Writers Talking Writers: Rumaan Alam on Anita Brookner and Tommy Orange on Felisberto Hernández

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who influenced them. This month, we spoke 2020 National Book Award nominee Rumaan Alam (Entitlement, Leave the World Behind) about the wry maturity of Anita Brookner and 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange (Wandering Stars, There There) about the singular strangeness of Felisberto Hernández.

Rumaan Alam on Anita Brookner

I find it interesting that Brookner didn’t publish a novel until 53 and then poured out this massive body of work over the next 30 years.

That is one of the most extraordinary things about her. She had an entire other career as a very well respected art historian and wrote academically and critically about painting. And it's very clear when you read A Start in Life in particular, because that one feels—as often first novels can—the most autobiographical. The first line is, “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” And so it's very evident that you're encountering an authorial intelligence that has been so informed by reading. It's evident that she has this deep relationship to literature, that it helped her think about herself, and then it catalyzed something in her at some point in her 50s where she was like, I'm gonna do this. And she did it. It clearly wasn't a fluke, because she went on to do it, like, 22 more times.

What do you most enjoy about her writing?

There’s a kind of genteel veneer. It’s post-war into the ‘80s in London, upper-middle-class people talking about meals and clothes and rooms and art and hotels, but beneath that there is this attention to things that are pretty ugly. There’s not a lot of nicety. There's something that feels very human and kind of grotesque. She talks a lot about food. People are eating these meals, and they're often very small, mean little meals, like a can of tuna and a sliced tomato and a black cup of Sanka, and it’s so evocative somehow of hunger and privation. They’re women mostly who are just satisfied chomping on a thing of celery and eating like half a piece of toast, and I don't know why, but there's something so animal and kind of gross about that. There's also something kind of comic about it. I think she's funnier than she seems. She's more wry, and she's a bit mean. The characters will go for these unbelievably long walks and there's this feeling of people walking to the point of exhaustion or walking because they don't know what else to do with themselves.

While I love a writer like Jennifer Egan, each of whose books feels like a left turn from the previous and a wholly different enterprise, Brookner is a writer who's almost the inverse, where every book is kind of the same—and that can sound like an insult to one kind of reader, but I don't mean it that way. Maybe a way of thinking about it is the way we'd think about a painter like Agnes Martin. She's investigating the same idea over and over again because she's the artist—the artist is not satisfied, or has to go back into it because there's something more that she's looking for. The artist who is relitigating the same thing over and over again—it’s not a bad thing. It's kind of a fascinating thing. She's just using roughly the same framework each time, but that is not to say that I would skip any of them, or that they feel redundant or repetitive. There's some kind of joy to me as a reader in their familiarity, actually.

Her work has a mood or attitude that seems more important than the story.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. There's a real atmosphere to the books—urban late afternoon loneliness. There’s something frank and very adult about Brookner's work. Sometimes people suck. Sometimes they're idiots. Sometimes a woman, to save herself and make something of her life, has to marry a guy who's an idiot but has some money, and then they'll live happily in this stupid house, but at least they're happy, or they're rich, or they don't have any kids. It feels very grown up to acknowledge that like that: people aren't amazing.

What do you think other writers can learn from her?

I think her biography is very interesting, especially for writers who feel some pressure when they see those debut novels by 24-year-olds. It’s like, you don't have to start there, and there is another way forward. In a culture that is so ridiculous about youth, Brookner is a very useful reminder that maturity brings its own rewards. That beginning the life of an artist at that point in your trajectory through the decades, you’re sort of starting from a place of real strength. And so I do think that’s useful to remember, because I think we all feel that pressure. I know I felt that when I was younger. But it’s not useful to think that way, so it's good to have a counterargument to that in the literature.

Tommy Orange on Felisberto Hernández

Hernández has kind of a cult following. I know Calvino really loved him.

Yeah, he was my favorite writer for a certain time period, and I think this largely has to do with people who can accomplish being really funny and really sad at the same time. And also I read this story about when he died, how he had to be lifted out of his house using the kind of crane they use for moving pianos because he’d gotten so big. That really intrigued me, because he was a professional piano player for silent movies and was sort of doing fiction on the side. I played piano before I wrote. Most of the reading I was doing when I really fell in love with fiction was work in translation, and a lot of that was by South American authors, so Felisberto felt like somebody that I had found completely on my own. And he was just so unlike anyone else, and continues to be.

It was a big event for me when New Directions put out Lands of Memory. That’s how I discovered him, because I used to follow publishers that I loved rather than authors that I loved, and New Directions was always kind of a beacon for me. Piano Stories was the first one that I read, so discovering a new author, that book kind of remains special for that reason, and just to get another book from him was really exciting. I don't know that I would be able to choose between the two. I think it really caught my eye, too, before I read them, that Cortazar, on the back of one of the books, just says, “I will always love you.” And, you know, Cortazar is a giant.

What strikes you about his work on a page level?

His writing is unique. It’s not like anyone else's, style-wise. A lot of the premises for his stories…like, this salesman who goes to people and can't stop crying in front of them comes to mind. He can pull off story premise, higher concept, and also just stuff that can feel nostalgic from his childhood, and keep me on a sentence level and on a premise level.

I read that Hernández was really into Proust, and you can see that in his obsession with nostalgia and memory. But he kind of pulled off in a few dozen pages what Proust did in a few thousand. What do you think of long versus short form?

My entrance into fiction largely was short form. I loved Borges really early on, and Borges, of course, famously didn't ever write anything but short stories. Some of them you can't even call anything more than fragments. I think pulling that kind of feeling out of the reader with a shorter amount of time is something to commend Felisberto for. I feel like he’s one of the South American writers who can both go on for really long stretches in a sentence but can also be concise. He’s got a relatively small body of work, but like you said, I think he accomplishes a lot with a little.

What do you think writers should take from Hernández?

I think funny sadness is something that is appealing to everybody, and this happens on a craft level, but it's also something that is hard to teach. So I think reading people who can manage this balance can teach you how to do it more. You know, life—when it’s not a tragedy—is definitely a dark comedy. And I think that the singularity of his voice can really teach you how to be singular in your own voice. When you read people who are really breaking from the mold stylistically, you can learn a lot about the ways that you're singular, and then the best book you can possibly write is the one that only you can write. So I think reading weird authors like Felisberto, like Robert Walser and Clarice Lispector, can teach you a lot about how to get at your own weirdness.