No Boys Allowed: A Book Club to Discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

In Person
November 23, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 18 4 min read

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coverLast month, a group of women between the ages of 25 and 35 got together in Los Angeles to talk about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.  I was one of these women.  I loved the idea of getting together to discuss a big book, one that people across the nation were also buying, and reading, and meeting to talk about.  It felt like we were participating in a cultural moment–it was like getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in the 1980s.   Plus, there would be snacks.

Since the novel is 562 pages, we decided to discuss the book over two meetings–crazy, I know.  Because I actually get paid to facilitate a different book club (can you believe that?), I held back from planning questions and discussion points for this new one.  I would not let this group become a job. I would not bring a highlighter.  However, I did bring one quote, from Garth Risk Hallberg’s review on this very site.  To start the meeting off, I read the quote aloud to the others:

It is surely worth mentioning that Franzen writes more persuasively and attentively about the inner life of women than any male American novelist since Henry James.

“Who wrote that?”  someone asked.
“What? You don’t think a man can write from a woman’s perspective?”
“Was the reviewer a man or a woman?”
“How does he know?”
“The question isn’t whether a man can write a woman’s perspective, but if Franzen can. Was he successful?”

The responses were mixed to this question.  All of us felt Patty Berglund, midway through the novel at least, was a complicated and believable character, but a few of us–myself included–did not buy the conceit of her autobiography.  It did not feel as if she had written it; arbitrarily capitalizing words does not render a perspective true!  To me it felt half-assed, almost offensive. Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself?  It didn’t seem like a true investigation of a character’s world or her use of language to describe that world.

But I digress.  We talked a whole lot about Patty.

“Why did Richard keep saying she was tall?  She’s only like 5′ 9″!” (So said our tallest member.)
“Did anyone really imagine her as attractive?”
“When I think female basketball player, I’m unable to imagine a good looking woman.”

What’s interesting to me about an unguided book club is how quickly it dives into content, with only brief exchanges about form.  There is analysis, but it’s about the characters.  Why did Patty marry Walter?   What is the nature of the love between Richard and Walter?  What the hell was up with the dirty talk between Joey and Connie?  (“That was my favorite part!”)  The great fun of these meetings–and perhaps why they’re not particular productive–is that you get to talk about the characters as if they’re real.  People describe emotional reactions to the events in the book.  They make value judgments.  They psychoanalyze the characters–and this inevitably pulls the discussion away from the text.  I recall one moment, as we were debating the potential selfishness of the characters, when someone said, “Well, first, we need to define selfishness.”  This led us down a thorny but fascinating path, which had little to do with the Berglunds and their problems.  In a book club about Freedom, it’s easy to go from a discussion of Walter’s environmentalism to a discussion of overpopulation to a discussion of having babies to a discussion of orgasms to, “What do you think Jonathan Franzen’s lovemaking style is?”  No wonder Franzen hemmed and hawed his way to a dis-invitation from Oprah nearly ten years ago!  He understood how dangerous a group of women can be.

It turned out, after our first meeting (four hours long, no joke), we were all talked out.  Our second meeting was shorter and more subdued.  We discussed the ending, and the relative happiness of Patty and Walter.  Had anyone changed?  Could anyone really change?  We discussed the structural and narrative similarities of the first and final sections–was that return to the elevated perspective beautiful, or a cop-out?  (My answer?  Both.)  We talked about whether or not the sections about mountain top removal were sort of interesting or incredibly boring, and how we reacted to real-life details in fiction.

“You think Jonathan Franzen listens to Bright Eyes?”
“Is there a real life version of Richard Katz?  I never believed he was actually famous.”
“What the fuck is up with the band name Walnut Surprise?”
“It was so silly!”
“Should have been Walnut Hotel or something.”
“Walnut Surprise sounds sexual, and scatological–like a Joey and Connie thing.  Franzen is obsessed with poop.”

