Tag: Granta

Granta Podcast: Lina Wolff

Saskia Vogel

Lina Wolff ©Håkan Sandbring / sandbring.se©Håkan Sandbring/sandbring.se

‘I think in the beginning it was a crisis. I started to write because I felt the need to fit in, and not be an outsider… I have felt bound to an outsideness and an otherness.’

I was wondering where-oh-where this podcast had gone. Its arrival on Granta.com completely slipped past me amidst the whirling waltzes of late. I had the honor of translating Lina Wolff‘s short story “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción” for Granta 124: Travel. Wolff writes in Swedish, but this story and her debut novel Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs are both set in Spain. When she came to London for the launch of the Travel issue this summer, we talked about the tension between a rational way of being and a magical way of thinking, Lorca, Dante, literary travellers and their guides, irrationality and the artistic temperament.

Granta 124: Travel: The July Launch (and my translation)

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Saskia Vogel

945657_10151560250264055_54636770_nGranta 124: Travel is launching in London, New York and San Francisco this July. I’m particularly looking forward to this launch because Lina Wolff will be in town., Not only is she an incredible author, but I’ve had the honor of bringing her work into English. Come out and celebrate the new issue and meet Lina.

Liars’ League Presents Granta 124: Travel
16 July, doors at 6.30 p.m., event at 7 p.m., The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. £7, tickets include a copy of Granta 124. Tickets are only available at the door. RSVP to events@granta.com to reserve your place.

Travel: an encounter between a person and a place. From a river in the South Sudan to a Bulgarian forest, the Liars’ League, a live storytelling salon, reads new stories from Granta 124. Swedish author Lina Wolff, whose English-language debut is in ‘Travel’, joins us for the second half of the salon for a reading and conversation with translator Saskia Vogel.

The London Launch
17 July, 6.30 p.m., Foyles, 113 – 119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB. £3. Please book via foyles.co.uk/events.

Join Robert Macfarlane and Lina Wolff for readings and conversation with Granta editors launch the new issue. A drink reception will follow.

1012117_10152908966025258_1412679681_nPS Now that it’s in print, it’s for real, for real. The novel is coming….

Granta’s Best Young British Novelists

Saskia Vogel

Granta Best of Young British Novelist 4 on BBC News at Ten from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

I’ve been silent on social media and generally keeping my nose to the grindstone while working on the launch of Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. A little shamelessly, here’s some of the coverage I’m most proud of: the BBC News at Ten, a New York Times feature, NPR’s Morning Edition (with one of my favourite writers, Sarah Hall) and this great article from the Globe and Mail. If you’re in LA, we have an event tonight at ALOUD, and tomorrow we’re in Seattle, in May we come to NY, Boston and Washington DC. We’re also doing events across the UK this week and through the summer and around the world with the British Council. Here’s the full event list. Phew. Hope you can join us!

A Granta interview with Tania James

Saskia Vogel

Tania James is a novelist and short story writer whose ‘Lion and Panther in London’ is featured in Granta’s Britain. In her latest collection, Aerogrammes and Other Stories, out this May in the United States, James opens a window onto a world marked by loneliness, obsession and wild animals. Granta’s Saskia Vogel speaks to the author about writing from a child’s perspective, Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, and the author’s alleged anger issues.

SV: ‘Lion and Panther in London’ tells of two brothers from Lahore who come to London to seek their fortunes as wrestlers. They find themselves confronted by the oddities of life in London in 1910, including crowded living spaces and ‘the sort of fare that would render them leaden in body and mind’. Tell me a bit about the genesis of this story and how your idea of Britain influenced it.

TJ: I came across an old book called Strong Men Over the Years, a rare and remarkable account of Indian wrestlers around the turn of the century, including Gama the Great and his brother Imam. I was actually doing some very dry research on the Indian Students’ Movement, but that book was lively, comic, nostalgic and completely addictive in its illustration of these Indian superheroes.

I only had a vague idea of Britain, let alone London in 1910. But ‘Strong Men’ brought certain details to surface, such as the wrestlers’ total bafflement over the Western suit – why would anyone wear something so snug and restrictive? The more I understood about these wrestlers and their very rigorous way of life, the more freedom I felt in rendering their environment, and how they might be at odds with it.

