Tutte and Other Stories: Haneke, Mendelssohn and Ozick

Today I'd like to tell a story in two parts. The first one begins like this:

I take the viewer seriously. That's why I know I can show him serious things on the screen. And there's no need for Michael Haneke to repeat those words. The images, the dialogues, the refusal to reduce the viewers discomfort; all of them are Haneke's.

It's all about observing closely; finding bits of reality that, woven together, make drama more intense, more immediate. It is the work of a craftsman.
This weekend I saw Michael H - Profession: Director, a documentary on the artist, the screenwriter, the drama professor.  

"There's no one like Chekhov for dialogue," says Haneke, rimless glasses on, ever serene in front of the camera. In the documentary we see him sitting behind a pupil's desk, observing how a young couple argues: he, pleading, she, firm and unmoved; they're giving all they have on this dialogue. Haneke then tells them to stop and, without holding back on the irony, explains why the scene is, simply not believable. He knows the reason too well; he knows what it means to sit in Chekhov's chair.
"When filming, sometimes I need a break after a dialogue scene," he says. "I just feel too much the pain in my characters."

Chekhov, the Doyen of all times at capturing our misunderstandings, was born in Taganrog, Russia. After being diagnosed with tuberculosis he left Moscow and spent the last seven years of his life in Yalta, Ukraine.

Bolekhiv, also in Ukraine, is where the second part of this story begins.
In the mirrored room of La Monnaie, we are all quiet, bedazzled by Daniel Mendelssohn's words - the interviewer, Annelies Beck tilts her head and keeps her microphone away.
He tells us about the time he went to Ukraine, to Bolekhiv, where his grandfather had been born. He goes on to describe the moment when he went for a walk just outside town.
He sees children playing, running around and chasing each other. He asks one of them, "do you know what this is?" The boy, almost chuckling answers, "why, of course: the Jewish cemetery."

He pauses for a moment, looks at Annelies, then goes on, "So I decided to ask him a second question: 'do you know what a Jew is?'"
There is silence.
"The boy didn't know," we hear him say.
His eyes are glazed, his stare lost somewhere amid the audience. He then clears his throat and continues: "If my grandfather knew; if he could see what has happened; see that nothing, nothing of what he knew is left, his heart would split."
He has nothing more to say; there are tears in his eyes.
Annelies, who's brought about the session expertly, leaves those words to linger, just enough so that our heads feel heavy, our backs are hunched; sadness now covers the room.

And that was just one of the moments, captured forever in memory, that Annelies Beck and Daniel Mendelssohn treated us with at the foyer of La Monnaie. During those two hours there was talk of Greek tragedy, our need for closure, the nature of desire, all of them revolving around one topic: Michael Haneke's production of Cossi Fan Tutte.
When I left I felt giddy, almost tripped on my way out. I had so many thoughts, so many ideas firing up in my head.

That evening, as I lay collapsed on my couch, a glass of Carménère in one hand, a book in the other, I read a short story by Cynthia Ozick called "Save My Child!" In it, Ruth Puttermesser, a Jewish Russian emigre in her sixties and living in New York, hosts her cousin Lidia, who's just decided to leave Soviet Russia.
A few pages in, I encountered this sentence and I couldn't help thinking of Daniel Mendelssohn, as it could have been his own mother's words:

"An ache fell over Puttermesser. It was grief for her papa's grief."

Break It Down: Meet Lydia Davis

I first discovered Lydia Davis in a sleight of chance - a very fortunate one.
It was in Oslo, a few years ago, when the days were growing short and the hours of energy left in me grew even shorter. It was in an anthology I picked out from the shelf because of its title: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off, Love Quarrels.
And that was all it took. I read her story and I laughed a big hearty laugh. It was just a tiny story, no more than a paragraph, but there was depth and rhythm and, as it often happens in her prose, a profoundness that stands out not despite but because of the conciseness.
I thus went on and looked out for more.

And so it happened that those laughs turned into a heavy heart when I read her story "Break It Down". Perhaps it was the sadness, perhaps the feeling of immense loss in the narrator's voice, the longing that grows like a shadow, boundless, and that it suddenly becomes overwhelming.
But there is also tenderness in his voice. A tenderness that makes you think there used to be happiness in his heart; that he lived moments that will never be erased from his mind. It makes you even jealous. And how could you not when you read phrases like this:

"And no matter how long you crawl over each other it won't be enough...and you look over at her face and can't believe how you got there, and how lucky, and it's still all a surprise. And it never stops."

I met Lydia Davis in March, at the Passaporta Literary Festival in Brussels.We talked about other writers as influences - her life changed after reading Russell Edson's work, mine after James Salter's. And at the end of our conversation she said to me: "Just keep on writing. Don't you worry about the rest. It will come."

