Worlds - A Guide for Readers

Worlds (a Writers' Centre Norwich gathering of writers) takes place in Norwich from Monday 17th-Friday 21st June 2013

Every year for the last decade a unique and wonderful gathering of writers has been taking place in Norwich. The Worlds Salon is an open space where writers come together to discuss the art, craft, and profession of literature, share ideas about what is happening now and might happen in the future, and develop friendships that inspire and influence their writing for years to come. There’s an impressive list of writers who have been involved, including J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Xiaolu Guo, alongside many other internationally celebrated authors.

And yet, few people really know what Worlds is. It is often called a festival but it isn’t. Not really. A festival is a gathering dominated by public events, where audiences encounter literature and ideas and there’s a buzz of excitement that comes from a shared passion. Books are bought, reading adventures begun. Authors pop in for a few hours before heading somewhere else.

But Worlds, the heart of Worlds at the Salon, has no audience. The discussions necessarily take place in private – it frees participants to explore together, try out ideas, debate in substance and be wrong on occasion: all fundamental aspects of the creative process – and even though there are brilliant events around the edges these often have little to do with the core purpose of Worlds.

The fact is: Worlds isn’t about readers. It is about writers. Some of you may have noticed that I can be a bit bolshy about the way readers are sometimes sidelined from the processes of literature, treated as passive consumers of whatever is dangled in front of us rather than active participants in the art of literature. At the Edinburgh World Writers Conference last year I got so frustrated about this that I threatened to create a rival readers conference, and I hope to do this in the next couple of years. Readers must and will lead the transformation ourselves. But the truth is that I don’t feel angry about Worlds. It is one of the most incredible weeks of my year. And readers benefit from what happens there.

The best books I read are those that are original and exciting. Great writing comes from writers being enabled to write what they want, to push boundaries without worrying about whether a publisher, politician, or anyone else thinks it is something they should write about, or something that readers want to read. There is so much writing out there that failure shouldn’t matter to readers. If a writer takes a risk and it doesn’t work, so what? If a writer takes a risk and it pays off, we all have a book that will be loved for decades to come. Creativity cannot be constrained. If we readers want to have access to brilliant writing across forms and genres and from around the world, then events like Worlds are imperative to making this happen.

Furthermore, Summer Reads was created in 2010 to open Worlds up to readers. Some of the best books we’ve featured in Summer Reads including The Longshot by Katie Kitamura, The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper, and After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld were discovered through Worlds. Had it not been for Worlds I would never have read them, and all the wonderful conversations we’ve had about them would never have happened. And even though Summer Reads has grown so that it can now feature great writing wherever we find it, regardless of the authors availability to come to Worlds, that facility of introducing great writing from around the world to readers remains at the heart of everything we do.

I first encountered Worlds in 2006 when, at Waterstones, a couple of colleagues got to meet Andrey Kurkov (author of Death and the Penguin – one of my favourite books at the time) at an outdoor event that also featured Steven Fry as well as two authors, Aleksandar Hemon and Shahnush Parsipur, that I’ve since read and loved. I gave them my books and wished I were there with them. The next year I made sure I was there and in the coming couple of years I followed the public programme like a groupy, planning my days carefully and making sure I could see everything it was possible to see. I sold books and discovered amazing writers from all corners of the world. In many ways, it was my on-the-job training for world writing. I still remember the thunder storm that halted Sheila Hancock in the middle of a Norwich City of Refuge reading at the Cathedral, the feeling of worlds opening upon hearing the masterful poetry of Adam Zagajewski and Kei Miller, and the sense that the world had been turned on its head as I sat behind one of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee, at an event about climate change at the Playhouse.

That I now work at Writers’ Centre Norwich is largely because of these experiences. I loved Worlds and I wanted to be a part of it. Over the last five years that dream has become a reality and I’ve been fortunate to have sat in on these discussions at the Worlds Salon. The flash of ideas around the room never fails to inspire and excite me. I tweet like a maniac, desperately trying to keep up with the pace of discussion and share some of the topics with those not in the room. Last year conversation revolved primarily around the relationship between truth and imagination in writing, and some of the thoughts remain with me to this day. A participant described fiction as being ‘a lighthouse that guides us towards truth, or something resembling truth.’ Another talked about the process of writing as ‘letting fascination rule language’, and a third said that: ‘literature sets out to add to the enchantment of the world.’

Three are beautiful, idealistic, wonderful phrases that catch glimpses of why I love literature. I can’t wait to see what this year’s Salon will bring. Our theme is Ways of Writing, Ways of Reading, an exploration of the ways that technology is changing how we write and read, and the possibilities this opens up for cross-art collaborations. It promises to be an amazing week.

But it saddens me that more of my fellow readers have never had a chance to discover the wonders of Worlds, and will miss out on all the conversations taking place, for they impact upon what we will read in years to come. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So here, friends, is a short guide to getting the most from Worlds.

Watch or listen to content from the Worlds Salon. Each one kicks off with a 10 minute provocation to get the discussion flowing and these are recorded and shared through the Writers’ Centre Norwich website promptly. In the meantime, why not look back through the annuls at some of the great provocations already delivered. I particularly love American poet C.K. Williams on Nature and Panic which takes in his sometimes regret at having to hold the unimaginable panic of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in his consciousness, no matter how wonderful it is, and his clarion call that ‘beauty saves us, beauty will save us, the beauty of art, the beauty of spirit, and most fugitive of all, the beauty of hope.’ I also love Gillian Beer on The Reader Resists from last year, in which she wondered what the role of the reader is in engaging with the written word.

