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