There was so much interest in his visit to H-town that, for the first time, Inprint, in collaboration with Houston Public Media, live-streamed the reading.  In fact, tickets for Doerr’s event, part of the 2015-2016 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, sold out in 90 minutes. According to St. John Flynn, Arts and Culture Director at Houston Public Media, more than a thousand people saw the reading online, and that number will rise, as it will soon be available on the Inprint website for those who still wish to partake.

Impressive.

As Rich Levy introduced Doerr, he surprised me by saying Doerr would be reading from a short story—his 2011 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award Winner.  Doerr, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, has described himself as coming from a place where if you described yourself as a “writer,” you would be called “precocious or pretentious.”  Doerr, who is likeable and easy-going, certainly is not pretentious.  But he sure can write. 

Levy tells us that Doerr, a voracious reader, was “allowed to read while he ate,” and suddenly, this sounds like an excellent idea.  Some of his favorite writers:  Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, Anne Carson, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee. He also likes Calvin and Hobbes.

Doerr has not only written his award winning All the Light We Cannot See, but also the novel About Grace, two short story collections, The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, and a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome.  In addition, he wrote a long-running science column for The Boston Globe.

When Doerr reaches the stage, he is gracious, praising Houston’s weather (he lives in Idaho), saying this winter day feels like “95 degrees” to him. He talks about the collaboration between Inprint, University of Houston (where he gave a talk earlier that day), and Brazos Bookstore (which has just been nominated as one of the nation’s best independent bookstores) as rare—“seems like paradise.”

In introducing his award-winning short story, “The Deep,” Doerr talked about what was in his head while writing it:  things like “whale falls” (the carcass of a whale on the ocean bottom), marine biology, what it might be like having a child with a disability, economic recessions and depressions, salt mines.  It is fascinating to hear how he connects all of these seemingly disparate things.  He explains: “Lots of things get crammed into the stew of your mind.”

He is funny—very funny—describing the absurdity of how some kids act as if “there’s no mystery left in the world,” in contrast to Doerr’s enthusiasm for what he observes in the natural world.  Who else would describe a whale fall as “a great Burger King dropping out of the sky,” serving as a “feast” and an entire eco-system in and of itself?  Suddenly, I am interested in the “striations of time” suggested by a salt mine—I have caught a severe case of Doerr’s palpable and contagious enthusiasm for—well, everything.  I am excited about his story just hearing him talk about it.

In spite of his excited demeanor, Doerr is still a master of the understated phrase on the page, and it stays with you.  Early in the story, the protagonist’s life begins to unfold: “His father is off stage, unaccounted for.”  So subtle, you almost miss it.  Almost.

Doerr’s phrasing reminds me of a poet.  Some of the lines you have to write down—you don’t want to forget them: “His heart will have to do three times the work.”  “Sixteen, thinks Tom, eighteen if I’m lucky.” “By the time he’s ten he’s in remedial everything.”  Doerr is a wonderful reader, speaks in an upbeat and cheerful voice even when wistful, even when something in the story is “a daily lesson in insidiousness.”  Mid-reading, Doerr asks the audience, “You guys doing ok out there?”  You don’t see that every day.  You wish you had written a line like this one: “To say no to Ruby Hornaday would be to say no to the world.”  His hero Tom (how often do you use that word anymore?) writes to Ruby, “I am as lonely as the Arctic Sea.”  And then you realize what Doerr is all about:  even when things can’t get sadder, can’t get worse, everything is still worthy of our attention, our susceptibility to marvel: “Everything is radiant.”  Doerr is no moralist, but reminds us of the wonder around us, a tough feat in cynical times:  the world will never run “out of life.”  No matter how you felt before you walked into that reading, you feel better when you leave, and you believe him.

After the reading, novelist and UH Honors College faculty member Robert Cremins interviews Doerr, asking him about his “wide-ranging and fearless imagination.”  Doerr is modest, claims he is “stealing from research” for some of his inspiration, including old colorized postcards.  Doerr touches on his love of reading, how he got hooked on C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia when younger, how “librarians are drug dealers”—getting us hooked on books.

