The highlights of Saturday morning were two sensitive, probing and humane interviews of contemporary authors, Paolo Giordano and Mario Vargas Llosa, conducted by one of Colombia's most celebrated contemporary writers, Hector Abad Faciolince. Faciolince is best known for his autobiographical work El olvido que seremos, a searing account of the political violence in Medellín—the second largest city in Colombia—in the 1990s which led to the assassination of his father, a prominent university professor outspoken in his condemnation of para-military, drug-related violence (a work now being translated into English by the prize-winning translator, Anne McLean).
Faciolince is a generous, kind, and erudite man, and his conversation with Paolo Giordano, in Italian, drew out many of the facets of the 28-year old author from Turin, whose novel La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), has been a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Giordano, a physicist who is to present his doctoral thesis next week, spoke about the tormented adolescence of Alice and Mattia (the two principal protagonists), his literary influences (including Ian McEwan), and the process of writing the book itself. For a young man (enviably) caught up in perhaps unexpected global success, Giordano seemed kind, unassuming, reflective and critically aware.
The Teatro Heredia was bursting at the seams for Faciolince's interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, the avuncular elderly statesman of Latin American letters, while several hundred people more watched the interview on a big screen in the blazing sun and sultry breezes of the square outside. Vargas Llosa spoke of the demons which compel him to write, and of the obsessive single-mindedness and intensity with which he has forged his novels. Not for him, he said, the inevitable inspiration of genius; rather, writing inspired by travel, reading, interviews, encounters and a deep immersion in the world, politics, the tangled knot of human relationships, and life.
Faciolince sought to understand Vargas Llosa's recurrent concern with fanaticism in his work, with characters swept up by passion, hatred and an uncontrollable thirst for power. Vargas Llosa contended it was not autobiographical, but rather borne out by his experience of dictatorships and brutality in Peru and across the continent over the past fifty years.
And, inevitably, there was much direct talk of politics too: with Vargas Llosa setting out his vision of a Latin America currently divided between well-established democracies with moderate parties, of both left and right, pursuing liberal market economies, and other countries caught up in demagogic, autocratic populism, primarily of the socialist kind, lurching from one crisis to the next. Vargas Llosa, consistent with his writings and political stance since the 1970s (in which he famously opposed Castro's imprisonment of the critical poet Heberto Padilla), spoke eloquently of his liberal philosophy, concern for human rights and condemnation of “caudillismo” on the continent. It was rousing stuff and there was loud applause from the audience.
Rosie Boycott's discussion with Sarfraz Mansoor about the politics of food and climate change seemed a salutary, if comparatively anodyne, interlude in the early afternoon, as we prepared ourselves for further conversations with Ian McEwan and Michael Ondaatje later on. Boycott argued that Britain is only ever three days from anarchy, given our wholesale dependence on a fossil fuel-dependent food distribution system which would collapse with the disruption of our ports or another oil shock, and that politicians should be promoting the growth of more local food, in addition to a reorientation of the currently inefficient (and often cruel and senseless) global agricultural system, which promotes animal brutality and absurdly water-intensive land use.
Ian McEwan's conversation with Peter Florence drew another capacity crowd in the late afternoon and—hearteningly—touched on almost completely different themes to the encounter in Bogotá on Wednesday evening. The audience was again struck by McEwan's humour, capacity for detached reflection on his work, and the generosity with which he shared his knowledge and appreciation of other authors.
Inter alia, McEwan spoke of the composition of Saturday, which began when the image came to him of a man, naked, standing at his bedroom window in the depth of night, his wife asleep in the bed by his side, contemplating London's night sky, and of his subsequent, in-depth research accompanying a neurosurgeon in his work for several months to learn more about the brain. Speaking of the structure of his novels, he differentiated between their beginnings: the way in which Atonement, for example, begins with a slow setting-out of the psychological background of the characters, whereas Enduring Love, and Saturday, like Mozart's Haffner Symphony, begin with a dramatic incident or expression and then the themes are developed. Interesting, too, that Saturday should depict a happy marriage; McEwan found it a challenge to write, given his wider concern for the failure to communicate and frailty of the majority of human relationships he depicts. He cited Tolstoy's epiphanous description of the early days of marriage in Anna Karenina as a uniquely sun-lit, verosimilitudinous case in point.
There was some discussion of his films, in which McEwan spoke of his screenplays and of the success of the different realisations of his novels that exist (the only caveat perhaps some aspects of Enduring Love, although the director did achieve the film he wanted to make); also of On Chesil Beach, and of his latest novel on climate change, which hits the shelves in a week. The context for the book grew out of McEwan's salutary (if dispiriting) experience on a boat in the Arctic with writers and scientists a few years ago. In the evenings, after days in minus 40 degree cold, his fellow travellers and he would have lengthy, earnest discussions putting the world to rights, working out the necessary international arrangements to reduce climate change consistent with the climate science and the evidence before their eyes. Simultaneously, and as the week progressed, the storage room in which the group kept their essential kit (gloves, thermals, coats, etc.) became ever more disordered, until such time as complete pandemomium had taken over and some of the group were not able to leave the boat on their daily expeditions for wont of kit.
Despite the inevitable reflections ensuing from this experience, implicit in his rendering of the tale and the audience's laughter, McEwan contended he was an optimist, and that the luxury of pessimism was a luxury of youth (as a twenty-something-year-old, he would welcome the likely arrival of nuclear obliteration with a kind of passionate glea).
The consoling, mellifluous voice and instruments of Mara Carlyle were balm to the soul after the McEwan lecture, and so was the gentle voice, and poetic language, of Michael Ondaatje, in conversation with Juan Gabriel Vásquez, an hour later. Ondaatje spoke compellingly about his work, the gaps between his novels, the experience of working with Minghella on The English Patient, his poetry, and the joy he obtains from editing his twice-yearly literary journal The Brick.
The British Ambassador and his wife, John and Marion Dew, then hosted a drinks party in the sixteenth-century Palace of the Inquisition, in which the mojitos flowed, and then authors and pundits alike—including this lowly Prospect blogger—danced the night away under a full and golden moon overlooking the old city.