In both meetings, we came back to this question of whether or not Freedom is a masterpiece.  Why was Jonathan Franzen, out of the many talented and important authors, the anointed one?  We all agreed it was pretty great to see a writer on the cover of TIME, but was he truly “the great American novelist”?   He is both commercially successful and critically acclaimed, and few can claim that mysterious combination these days.   We were saddened, or sobered, by the fact that a woman, at least in the present day, would not be given that title.  Everyone agreed with that.

Of course, we spent the last twenty minutes discussing the most important question: “What should we read next?”

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

In Person

Brad Bumsted: An Old-School Reporter Still Getting the Story, and Still Getting It Right

In Person
October 16, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 3 13 min read
Brad Bumsted is an important reminder that good journalism will always be built on what it was originally built on – not technological innovations, but on the ability of dogged, savvy, intelligent reporters to gather information and quickly turn it into factual, even-handed and engaging prose. Few people have done it longer than Brad Bumsted. Few do it better.
In Person
| 1 book mentioned 3 13 min read
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In Person

Jonathan Franzen, Honesty and the Lines of Literature

In Person
December 14, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 7 6 min read
"What turns out to matter most is that you write as truthfully as possible" -- Jonathan Franzen In Germany to deliver a talk on fiction, Jonathan Franzen couldn’t be more American. He is friendly and informal, casual and comfortable, approaching the podium of a University of Tübingen auditorium so packed that students are sitting on the floor in front of the podium and on the stairs between the seats. A few even perch up on the broad windowsills, two or even three students to a window. About to kick off a week-long series of lectures and discussions, Franzen has his talk printed out in a sheaf and rolled up sort of nervously in his hands. Then he realizes the Germans haven’t finished introducing him yet, have actually only finished the first half of an introduction that will describe him in ways that might be more fitting for a landscape or a panorama; proclaim him to be the most significant voice in America, an arbiter of its culture and an example of the best of its art; and awkwardly recommend him for the Nobel Prize. It is only half over and he’s embarrassed himself by standing up in the middle. He grimaces, mouths “Sorry,” walks back to his chair in exaggerated tiptoe, and sits down. Midwesterners, and Americans generally, often carry with them this suspicion of the formal and overly complicated - a fear that, other times, is expressed as a commitment to hospitality, honesty, and egalitarianism. In a piece in The New Yorker, in 2002, Franzen cringed in print at the thought of his mother asking him “if he was just showing off” with the big words in his third novel. She was, he writes, “a lifelong anti-elitist who used to get good rhetorical mileage out of the mythical ‘average person.’” In the essay, “Mr. Difficult,” Franzen finds himself caught between two models of the novel. One, which he calls “Status,” values a novel for its appeal to an elite. The harder it is, the better. The other sees the novel as a “Contract” between reader and writer. It’s the novel as an exact balance between entertainment and having something serious to say. “In my bones,” Franzen confesses, “I'm a Contract kind of person.” A great novel, according to this model, will aspire to the broad middle, neither showy and elitist nor low-brow and trashy. This is the novel that, if it were a politician, could win 51 percent of the vote. The comparison to politics is actually helpful here. If you're on the political fringe in America, you find yourself weighing two possible rhetorical moves. The first is to defend extremism, almost abstract extremism, extremism for its own sake. You deride the democratic majority, calling them "sheep," unwitting pawns of powerful forces. Thus your fringe status is a sign of the value of your ideas, marking you yourself as one of the few, the chosen, those who really understand. This is the move of anyone quoting Barry Goldwater on extremism in defense of liberty. The other possible move is to attempt to redefine everything, to re-frame the picture so that you are actually at the center. Everyone else is on the fringe, the real crazies. This is what libertarians do with their World's Smallest Political Quiz, wherein, through "just the honest magic of truth and common sense," libertarians fall at the center and top part of the map, while mainstream Republicans are a dot on the far right, along with fascists. (Liberals and anyone who doesn't think the government should be shrunk by 50 percent or more is out on the left with the commies.) The move is actually kind of brilliant, in that the reframing appears natural, and it's hard, while looking at the redrawn Bell curve, to notice immediately that the terms being used aren't quite the common, accepted ones. Jonathan Franzen ended up making something like the second move in his December 1st talk in Tübingen. He structured his talk - "Description of a Struggle: How I (Mostly) Fail to Write" - around four unpleasant, vexing, and (he said) good questions authors are always asked: Who are your influences? What are your writing habits? Do your characters sometimes take over and take on lives of their own? Is your writing really autobiographical? By way of answering them, Franzen talked about the moral struggle of writing, and - quite openly - about his own personal efforts as a writer to overcome shame, guilt and depression. "Unless the writer