Doerr says he feels most balanced when immersed in what he calls “three streams”—life, reading, and writing.  He discusses the miraculous of the everyday—the amazing “technical miracles” that we have come to take for granted, such as the transmission of sound and light through technology.  He talks about how radio, the phenomenon of “hearing the voice of a stranger in your ear, was a miracle,” and he makes you realize it still is.

The purpose of writing and art?  Doerr says that both remind us “that you are not alone. Let me show you how another person has lived.”  He tries to steer his students away from the desire to dramatize “universals”—specificity is best.  “That’s how you transport people—through the particulars.  Art puts you in the life of someone else.”

Cremins asks Doerr about “the wonder and the study of the natural world,” and Doerr notes his admiration for another writer who incorporates nature and science in her fiction, Ship Fever author Andrea Barrett.  Doerr’s mother was a science teacher, and he tells the audience that he was never forced to choose between science and the arts—instead, he was just “pursuing curiosity.”  Doerr adds, “the more you learn about anything, the more interesting it becomes.”

He talks about German state schools during the war, bombed medieval cities, French journalists who blow smoke into his face in tiny French restaurants while asking him about symbolism.  He is funny without malice, adventurous without pretention—sharing his experiences without making you feel like you have missed out.  Instead, you just want to look at the world as he does.  Cremins is right when he tells Doerr that so many of his books are about “how to say ‘yes’ to the world.”  It is a good thing to know how to do.

Doerr in conversation, and on the page, easily navigates through a lot of territory:  how we understand light, “how limited our senses are.”  The way that “cynical work” is “not that interesting” to him.  How editing can be “literary liposuction” (phrase courtesy of Lawrence Wright) or removing “passenger words that are just along for the ride.”  How writing itself can be a mystery: “I really like the surprise of not knowing what a character will do.”

The evening seemed to go by fast—Doerr is engaging, and his students are lucky.  One of my favorite moments happened at the end of the night, when an audience member asked him about his work, and the way it was “free of irony, sarcasm, a certain world weariness”—a perfect articulation of what much of contemporary literature is not.  Was it, she wondered, “risky” to write like this, given the current “literary landscape?”

Doerr’s answer: “You can’t let fear stop you from doing the things you are interested in doing.”  Good advice for writing.  And life.

The Inprint Book Club will discuss Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See on February 14, 2016, 4 pm at Inprint House. Click here for details.

The post Saying ‘yes” to the world: Anthony Doerr reads for H-town first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Just like everyone else streaming into the beautiful Wortham Center, I was excited.  He was on a “limited” U.S. book tour and Houston had made the cut.

Multiple nominee for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, Ishiguro won in 1989 for his best known work, The Remains of the Day, which was also made into an excellent film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  Never Let Me Go had also been made into a film, and Ishiguro has been listed as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1948 by The Times.  Recipient of the OBE award from the British Crown, he is a palpable force in English letters, tending to experiment stylistically while hovering on similar themes:  self-denial, acceptance of fate, the dance of time with potential and real regrets.

Although born in Japan, and influenced by the culture of the Samurai in interesting ways, Ishiguro comes across as thoroughly English, having lived there since he was five in 1960.  He did not speak English, but enjoyed American Westerns on television, and later, became hugely influenced by the novels of Charlotte Bronte, particularly Jane Eyre and Villette.  Ishiguro began as a singer-songwriter, interested in jazz and its improvisational modes—an influence that has carried over to his writing.

Ishiguro read from Chapter 11 of The Buried Giant, which takes place around 490 AD, a rather murky period of English history after the British Romans have left, and while the Anglo-Saxons are just settling in.  His characters are the indigenous Britons who were eventually obliterated—giving Ishiguro wide latitude in representing them—lost people who are looking for a lost son.  It is a chapter full of physical challenges (“It was bitingly cold on the river”), but the psychological atmosphere is what stays with the audience.  The story is part of a longer journey, concerned with collective and individual forgetting, and the atmosphere conspires to aid and abet that enterprise: “This mist makes us forget so much,” one of the characters says, but it is a reminder to everyone about how the forces of memory are easily challenged.