Your story ‘What to do with Henry’ moves from the perspective of a young boy who finds a baby chimpanzee and sells it at a market to the mother who purchases it, then to chimpanzee and so on. In fact, each story in the collection unfolds in a striking and unexpected way. What is it about the short form that appeals to you?

I do love how the short form allows for some risky moves. For example aI like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the worldstory can be the perfect vessel for a particular voice, or a chorus of voices, which would be harder to sustain over the course of a novel (I’m thinking of Mary Swann’s ‘The Deep’, for example). Certainly novels can and should take risks but maybe I feel more freedom in the short story form because if it fails halfway in, I don’t feel an urge to toss myself out the window.

In the collection, many of the stories have a child as a protagonist. What is it about children’s perspectives that you find compelling?

There’s a Chekhov story ‘A Trifle from Life’, which follows the perspective of a little boy named Alyosha and ends by referring to the ‘great many things for which the language of children has no expression’. I like that children have their own way of seeing, their own elastic vocabulary for explaining the world, before their minds have been entrenched with other people’s perceptions.

Your stories often engage with South Asians in the United States and a dissonance between the two cultures. Why are these stories important?

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home. That experience isn’t uniquely specific to first – or second – generation immigrants; it’s universal, and thus compelling territory for fiction.

‘What to do with Henry’, ‘Lion and Panther in London’ and ‘The Scriptological Review’, a story about a boy who compulsively analyses handwriting: each of these explores a different world. What comes first – an encounter with scriptology or the story idea? And what kind of research is involved?

A handwriting analyst studied my signature and told me I had latent anger issues, as evidenced by the tiny hook in my T. That seemed a little nuts to me, but slightly possible, so of course my imagination began to wander in that direction. I started looking into handwriting analysis – the technical term is graphology – but I didn’t delve too deeply into any real study. I was more interested in a guy who makes up his own kind of convoluted logic. Explaining that logic, in his voice, was probably the most entertaining part of writing the story.

You’ve published Atlas of Unknowns, a novel, and Aerogrammes is published in May, as is your story in the Granta. What’s next in store?

It’s a long way off, but as of now, it’s a novel involving wild elephants and those who tangle with them.

What’s the best advice you’ve received as a writer?

Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk.

Originally published on Granta.com on 11 May 2012.

Granta Podcast: Jeanette Winterson

Saskia Vogel2 Comments

This week on the Granta podcast, I talk to Jeanette Winterson about her new memoir ‘Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?’. I hope you can’t tell that I was so excited to meet her, I was a bundle of nerves. She was lovely. A dear friend introduced me to her via The Passion, which broke open how I think about the novel. Do check out her stories in Granta issues 115, 43, 39 and 23.

She’s on tour in the US at the moment.

Granta Interview: Ben Okri

Saskia Vogel

Ben Okri grapples with deep, elemental issues in his latest book, A Time for New Dreams (published today). With this series of ‘poetic essays’, the Booker Prize-winner and one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists employs a unique style to elucidate his ideas about the modern world. He illustrates how the economic meltdown and environmental catastrophes have brought us to a crossroads.

Granta’s Saskia Vogel spoke with Ben about his new take on the essay form, his love of Montaigne and whether his new book represents a manifesto. Originally published here at Granta.com.

SV: The essays in your collection, A Time for New Dreams, are redolent with stirring observations on poetry, childhood and other themes. How did you come to write this new book? Were you writing for a specific reader?

BO: I tend to write books of essays with a theme running through them. It takes a while for the theme to coalesce for me. It can sometimes be years before I know that certain pieces of writing resonate and belong together. But I am always listening.

My first collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, coalesced around the idea of freedom, but it was more an attitude, an orientation even. It was generously received and it took me a while to think I could say something beyond that. A Time For New Dreams is not a collection of essays in a normal sense. Essays are usually a full exploration of an idea and they give evidence and quotations along the way. That

…for most of us, childhood was a period of our most intense and furious dreaming.

was too laborious for what I was trying to do in this book. I felt a need to bring about a marriage of forms and was interested in finding the place where poetry and the essay meet, which is why A Time For New Dreams is subtitled ‘poetic essays’. I sense that poetic essays, or what I tried to do in this book, should be an essay with the brevity and spring of poetry. The astonishing thing about poetry is that it leaps to place itself having already done all the thinking and imagining required, and gives you the fruit of that meditation. That is what I wanted with this collection.