is personally at risk," he said, "it's not worth reading, or, for the writer, worth writing." Early on, though, Franzen made a little detour, an almost-aside, in which he attempted deftly, like the libertarians noted above, to reframe literature so that he and his project occupied its absolute center. He began by dismissing genre novels, pushing them to the one side of literature, as "a literature of diversion.” He then dismissed experimental novels, postmodern writing and "art novels," pushing them to the other side as, also, "a literature of diversion." He cast genre writing as harmless but unserious, and experimental writing as unserious but harmful. We value genre novels, in Franzen's view (he mentioned Elmore Leonard specifically), for their consistent form, and we appreciate and anticipate their repeated pattern. They are entertaining, but do not address the human condition. Experimental novels, for Franzen, are also all about form, in the sense that they overemphasize and foreground it, focusing on technical tricks and theoretical poses. They are solipsistic. They are playacting. They are too conscious of the act of communicating and modes of communication. They are not, Franzen suggested, fun or entertaining enough - and they are also not about the human condition. The upshot was that literature, this thing left in the middle ground between genre and experimental novels, must take us, humans, people, as "both its subject and dubious object." Offering Kafka as a model of what literature is and what literature should do, he said literature shows us how "to be human in the face of the awful truths of ourselves." However, problems arise from the conflation of what something is and what something should be. For one thing, Franzen's definition of the literary novel doesn't really leave space for a failed work, something that takes the human condition as its subject, but isn't successful. He also, at this point, took a little hop-skip and said literature is about "people as they really are” – as if realism were as natural as breathing. In fact, novels are not and never could be just simple reflections of reality, but are always and have to be constructions, artificial and formal mediations, interpretations. Moreover, it's not at all clear that this description of literature as being about "people as they really are" will divide writing in the way Franzen wants to divide it. It doesn't seem obvious that a story about a man turned into a bug, just to use Franzen's own example, is about humans "as they really are," in some way that, say, Leonard's story about former '60s radicals on a for-profit bomb spree is not. During the question-and-answer period after his talk, Franzen visibly recoiled when someone asked him why he hated experimental writers. "I didn't say 'hate,'" Franzen said. "I was really careful not to use that word." He did, though, describe postmodern writers, experimental writers, as his "enemies" and as enemies of the novel, people who make reading harder. He didn't name names, but did give a long list of descriptions of the writing he doesn't like, including "too self-conscious" and "solipsistic." Afterwards, I asked Franzen whether his aversion to experimentalists included his good friend David Foster Wallace. After all, everything Franzen said he didn't like could be (and has been) used to describe Wallace’s writing, and yet Franzen has never seemed to think of him as an enemy of the novel, or to cast him beyond the boundaries of the literary. Franzen offered three not entirely compatible answers, illuminating some of the unexamined tensions among the Midwestern virtues extolled in “Mr. Difficult” - hospitality, egalitarianism, and candor. First, Franzen insisted that he really wasn't decrying experimentalism, and threw out some names of experimental writers he liked. Instead, right now, he was really opposed, he said, to the "sentimentalists." When asked whom he would describe as a sentimentalist, however, he made the motion of zipping his lips and throwing away the key, which isn't exactly the best way to oppose something. The sentimentalists, he said, were writers who wrote with a sort of moral superiority. His second answer was more of a holding firm to his dislike of experimentalism while also defending Wallace, whom Franzen described as a "once-in-a-generation genius." His idea seemed to be that Wallace was able to overcome experimentalism and its limitations by virtue of his immense talent - to surpass it en route to real literature. Asked for clarification, though, Franzen gave what might actually have been his most satisfying answer. “You know,” he said, “honesty was a life and death struggle for Dave." Franzen too has struggled. He spoke very openly, in Tübingen, about his own struggle to "becom[e] the person you need to be to write the novel you need to write." And he said that his "conception of the novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct confrontation" - that the point at which writing becomes easy for a writer is where it becomes unnecessary to read that writer…. What turns out to matter most is that you write as truthfully as possible. And so Franzen’s fear of being mistaken for an elitist ultimately seems like a distraction, for himself and for his readers. If we disregard his rather conservative attempt to demarcate the boundaries that divide literature from mere writing – if, that is, we disregard his abstract pronouncements and look instead at the writing he admires, it becomes clear that he values above all the great moral effort to be honest in writing, no matter what form it takes. And here we must side with Franzen against himself. In the end, honesty is the moral project that divides good writing from bad, whatever “literature” turns out to be.
In Person
| 1 book mentioned 7 6 min read
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In Person

