On Stage With Pamuk, Manea and Rushdie

by Andrew Bast

Recipe for literary celebrity: 1 part Page-Six worthy novelist once chased by radical Islam; 1 part Romanian writer once enslaved in Nazi concentration camp; 1 part Turkish novelist who only two weeks ago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

So went the mix Tuesday night at the gorgeous LeFrak Concert Hall at Queens College. It was the first event of the 31st season of evening readings put on by the school, and the facilitator, interviewer, ahem, chef, for the evening was none other than WNYC’s ever-astute Leonard Lopate.

Salman Rushdie, Norman Manea, and Orhan Pamuk (hunted by fanatics, concentration camp survivor, and Nobel-winner, respectively) came together for a “Roundtable on the Art of Writing,” and while the conditions were ripe, the recipe yielded mere nibble-size cookies of ideas that would have been better served as five-course meals.

It was good. Only, when you’ve got three huge minds (with egos to match), it’s tough to tap them all in 90 minutes.

That’s not to say the event was a bust. Quite the contrary. The 489-seat performance hall was packed to the gills. Young and old (a 20-year union carpenter sat behind me), filled the first level, the balcony, and the aisles. In fact, the three literary celebrities drew such a crowd that organizers opened the adjacent choral room and pumped in an audio feed.

The three authors are all accomplished, bespectacled novelists. All wore slacks, jackets, and collared shirts with no ties. In the literary spirit, I’ll endeavor the week’s most severe nonsequitor: besides similar outfits, for their writing, each of them have been severely persecuted by oppressive regimes.

“Speaking about censorship, it’s difficult to explain it to a logical mind,” Manea said. Contrasting the once-oppressive Romanian government to the freedom afforded writers in the States, he said, “In the U.S., everything is allowed, so nothing matters. And in Romania, nothing is allowed, so everything matters.”

Pamuk, whose novels include Snow, My Name is Red, and The New Life, explained the “doubleness” of Turkey—how the country thrives on both modernity and the past, and how it is the meeting point of Islam and the West. But he was quick to say that the bridge across the Bosporous, as a metaphor for the connection of East and West, was a “very worn-out cliché.”

In one of the rare moments of the evening when the panelists actually discussed the craft of writing (there was much talk of regional politics), Pamuk addressed translation: “A good translation does not just convey the same meaning, but it gets the music of the words right.” Riled up, he went on, “A good sentence is one that plays with the expectation of the reader.”

Salman Rushdie, ever the comic, had the crowd eating out of his hand. Hardly surprising considering the fact that his first soliloquy explained why Mumbai and Queens were, in fact, the same place. He also spoke of his early reading life.

“I grew up with the tradition of the wonderful tale,” Rushdie said as he argued that the root of the Arab tales of the Thousand and One Nights actually lay in older Indian stories. “And because we were raised with this tradition of the wonderful tale, we learned at an early age that fiction is actually not true.”

“An author’s responsibility in fiction is to make the reader believe a story,” he said. “And he has to make the reader believe until the end of the book. Otherwise, you say ‘to hell with this,’ and you go read another book.”

Rushdie also pointed out that “fiction is the only art form that takes place entirely in the reader’s head.” A sharp observation. Movies, out there. Painting, out there. Music, over there. But reading a novel is an entirely internal process, one that every person will experience, and in turn relate to, in an entirely different way.

Perhaps that’s just an argument to discredit the critics.

(Top: Salman Rushdie; Middle: Leonard Lopate and Orhan Pamuk; Bottom: Norman Manea and Rushdie; all photos by Andrew Bast.)