I imagine a reader who, like me, is a bit exasperated with the accumulation of the follies of our times, someone ready for a new way of looking, thinking and being; someone who combines youth and experience, idealism and realism. Someone who isn’t afraid to dream but also is not afraid to roll up their sleeves and participate in the tough magic of life.

In many of the essays – ‘The Romance of Difficult Times’, for example – you number the paragraphs, some of which are as short as a single line. Other essays, such as ‘Photography and Immortality’, take a more standard prose form. How do you decide on the structure of your texts?

I find that the structure emerges from the idea itself. Sometimes an idea can almost become too luxuriant in its expression and you need a structure, not to tame it, but to arrive at what, for me, is the ideal in the form of the compressed essay. This gives an idea of expressiveness combined with restraint, power held back by form, intensity that’s not allowed to explode all over the place but to have a pouncing feel. And only the right form will do that.

Every piece ought to have something of the quality of a living thing – a slight quality of immeasurability – and only in its true form can it achieve this. Also, I like brevity of thought. There are few things more powerful in writing than a strong thought, whether a thesis or anti-thesis, expressed briefly. It is a paradox contained in a nutshell. I like powerful small units, so the aphorism threads its way through this volume.

There are these varied forms as the book is also structured round an idea of a suite, with a leading melody running through it – the melody of childhood. This is the foremost melody because, for most of us, childhood was a period of our most intense and furious dreaming. The title, A Time For New Dreams, is just a hint that it would be good to recover that dreaming in adulthood and to have that elasticity of imagination in our adult years. So the melody of childhood is the keynote, running against other melodies of politics and censorship.

I felt an echo of Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel in your book. Do you feel A Time for New Dreams is in dialogue with certain other texts?

First of all, it is lovely that you felt Kundera’s presence and at least some sort of dialogue with The Art of the Novel. Kundera is also inclined towards the aphoristic and the clearer, most direct statement – rather than endless exposition.

…many, many of the old dreams are exhausted or are proving moribund and severely limited

I have always loved the essay form and it is one of the forms I fell in love with very early on as I read my way through my father’s library. I developed a real affection for great English essays of 18th century. But my chief affection has to be for the essays of Francis Bacon, which have an extraordinary combination of brevity and the highest thought. He is unmatched in the way in which he can say so much in such a short space. He boiled these essays down over years to such a point that people who read them at the time, his wife included, just couldn’t make out what he was saying. They were so gnomic. This is the impact of the poetic on the essay form. It is the fruit, the distillation, not the whole journey.

The complete opposite of Bacon, I also love the essays of Montaigne – who is more expository and fluid, as he takes his time and wanders through classical antiquity. He loves his Greek and Roman authors, and quotes liberally – and he always expresses more uncertainty.

Between Bacon and Montaigne is something of where my feelings lie. Although I quoted from other writers in my early years, I am not a big fan of citing other people too much. I now think that if you have something you have thought about and what to share with folks, you need to say it yourself and find the best way to say it. People can always go back and read the old masters themselves.

You write: ‘Beauty leads us all, finally, to the greatest questions of all, to the most significant quest of our lives’ This transports me back to the first essay, ‘Poetry and Life’. How do poetry and beauty mingle in their purposes, and in their effects on people?

Whenever we use the word beauty or we feel it, it comes from a sense of something indefinable. The mind can’t quite pin down what it was that created that emotiton or feeling. It is intangible; a poignant and haunting feeling that reaches places in you that you can’t grasp or touch. It is as if some sleeping self wakes for a moment and expresses a note of wonder at something. It is that note of wonder that does it. Suddenly you become aware that you are more than what you thought you were. You feel a certain sweet inwardness, suddenly sense that the house has more rooms in it than you thought. That is what poetry does. That is what beauty does.

You write poetry, essays, short stories, novels . . . How do you choose how you will tell your stories?

Before a novel is born in the mind of the writer, it isn’t a novel. Before a short story is conceived, it isn’t a short story. A poem is often an incomplete swell of feeling, or maybe even just a beat that latches on to a wandering theme. The point I am trying to make is that, before they become what they are, all these forms are an insubstantial swirl of a mood inside us. How often has the mood or an idea of a short story become a novel? Or the mood or idea of a novel become a short story? It is all in its original, pre-creative state. This becomes the germ of an idea, and depending on its inner potential for drawing all sorts of related elements in one consciousness, it will take a certain form. Which form this is depends on the inner magnetism of the idea itself. So I stress the idea of listening – you hear an idea, but what is it? The form of a thing doesn’t reveal itself in the import of its creation, or even in the nature of its unfolding. Sometimes things are grown way beyond their destiny and sometimes things are under-nurtured and abbreviated. So I think one of the most difficult things in a writer’s life is knowing what a thing ought to be.