The shock of the chapter, and maybe even the entire novel, is the appearance of entities such as pixies (they seem utterly disgusting), ogres, and giants—a far cry from the butler’s quarters of The Remains of the Day.  There is Sir Gawain—yes, of Green Knight fame—and Ishiguro suggests that he is, like many of his characters, “out of time”—that is, they have a certain nobility or set of ethics that seems obsolete, anachronistic, awkward.  They reveal what is no longer tenable and relegated to history or the literary imagination.

In the Q&A session, led by novelist and University of Houston Honors College faculty member Robert Cremins, Cremins notes the departure from Ishiguro’s previous works in The Buried Giant.  Ishiguro agrees that this novel “is not a typical kind of thing for me at all,” and that the “mythical landscape” is intended for him to explore, microcosmically, the issues of nations’ “remembering and forgetting,” which was in part inspired by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and even South Africa after apartheid.  Communal forgetting, Ishiguro explains, even in a deliberate form, may reflect “the need to avoid another cycle of violence.”

Ishiguro agrees that this novel “is not a typical kind of thing for me at all,” and that the “mythical landscape” is intended for him to explore, microcosmically, the issues of nations’ “remembering and forgetting,” which was in part inspired by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and even South Africa after apartheid.  Communal forgetting, Ishiguro explains, even in a deliberate form, may reflect “the need to avoid another cycle of violence.”

Ishiguro’s point that the “dark passages buried” in communal or national history can also be identified in more immediate relationships:  parents to children, friendships, even marriages, in which the “buried passages” and unspoken ruptures are psychologically necessary to keep them intact.  His most profound question, both for the novel and for the audience, is “How much should we actually remember?”

Expanding on that thought, Ishiguro asks, is “love ‘genuine’ if it is based on suppression” or a limited acknowledgment of history and truth?  He is interested in the notion of “collective memory lapses” and “some kind of group amnesia,” and one cannot help but think of the social lubricant of smiles and denial that has been present in American southern culture, in both charming and disturbing incarnations.

When asked about his process as an artist, Ishiguro charmingly admits to having “slightly geeky writer’s notebooks”—some left since the 1980s—in which he has his own set of buried passages that he leaves behind for long periods of time, often even years, and that sometimes provide the seed of future stories.  Ishiguro quips that his wife, Lorna, knew him before he was a writer, when he was an aspiring musician, and still thinks of him as a writing ”upstart”—an amusing part of his interview.  Yet his accomplishments as a writer are indisputable, even if he confesses to tending to “have these ideas” with “two or three pieces of the jigsaw missing” before he fully brings a work to fruition.

If Ishiguro’s early works were “warnings to himself” about how to live, “a way of making sure—forcing me to have a perspective on the life I was leading,” The Buried Giant is about something else:  “less warnings, something else.”  Here, he is more like the musician—taking risks, improvising, even if it means going far back to Dark Ages Britain, conjuring trolls, flinging pixies and pixie dust on the page.  He is interested in what corrupts—the corruption of “a decent thing” that ultimately destroys it, and the role memory and recognition play in that process.  If something is “out of its time”—whether it be a knight, or English gentleman, or a lone cowboy, what does that mean about time?

One of Ishiguro’s last comments is his acknowledgment of the “large element of self-denial in people” and his observations that “most of the time people accept the fate given to them”—although this acceptance is in itself a curious choice, and one that has proven endlessly fascinating in his works.   His “key method” for all of his work is controlling “the element of surprise—or the lack of it.”

Ishiguro’s latest novel is certainly a surprise—both in terms of setting and form, part of what Cremins calls his ability to keep the reader “constantly on your toes.”  But Ishiguro is not jaded about these experimentations.  He says, “the reality of it is that quite a lot of decisions I make are more intuitive,” and he fears writers feeling like they have to have reasons to justify every aesthetic decision they make.

Often, he reminds the audience, he just writes something not because of any particular intellectual reasons, but “because it sounds better that way.”  He tells the audience that he thinks that “writers become too self-conscious.”  He thinks it is better to be more like a painter, a musician.  Better to allow giants, ogres, and pixies on the canvas, in the song.

The post Ogres, Pixies, and Giants: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Improvisations first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.