An Evening with Douglas Coupland

In Person
January 13, 2005 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read
Last night I went to a reading given by Douglas Coupland during which he read passages from his new novel, Eleanor Rigby, and also previewed a lengthy passage from a work-in-progress. Flying on codeine (Coupland, not me), he shot off on various random tangents that, in the end, were twice as entertaining as the readings themselves.Instructed in piano at a young age, Coupland recently decided to give himself a refresher so that he could impress and astound his family with a note-perfect rendition of that Charlie Brown Christmas Piano Thing (which probably has a simpler title than that). Unfortunately the task proved to be more physically traumatic than expected and his left hand went into painful spasms. Hence the codeine, which incidentally Coupland now swears by and highly recommends for recreational use.I should mention up front that I'm not actually an ardent Coupland reader. In fact, I've only read one of his novels (Miss Wyoming). I recall enjoying it thoroughly, but I must also confess that I don't remember a thing about it. Other than the pleasurable experience of reading it. Otherwise, sorry - complete mental block. However I will say that he's a tremendously engaging speaker - quick-witted, completely engaged with his audience, and with a dry, understated, almost deadpan delivery.Eleanor Rigby is indeed the story of one of the lonely people - Liz Dunn. Coupland spoke of the manner in which he describes his characters and his settings. How, in some works, he deliberately avoids over-describing things, leaving the reader to project his own image of a certain protagonist, or of a certain room. Other times, as Liz Dunn herself states, there should be no confusion as to the detail. So, here, the facts are laid out: her age, her overweight awkwardness. These details are necessary in setting the character. They affect her frame of mind. They affect her loneliness.As for Coupland's work-in-progress, it will be a sequel to Microserfs entitled jPod. Allusions to the ubiquitous iPod aside, jPod is actually the name of a corner of an office housing 6 employees whose last names begin with a J. Coupland says that this novel will essentially be about "corporate intrusion into private memory." Heady stuff. But the passage he read came off a bit light-weight and a bit forced. It was a scene in which the 6 employees discuss McDonald's, and in particular Ronald McDonald, and in particular Ronald McDonald's sex-life. They decide that they should each compose and read to the group a "love letter" to Ronald. Then we hear the letters, and they were amusing to a point, and I suppose they do reveal a bit about the individual characters, and the passage seemed to go off well with the audience. But the whole thing came off a bit jokey. And once the whole unusual premise was set, even a bit obvious.His random tangents, however, were truly memorable, as much for their delivery as for their content. How, for instance he suffers from what he calls "executive dysfunction" rendering him inexplicably yet completely incapable of performing such simple tasks as opening an envelope. Until, that is, a doctor-friend suggested doing these impossible tasks at half-speed. Which apparently works. And also how he and his 78-year old father, with whom he has nothing in common, have recently and surprisingly bonded over their mutual affinity for a reality show called The Swan.Whether or not I pick up the new or the next Douglas Coupland book remains a bit of a question mark. What is certain is that if he does another reading in town, codeine or no codeine, I'll be there. And I'll be the one listening intently for the random tangents.
In Person
| 1 book mentioned 3 min read
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18 comments:

