New Yorker Festival: Foer, Pamuk, Their Stuff (With Digressions)

On Friday night I went to see Jonathan Safran Foer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk at the New Yorker Festival event “Possessed,” with Deborah Treisman interviewing and moderating. The pairing was somewhat loose but turned out to be much more within my area of interest than I had initially expected (see Digression 1): Both writers have sideline interests in art and visual projects which they were only too happy to talk about in relation to their work.

Pamuk, who described himself as a “failed painter,” is in the process of transforming his most recent novel THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE into a physical museum in Istanbul, where he was born and where his office is now. The museum, he said, will be a “cultural oddity” to people who haven’t read the book, but for those who have will attempt to duplicate various scenes from it in tableaus of objects. He contrasted visual writers who make you see the world they’re working in (like Tolstoy) to verbal writers who dazzle you with their words (like Dostoevsky), placing himself in the former camp.

Pamuk described furnishing a piece (of which he showed pictures) where the protagonist of the book is standing in his bathroom and said the hardest part was finding the appropriate toothbrush since no one holds onto their toothbrushes from the ‘70s. For another piece he hired another artist to degrade over 4,000 cigarette butts (collected by the narrator from the woman he loves).

Foer, after publishing his first nonfiction book EATING ANIMALS (disliked by your humble blogger), has embarked on something completely different: His new novel TREE OF CODES is an art book created from the manuscript of one of JSF’s personal favorites, Bruno Schulz’s THE STREET OF CROCODILES, in which Foer has cut out parts of the pages or obliterated words in other means to create a new story from the existing story. (Even the title reflects this, see? THE STREET OF CROCODILES.) He didn’t mention this, but I think it’s worth noting that Schulz was a Jewish Pole who was shot and killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in a dispute with a friend of his.

To make TREE OF CODES, JSF physically worked on creating the book and shopped it around to several art publishers before finding one that would take it. (He has since started a new novel.) He talked about being inspired in a college sculpture class by the work of Joseph Cornell and wishing, like Pamuk, that he were a painter or visual artist, but deciding that the best way to inspire the same feeling in someone that he felt looking at Cornell’s work was to become a writer.

They both took questions from the audience after, none of which were particularly inspiring except a Polish woman who took the mike just to thank Pamuk for expressing something she could not have expressed. One woman asked Pamuk if he believed objects have auras and took very careful, deliberate notes on his answer (which was, in sum, “if we put them there?”) Foer expounded on his relationship with readers, describing every reading as a “misunderstanding” coming from the deepest part of himself. Unlike other panels I’ve been to, under the New Yorker umbrella or otherwise (see Digression 2), I felt like these authors had a really strong rapport and JSF was properly in awe of his cohort, as were we all.

Digression 1: This is my fourth (!) year attending the New Yorker Festival because I am awesome. However, I don’t love how they clump most of the fiction writers’ events on one night (Friday in this case). It forced me to make a tough choice between this panel and another featuring two authors I love, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. Ah, for a clone! My logic behind picking JSF/Pamuk was that I had never seen either of them live, and I thought Pamuk still lived in Istanbul full time, so it would be more difficult to catch him. (He actually teaches at Columbia now; see Digression 3.) Despite the pang I think I made the right choice. (Actually, I was supposed to see Foer AND Smith together at my first fest in 2006, but didn’t make it in from Pennsylvania in time. At least I didn’t have to miss that David Remnick-hosted screening of “Borat.”)

Digression 2: Between this and the Brooklyn Book Festival a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good panel of authors, and have found no one ingredient that really makes it. But this I know, a bad panel makes everyone look like they’re shouting past each other into a void, and not the one where the audience is. I don’t even think it’s necessary for authors to have much in common, so long as they’re respectful and acknowledge the distance, but sometimes the rift starts in the pairing. The audience can contribute too: Two years ago I went to an A. M. Homes/ Miranda July festival event, and fully 75 percent of the audience was composed of July fanboys and -girls who had no interest in anything Homes said, and that lack of interest was mirrored onstage. Also, don’t ever be on a panel with Miranda July, she takes very odd pauses in her speaking.

Digression 3: Orhan Pamuk’s problems with the Turkish state never came up during this panel, but it was difficult not to be reminded of them as he discussed his work. “I have seen so many military coups,” he said simply in the process of explaining a scene from THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, and having felt the current regime turn against him, even slightly (the charges were dropped after all) it’s hard to imagine it is not current in his mind. I wonder if he worries about having problems re-entering Turkey to complete his museum. It would be overly simplistic to compare the unrequited love plots that run through his books to any sort of nationalistic feeling or political critique, particularly the sense of betrayal one might feel while being charged with “insulting” one’s own nationality. I mean only a really hack blogger would do that. … …