Not surprisingly, only a few months later after we talked, she was given the International Man Booker Prize.
Congratulations, Lydia Davis.

On Why I write and Living in Norway

While I was growing up one thing was clear in my head: writing is about having something interesting to say.
The more I read and the more I talked to people, the more the idea was confirmed.
In the Peruvian Amazon or in the mountains of West Bengal, I'd often find myself surrounded by children waving their hands and giggling, all of them asking the same thing: did I have a pen I could spare?
They, too, had something to say.

But with time I've come to realize that for me, writing is about something else: it is about trying to understand.
Understanding means listening, asking questions, reflecting on the answers and then, asking yourself: have I asked the right question?
Living in Norway has been a blessing for me. My ear has become finer and more nuanced.
Many Norwegians are introvert and also, extremely attentive listeners. One can notice it even in the language when there is something they don't know they'll say to you: "Hør med Henrik, Hør med Hilde," go and hear with them, where as in other languages the suggestion would be: "Go and talk to, go and speak to."
It is in their culture to pay attention, to listen, and to try to understand.

The novelist Lionel Shriver, whom I had the chance to meet in London, recently wrote about her latest book: "I didn't want to publish dieting tips and slimming recipes, to write a thinly disguised self-help book....
A literary novel needed to dig down deeper."

I, too, have tried to dig down deeper in two of the stories that will appear this month in an anthology published by Holland House.The stories are about motherhood, loneliness, guilt and discrimination. All of them topics that I've put under my pillow hoping to understand, even if just a tiny bit more about.
In the anthology there will be also pieces by fellow writers Audrey Camp, Chelsea Ranger, Brian Talgo, Bree Switzer, Anna Maria Moore, Evelinn Enoksen and Zoe Harris, who also leads the Oslo International Writers' Group.

The Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf once said to me: "Finish it. Whatever you do, finish it."
And so I listened to his advise. The e-book will be released on the 17th of May and the print version on the 7th of June.

Lionel Shriver at the London Book Fair, 2013

Keanu Reeves & Rachmaninoff: l'amour, les larmes

"Am I K in your book?" That is what Katherine wonders. Is she K in count Laszlo de Almásy's logbook? To those of you who can remember, the year is 1996 and the movie, The English Patient.

I remember going to the cinema not knowing anything about the film other than the fact that I would get to see the small, slightly pulled-up nose of Juliette Binoche. And back then, that was enough for me.

I never really imagined that it would make such a memorable impression on me. The story deals with topics that continue to fascinate me: history, exploration of the world, marriage, adultery, love and subsequently, loss.

This weekend, during the Oslo International Film Festival, I had the chance to see a couple of movies, one of them being the documentary called Side-by-Side, where Keanu Reeves interviews several movie directors (Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, among others) to discuss and debate the use of digital cameras versus film cameras. The film gives an excellent tour of how a movie is made and how digital technologies have made their way into the film industry. An eye opener for those of us who don't really know all that happens behind producing a movie.
And it was there, in the middle of the film, that I found out The English Patient was one of the first movies to be edited with digital technology (with a tool called AVID). No wonder those incredible aerial shots of an expansive desert, fading into the face of de Almásy, learning to speak with a Bedouin who describes a mountain the shape of a woman's back.
The debate is far from over but one stark conclusion is that film-based equipment producers have stopped research and development altogether.

To wrap up the weekend I saw the movie that won the 2012 Palme d'Or in Cannes: Amour. And I don't want to say too much except that it is a heartbreaking story about being human: loving, growing old together and inevitably, parting.
There is no background music to the film but there were grief stricken moments when, inside my head, I heard the melody of a piano piece being played. It was Rachmaninoff's Les Larmes - the tears.
And it continued to play on and on, without wanting to leave my head. 

Homage to Raymond Carver and Mikhails Tals

Mopeds buzzing by, waiters dribbling their way around tables and women trapping their skirts against the wind. This is what I will remember from the time I sat at Les Deux Magots in Paris. But why do we remember only certain images, certain moments, and not others?
"I have large blanks. But I can remember some things, little things" wrote Raymond Carver in his essay called Fires. I have also large blanks.
Recently, on a flight back to Oslo, I sat next to a young couple who had to chase their young son along the aisle until the three of them collapsed, exhausted. I almost felt sleepy looking at the way the young parents dozed away, knocked right out unconscious. And when I saw father and son sleeping together, his little chest up and down, I wondered about the first time I flew. Only one image came to mind. I am three and my father is on the window seat, his chin resting on my shoulder while I, standing up between his legs, point at the plane's wing. The rest is gone.
I like to talk to people on airplanes -if they are awake- and I often get to hear the most astonishing stories. This summer, on my way to the Edinburgh book festival, I met a retired Scottish engineer who had been an expert on windmills. He told me about the first time he visited Oslo, in 1966 - way before the oil years - and how different a city it was. But what I found fascinating was the recount of his chess match in Nice, summer of '74, against the once world champion, Mikhails Tals. I had been working on a short story, inspired by Tals, after my visit to Riga but this was, to put it mildly, better than Veuve Clicquot in first class.
Listening to the way this man, already a few years into retirement, could remember the coolness of the pieces, the hushed Russian whispering and the extreme mental fatigue, made me want to write about him. To keep our brief encounter in my thoughts. And in my memory.