  1. Patty! I’m with you on the Autobiography. (Mistakes Were Made? Was Patty a twenty-something blogger?) Less with you on believable–when I read Freedom (which I loved), I thought a lot about why I was so riveted by a book whose main character seemed so… unlikely.

    With the exception of Melissa the coed, the women in The Corrections felt more plausible to me.

    By the way, it comforts me to know that there was extended confab about what Patty actually looked like. Franzen was not forthcoming on this subject, except about height and toned arms. I need visuals!

  2. I kept thinking about his portrayal about the interior life of a depressed woman. I thought he got Richard’s depression in a way that he never got Patty’s. He described her actions as the actions of a depressed woman (namely, drinking too much) but we never really got to see her disillusionment in a way that felt real to me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, and I loved the autobiography, but it was a woman as described by a man, for sure.

  4. The book group is in LA and you didn’t relay the requisite closing question: who would be cast as each character? Careful, that omission could get you thrown out of tinsel town. In the midst of my multi-hour LA based discussion, I asked whether a men’s book group would focus so much on Patty or would they see more in Walter and Richard, who we found a bit stereotypical and flat. SPOILER ALERT: I found the ending unrealistic and that caused a flurry of discussion until I asked “would you get back together with your ex-husband?” At which point every divorced woman in the room (whether she wanted the divorce or not) looked horrified.

  6. Just to stir up the pot, a few obvious questions:

    1. Apart from Franzen, are there any living male writers who write well about women?

    2. If there are, what makes them different from men who don’t write well about women?

    3. Joyce Carol Oates and Pauline Kael both said that the greatest writers are neither particularly male nor particularly female in their viewpoint. Any thoughts on this? Is it just the rationalization of an older generation of women who were trying to get the male literary establishment to take them seriously, or is there something worthwhile to their opinion?

    4. Is Franzen being scapegoated for larger issues — the sexism of society in general and of the literary establishment in particular? Or are there good reasons to hold him particularly accountable as a symbol of these issues?

  7. Thanks for all your comments. Chelsey, I really enjoyed your blog post–very well said! We talked a lot about Connie in the group. Some of us found her to be a cipher, and only a cipher. Others found her cipher quality to be incredibly complicated and fascinating. We all wanted more Jessica, and we wondered at her absence of perspective.

    Lydia, I agree that The Corrections had better female characters overall. I still think of Denise when I’m cooking…

    Kim, our club actually talked a lot about Walter and Richard’s relationship, and we did wonder how male readers reacted to their conflict and connection. Someone wondered if Franzen had considered a particular gender for his reader. That is, is this a book written for men? Or was that not a question in his mind? He certainly had his misgivings about going on Oprah (the first time) because he’d had the hope of getting men to read fiction.

    Great questions, Bill! Everyone in my group thought men could write about women, and women could write about men. If not, then we would have very little faith in fiction. But what one woman finds believable, accurate and complex about a male-created female character might strike another female reader as unbelievable, inaccurate, simplistic, and so on. I mean, one’s consciousness isn’t wholly defined by gender, and not all women think the same, nor do all men think the same. So it’s murky territory.