To what extent do you feel A Time for Dreams is a manifesto?

I don’t think it is. A manifesto is too definite, too deliberate. I am working with suggestiveness, with hints and orientations. In a way it is a cubist text because I am wandering round the different facets of this big subject – what it means to be where we are now, and how we are going to leap from this place to our new place with full consciousness and intelligence. It is more like a preparation for this new foundation – like cleaning our eyes so we can see clearly; like limbering up or toning the mind in preparation for the courage I feel we will need for these new times. We are at some kind of crossroads, and many, many of the old dreams are exhausted or are proving, one by one, to be moribund and severely limited in what they can give us. And we can’t go on carrying those old dreams.

Granta: Three Questions for Nicole Krauss

Saskia Vogel

Nicole Krauss is the multi-award-winning author of three novels, including the bestseller The History of Love, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007. Her new novel, Great House, was published this month. The plot centres on an imposing 19-drawer desk, once owned by a Chilean poet who died under Pinochet’s regime. It has one locked drawer. The story is narrated first by a reclusive New York writer, then by a widower in Jersualem and finally by another widower in London as he tries to understand a secret his wife kept from him for five decades. Saskia Vogel caught up with Nicole to ask her three questions about the book.

SV: In the first part of Great House the narrator asks two questions: ‘Do you think books change people’s lives?’, and the more cynical, ‘Do you think anything you write could mean anything to anyone?’ They are very different questions, but both make me wonder how you feel about the author as a public figure.

NK: Are they such different questions? I see them as different phrasings of the same question, or the same question asked in different moods. I know both of those moods well, and the many shades in between, too. I don’t think a writer can get away without wondering about the impact of literature, or questioning the worth of what she does. Obviously it’s easy to make an argument for the importance of literature in general, but almost impossible to sustain any conviction about the specific value of one’s own work. And that’s where the problem begins, or one of the problems.

Your style of storytelling has been described as ‘kaleidoscopic’. Do you feel this is accurate? What attracts you to telling a story with so many strands?

Yes, I think it’s fair to say that I’m very interested in patterns – within a single life, and between many lives – and equally interested in where those patterns break or become ambiguous. I think this attraction is connected to some innate fascination with structure, specifically to forms where disparate parts are drawn together to form an unexpected whole. I find it incredibly pleasing to make things in this fashion. Why that should be is a more complicated question. I’ve been thinking about metaphors recently. Why do we love metaphors? Because, when we link or juxtapose two seemingly unrelated things to reveal a commonality that feels at once surprising and inevitable, it confirms in us a sense of the unity and connectedness of all things. It’s a very joyful feeling, and one supported in art far better than in life. I suppose one could say that I like to create metaphors on the narrative or structural level by discovering the bridges, patterns, and allusions between stories that at first seem remote from one another. And one could also say that, having discovered them, I have a paradoxical urge to resist those same patterns, to break and deny them. For as much as I am invested in the consolation of meaning, I’m also very much aware that ours is an uncertain life, and I’m moved by the struggle of what it is to live in doubt, or with the unknown.

Both The History of Love and Great House carry a sense of the impossibility of ownership and the inevitability of loss. How did you become interested in these themes?

I wouldn’t describe my themes exactly in that way, but that doesn’t mean much; the writer isn’t the only authority on her themes. But if you’re asking about the subject of loss, I’d say that I’m interested in how people respond to tremendous loss, and specifically a response that involves a form of reinvention. Take Samson Greene, the protagonist of Man Walks Into a Room, who loses twenty-four years of his memory and has to reinvent a coherent self out of what remains. Or Leo Gursky in The History of Love, who responds to his loss by altering his reality; for whom memory is a creative act; who draws vitality from his irrepressible imagination. Or the story that the title Great House is taken from – to my mind one of the most beautiful stories in Jewish History – about how the Jews, under the guidance of Yochanan ben Zakkai, reimagined themselves after the loss of the Second Temple and Jerusalem, a radical reinvention that allowed them to survive in the Diaspora.

Reposted from Granta.com