Gerald
Murnane
In recent
years I’ve come to more fully appreciate the fact that reading literature is an
exercise in eavesdropping—between characters and others, between characters and
themselves, a convention certainly well-known to most avid readers. Yet to my
mind the literature I so love is even more so a conversation between writers
themselves, from country to country, culture to culture, generation to
generation, a discussion to which, if we are attentive, we can listen, as
through a keyhole or a crack in a door.
Javier
Marías
In their
writing, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov chatted restlessly
with Shakespeare; Virginia Woolf with Leo Tolstoy; Gabriel García Marquez and
Toni Morrison with William Faulkner; Marcel Proust with John Ruskin, George
Eliot, and Charles Dickens; David Foster Wallace with Thomas Pynchon and Don
Delillo; Jane Austen with Lord Byron and Anne Radcliffe; Haruki Murakami with
Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Joan Didion with the great and
inimitable Joseph Conrad. Even the case of a writer actively despising the work
of another writer is part of the conversation, as when Nabokov said of
Hemingway: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40’s,
something about bells, balls and bulls, and I loathed it.”
Yet such conversations
are not reserved for the great writers alone, but take place between all
writers, every day, in every part of the world, whether their work has ever
been published at all. For it is in conversation with other writers, especially
with one’s favorite writers, that every writer finds her way. After many years
of often dogged imitation of the work my own writer-heroes, of Proust, Woolf,
Conrad, Dostoevsky, Camus, Nabokov, Gordimer, Abe, Oe, Oz, Bernhard, Sebald, Brink,
Bellow, Lispector, Jelinek, Rulfo, Baldwin, Okri, Drndic, Niwa, Bolaños, Onetti,
Soyinka, Benet, Krasnahorkai, Mahfouz, Saer, Énard, and Shalev, I have come to understand
that my own writing is exactly and essentially
that—a probing, restless conversation with other writers, a protracted, if de
facto apprenticeship in language, character, subject, and form. For literally
everything I have written I am indebted to the writers I love.
Nathalie
Sarraute
Presently
I am at work on a novel that represents—more than anything I have written
before—an explicit conversation with others writers, in this case with Gerald
Murnane, Javier Marías, and Nathalie Sarraute. So intense is the conversation
some days it is as if they are sitting here in the room with me, prodding me,
joking, watching me work.
Peter
Adam Nash