    I think Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is a great example of a believable and nuanced female character. I think Tom Drury’s female characters are great too, and Dan Chaon’s, Charles Baxter’s, William Styron’s. These are just from the bookcase next to me! It’s harder to pinpoint why some writers can’t write characters–it has less to do with gender, in my mind, and more about a failure of imagination and deeply inhabiting that character’s consciousness. It’s as if the writer can’t truly get into that character’s experience of the world, can only see it through a veil of assumptions, stereotypes, etc. Perhaps, a male writer who writes a female character poorly cannot see beyond her body and what he perceives as her feelings for men–she is wholly created by the men around her. Of course, women writers could also be guilty of this. And, some women might actually be like this.

    Your third question is really making me think. I hope someone else weighs in on it!

    I certainly think Franzen’s been blamed for a whole lot that has nothing to do with him and the book. It’s not his fault who does and doesn’t get reviewed in the NY Times, for instance.

  12. Franzin? Maybe this isn’t altogether to the purpose, but I am concerned about those brave Millions readers who fret over Franzin’s Freedom, a book that, if I have it correctly, is THE searing written record of the present day, a living chronicle of the times, yet still manage to misspell the surname of the times’ biggest star, lamentable and incredible though that stardom might be. Probably there are greater things to worry about in this world than the spelling of “Justin Bieber.” Of course there are. Sure there are those for whom the AMA’s can’t quite match up to the NBA’s, and Twitter might be just a platform for Kanye and kids with smartphones and a field of free time to play in. But the mistake, if it was one, made me feel weird. The fact that it was made twice made me feel even weirder. If the move was intentional, I withdraw the comment. If not, I join in ROFLMAO.

  13. Edan at al: First, I loved “Mistakes Were Made” and found those sections the most compelling and insightful of the entire book. I am eager, though, to get a female perspective on those chapters, so thanks very much for the post.

    You say that you “did not buy the conceit of her autobiography” and asked “Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself?” Since I loved the autobiography, I thought the idea of Patty writing objectively about herself (at the request of her therapist, she indicates) in the third person made a ton of sense as a conceit. I would feel much more comfortable, were I to try and write a memoir, making myself a character in the narrative of my own life. I can imagine, therefore, that Patty would feel similarly — especially in regard to those episodes in her life she is ashamed of, or embarrassed to recount.

    Further, is “Mistakes Were Made” all that different, in terms of form, than writing from a limited 3rd person perspective? The rest of the book, when narrated in the 3rd person, still seems to come from the perspective of one of the characters — for instance, we feel inside the head of Joey, even though he’s not actually narrating his own sections, whereas we never get inside the minds of Connie or Jenna. Is “Mistakes Were Made” so different? I appreciated the break from a true (limited) 3rd person perspective to get a more questionable blend of 1st and 3rd person narration in the form of the autobiography. The perspective is not terribly different from the rest of the book, but you feel closer to Patty’s understanding of herself. Structurally, I also appreciated the change of pace offered by the autobiography sections.

    In terms of the writing itself, I never feel strongly that the narrative/writing styles of different characters need to be wildly different. (Maybe that’s intellectually lazy on my part.) I’m aware at all times that Franzen is at the wheel, while appreciating that he switches lanes, so the readers (passengers in his car) can get different perspectives from different characters. I really don’t need each section to be written in utterly different vernacular or idiom; I get what the Actual Author is doing and simply appreciate the different perspectives without concerning myself so much with form or word choice. It’s like an author telling me that a character is southern. I can hear that character just fine without needing the text itself to be full of “y’all”s and “dang”s.

  14. Hi Martin,

    Thanks for your thoughts! For me, the ‘conceit’ of Patty’s autobiography, in theory, is great–I like the idea of a first person writing in the third person, for the sake of self understanding and whatnot. It’s how Franzen executed it that I had trouble with. He didn’t really commit to the conceit, in my opinion. If Patty were truly writing this part, in the third person, about herself, it would be pretty different than the other sections in the book–if Franzen wanted this section to be similar in voice/style as the other sections, then why introduce the conceit?