The King of Norway

The scent of parsley, shallots and wine coming from the kitchen is delicate but pervasive; it consumes me. I let myself surrender to the bowl of moules marinières that has been delivered on my table by the thin, long-necked waitress with beautiful posture yet, very little manners. But I don't make a fuss. Not tonight. The room's dimmed lights, the sound of come down in time in Sting's husky voice and the pink chewy flesh makes me feel a flow of goose bumps in the middle of the back and up to my neck. That is, simply put, the joy of being in Brussels.
The day after, I wake up with a minor headache but nonetheless hit the city to benefit from the mild 12 degrees hoping to finish "The discomfort zone" by Jonathan Franzen over a cappuccino and a pastry at Place St. Boniface. The metro is unusually crowded and all seats are taken by either people, bags or vomit so I decide to stand at the end of the car and listen to an interview with Jennifer Egan and Siddhartha Mukherjee, the latter being the author of an interesting book called "The emperor of all maladies, a biography of cancer". I learn in shock how an effort to fight the disease might actually wind up killing you as it happened to Susan Sontag who died of the blood cancer caused by the chemo against her breast cancer. I regain some hope hearing the description of the drug Gleevec, which has shown positive results against chronic myeloid leukemia. The interview moves on to Jennifer Egan's "A visit from the goon squad" the moment I leave the metro and start walking for that cinnamon roll. I get to the terrace, remove my headphones and start reading the weekend newspaper - is there a better way to relax and get away from routine stress?
On Sunday, half sober and full-bellied,  I decide to treat me and read some fiction on the plane back to Oslo. It's a short story written by Amos Oz for the New Yorker and as I start to get into the psyche of the main character, Zvi Provisor, the end of the story hits me with sorrow and despair: "Did you hear? The King of Norway died last night. Cancer. Of the liver"
As much as it was fiction, it made me wish the results one awaits on the day tests are due, come negative.  

To Madame Sarah Bernhardt

"Madame, l'auteur était bien jeune lorsqu'il a écrit ce livre; il le met à vos pieds, Madame, en vous demandant beaucoup, beaucoup d'indulgence" thus begins the author whose footsteps I, without being aware, wound up following across continents. It's the sort of nudge on the rib that upon realization makes you wonder: how many intricate paths in our lives do we heedlessly enter, exit, re-enter, cross over and under without ever having the slightest clue of where we've stepped into or out from?
It's dinner time and the entrée, smoked trout with dill sauce and cherry tomatoes, is looking dandy. My friend Suglum and her husband have been very kind to have me over for a meal at their flat in Grünerløkka. At the risk of being perceived as bulimic, I've been chopping the fish to particles to avoid her getting up and bring the next dish. All I want is to have her go on about her time in the South Pacific and the anthropological research she carried out there. "You've probably read 'The way to paradise', haven't you?" It takes me by surprise that my passive role has been interrupted and I manage to nod while almost fumbling my glass of white wine onto Genk, who seems more amused than worried at my clumsiness. "Besides the references to Gaugin in Tahiti", I blurt out, "Vargas Llosa mentions a book called Rarahu".  I haven't yet finished saying this when it hits me that three years before Rarahu, Pierre Loti wrote Aziyadé while being in Istanbul, which I happen to be visiting in just a few hours time. Perhaps a chance to have a coffee where he used to sit and reflect, looking over the golden horn?
Having had a charming one night stop-over (see Letter from home), I set out to my main destination in the West corner of Africa landing in Dakar at the heat of Senegalese mid day. A day trip to Lac Rose serves me as a warm up -literally- and soon after my friend Hanna and I are ready to head off north to the jewel of the Senegal River: la ville de Saint Louis. On the second day of exploring the town I almost trip over a line of wooden statuettes for being distracted by a street sign (see below). The kid selling the pieces is giggling and asks me if I could please do the pirouette again yet I barely listen. I'm too focused frantically going over the pages of my guide until I find the sought out confirmation : Pierre Loti wrote "Le Roman d'un Spahi" while being stationed in Saint Louis in 1881.
A cute coincidence? If anything, a blip, a desafinado note de um coração que bate calado? I decide to ponder over it while I steal some of the joy from Miss Bernhardt.