    I had no trouble with the other sections of the book, narratively speaking, or with their veracity of voice/character. The more elevated third person sections at the opening and ending were well-handled, and the close third person sections, with Joey, Walter and Richard, read smoothly as well. In these, yes, you get a sense that Franzen is narrating, while also channeling the character’s consciousness. A classic example of James Wood’s Free Indirect third person perspective. (I think that’s what Wood calls it….)

    But with Patty’s section, I wanted more, because it was presented as a first person character writing it, in the third person. In that case, I don’t want to feel Jonathan Franzen there–I want to truly believe that Patty is writing this, that she is attempting self-presentation. But aside from a few early attempts–the random capitalization of words being the most apparent–it didn’t seem like Franzen was really invested in Patty’s consciousness, to make it believable. Perhaps he didn’t want to sacrifice the wit and skill of his prose; that’s fine, but why the conceit then? In the end, I kept feeling Franzen hijacking her voice and style, and I wondered why he didn’t just do the free indirect style, if that’s what the narrative seemed to want to do, perspective-wise.

  15. Pingback: Interview: Edan Lepucki | Full-Stop.net

  17. Charlotte, that info is very easy to find on the site. (Hint: click on “About”)…

  18. Am on page 165, but from the off have been struggling to get over this whole autobiographical thing.

    Seems as though every 20 pages or so, Franzen’ll throw in the occasional ‘according to the autobiographer’ line just to remind us who’s writing.

    But given the amount of dialogue contained are we meant to overlook that fact?

    Disappointingly not doing it for me based on that simple conundrum.

    Must surely be missing something.

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In Person

Anne Garrels

In Person
October 3, 2004 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
I had the opportunity today, along with a small group of fellow grad students, to meet NPR reporter Anne Garrels. Garrels has become famous over the last couple of years for being one of the 16 American journalists to remain in Baghdad during the war. Her sometimes harrowing reports from the Palestine Hotel seared her voice into the memories of many Americans. She's been back to Baghdad since that initial period, and she'll be going back again soon. She exudes an interesting mix of enthusiasm and fatalism about reporting in such a precarious situation -- there was much mention of kidnappings and beheadings. She is quite pessimistic about the situation in Iraq, and she seemed genuinely astonished by the way she has seen the Americans handle the reconstruction. The logistics of reporting in that part of the world were perhaps the most fascinating part of the conversation. There is seemingly endless second- guessing about at what point it becomes too dangerous for reporters to be there, and in the meantime much of the time and budget seems to be taken up by solving security issues. There was, in the room, an almost palpable sense of concern for Garrels' well-being. Certainly she is more than capable of handling the situation, but even so, after meeting her in person, we began to worry about her impending return to Iraq. After her time was up in the classroom we all sort of followed her out of the building -- she had kept up the conversation even though it was time for her to go -- and outside where she smoked a cigarette and we huddled around her, telling her about ourselves. When she was done, she wished us all good luck, and we all wished her good luck back, and we meant it.Side notes: Garrels mentioned that Anthony Shadid, the Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer for his Iraq coverage, is working on a book. She said that his deep understanding of the situation over there should make the book very good. She also mentioned the Committee to Protect Journalists, of which she is a director. The website keeps track of journalists who have been killed in the line of duty, underscoring what is at stake for journalists who put themselves in dangerous situations. Finally, I should mention her book, which, after meeting Garrels, I would really like to read. Have a look: Naked in Baghdad
In Person
| 1 book mentioned 2 min read
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In Person Notable Articles

Haruki Murakami in Berkeley

In Person Notable Articles
October 14, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 4 4 min read
This past weekend, Haruki Murakami appeared at U.C. Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium for a reading of his short stories and a wide-ranging conversation about his work and life. Despite my disappointment with his recent work, Murakami ranks as one of my favorite writers, and it was a pleasure to finally see the notoriously shy writer in person.Zellerbach is a big venue, at least 800 seats, and in an age when lit pundits constantly bemoan the future of literature, I was surprised when I attempted to buy tickets several weeks ago only to find they were sold out. Thanks to the timely intervention of a friend, however, I managed to get a decent seat in the mezzanine, and spent two and a half enjoyable hours laughing along with the capacity crowd at Murakami's understated humor.During the first part of the program, Murakami read "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" (from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) The story, written in the early stages of his career, is a parable about the Japanese literary world and its reception of his first novel. In classic Murakami style, the story follows a Japanese everyman whose seemingly normal life descends into the bizarre. In this case, after responding to a newspaper ad, he finds himself baking cakes for a competition that is judged by cannibalistic crows. The story, in turns hilarious and gruesome, received a warm reception from the audience, with several people, strangely, even laughing at the grim denouement."Sharpie Cakes" was followed by a fascinating discussion on writing between Murakami and Roland Kelts, a writer and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, and questions from the audience. The conversation ranged from Murakami's obsession with jogging to Carl Jung, hitting most of the stops in between, including hints about his newest novel. Some of the highlights (in no particular order and paraphrased in places):On Reader's Questions: Apparently Murakami actually answers all of his fan mail personally. "I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens."On Inspiration: "I'm observing things, not making them up... I'm not nationalist, I don't write for my country, but for my people... I don't think with my brain. I like my keyboard. I think with my fingers. When I write, it's just a simple joy... I can write about torture, about skinning someone alive. But it's still heartwarming..."On his obsessions: "Elephants, sofas, refrigerators, wells, cats, ears. These things help me to write."On video games: "Writing a story for me is just like playing a video game. I start with a word or idea, then I stick out my hand to catch what's coming next. I'm a player, and at the same time, I'm a programmer. It's kind of like playing chess by yourself. When you're the white player, you don't think about the black player. It's possible, but it's hard. It's kind of schizophrenic."On dreams: "I don't dream. I use my dreams when I write. I dream when I'm awake. That's the job of a novelist. You can dream a dream intentionally. When you're sleeping and you have a nice dream, you're eating or with a woman, you might wake up at the best part. I get to keep dreaming. It's great."On his next novel: He finished it last week. Apparently, it's going to be a doorstop. "I hope you're not a commuter... The new novel is in the third person, from beginning to end. I need that room, because the story is getting more complicated. I need many perspectives."On translations of his own work: "I'm a translator myself. I believe in my translations. If the story is strong enough, it will be translated rightly. I'm a novelist, not a linguist. If the story's good, it will move you. That's the important thing. It's embarrassing for me to read my own work in Japanese. I enjoy the translations of my novels in English, because it's not what I wrote. I forget what I wrote, and I turn the pages, excited to find out what will happen next."On Catcher in the Rye (which he translated several years ago): "It's a dark story, very disturbing. I enjoyed it when I was seventeen, so I decided to translate it. I remembered it as being funny, but it's dark and strong. I must have been disturbed, when I was young. J.D. Salinger has a big obsession, three times bigger than mine. That's why I'm here tonight, and he isn't."On Revision: "The first draft is most important. I have to go through and adjust small things, contradictions. When I stared writing The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I wrote for an hour, and immediately I felt something was wrong. There was too much going on, so I pulled out that part of the story and wrote another book, South of the Border, West of the Sun."On his favorite music: "I listen to classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening. I listen to rock when I'm driving. I like Radiohead (big round of applause). I like REM, Beck, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thome Yorke is a reader of mine. He's in Tokyo now, and he wanted to meet me, but I had to be here. It's a huge sacrifice for me... I sing "Yellow Submarine" while I swim. It's sounds like bubbling. It's great. I recommend you try it... I loved the Beach Boys when I was younger. I met Brian Wilson when he came to Tokyo. He's strange."On Berkeley: "Something's wrong with this town."Bonus Link: A Rare Treat for Murakami Fans: Pinball, 1973
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