Attend events. There are afternoon readings every day featuring writers you have probably never heard of before. They are free and amazing forums for discovery. Come along if you can. Evie Wyld will also be launching her second novel, All The Birds, Singing, at a Granta Best of Young British Authors event on Wednesday – don’t miss that!

Join the Conversation - If you are on Twitter, follow #Worlds13 for live commentary throughout.

Read reports from the Writers’ Centre Norwich marketing team throughout the week.

Come on. Get involved in Worlds. And start your own adventure today.

Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon

Read: January 2009

Nowhere Man in one tweet sized chunk:
Darkly funny but emotionally reserved Nowhere Man offers further proof of Hemon's intuitive talent as a writer in English.

As with Shahrnush Parsipur, I first came across Aleksandar Hemon through his participation in New Writing Worlds. However it wasn't until I was commissioned to write the Waterstone's Books Quarterly review for The Lazarus Project that I actually discovered what an excellent writer he is.

There is a certain amount of biography about Jozef Pronek, the star of Nowhere Man. He first appeared in a short story in Hemon's debut collection, The Question of Bruno, where (like Hemon) we saw him leaving Sarajevo to visit Chicago just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Nowhere Man sees Jozef trying to make his way in his accidentally adoptive country. It is a complex, time shifting, elliptical novel in which the narrative shuffles between his childhood in Sarajevo where he formed Beatles cover bands and tried to be cool, his student days in Kiev where he had a bizarre encounter with George Bush Senior, and Chicago in the 1990s. In need of a job Jozef joins with a band of Greenpeace activists where ha learns the subtle tactics needed to extract money from people who don't really want to give it, and even attends a rally where he finds it impossible not to correct the grammar of the protesters. 'One, two, three, four, we don't want nukes no more' they chant. Shouldn't that be 'one, two, three, four, we don't want nukes anymore' he corrects. And there are other subtle linguistic word plays scattered throughout this complex novel. The prose is exact and poetic, it is no surprise that he has already being compared regularly with the likes of Vladimir Nabokov.

However, for all the great prose, the problem with Nowhere Man is that it is difficult to follow due to all the time shifts. Hemon also seems to go to great lengths to keep the reader at arms length from his character. It is a dryly witty view of life which Jozef offers, rather than a deeply emotive one. And it is this emotional distance which differentiates it from the fantastic Lazarus Project which was one of the very best books I read in all of 2008.

Aleksandar Hemon is a first rate writer and one to look out for over the coming years.

7 out of 10

Women Without Men - Shahrnush Parsipur

Read: November 2008

Women Without Men in one tweet sized chunk:

An intriguing story of female unity, Women Without Men is a work of earthy magic unlike anything else I have read.

I first acquired Women Without Men incidentally. It was 2006, I had just started working for Waterstone's at the University of East Anglia and been set loose on the fiction section. I was at that stage of my literary education when every day heralded a new discovery and another book to be added to my Amazon wishlist. Shahrnush Parsipur was invited to Norwich as a participant in New Writing Worlds (alongside the likes of Andrey Kurkov, and Aleksandar Hemon) and so I ordered some of her books in from The Feminist Press in New York for us to sell at bookstalls during these events.

A few weeks later I was flicking through a box of books which I was unpacking and on the back of a book entitled Touba and the Meaning of Light I spotted a quote from Marjane Satrapi, author of the Perseopolis graphic novels which I had just read. “When I left Iran,” it began, “I took three books...one of them was Touba and the Meaning of Night...Parsipur is a courageous, talented women and above all a great writer.” This intrigued me but being a big £20 hardback I filed the information at the back of my mind and waited until I could buy it.

Months passed. Then one day, after applying to return the unsold copies, we received a letter authorising us to TPR (title page remove, a process where you rip out the title page to return to the publisher's and take the now damaged copies off sale) all the copies. Suddenly I not only owned a copy of Touba and the Meaning of Light, but also a far shorter paperback novel entitled Women Without Men. From there it was only a year or so until I actually got around to reading it.

So that is the very boring story of how I discovered Shahrnush Parsipur. It is yet another example of the little discoveries inspired by international authors being invited to Norwich for New Writing Worlds which was why I first developed an interest in working there. And look where that ended...

BUT WHAT OF THE BOOK? Get on with it already.

Women Without Men is a great little read which follows the destinies of five women living in modern Iran. They include a prostitute, a wealthy middle-aged housewife, and a schoolteacher, all sorts of women who by various routes come to live without men in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran. It is a book of escape, a vivid depiction of women's independence and a celebration of nature. Suffused throughout with Islamic mysticism which is mixed with comment on contemporary Iran (she was jailed soon after publication for her frank and defiant portrayal of women's sexuality) this is an incredibly powerful and arresting work, unlike anything else I have ever read. There is one beautiful part which will stay with me a long time. Having arrived by their various routes in the garden one of the women, Mahdokht, decides to become a tree. She plants herself by the riverbank in the fall and her feet are slowly frozen into the ground. Come spring she starts to spout green leaves and from then on as the seasons change so does she. Then one summer she begins to transform into seeds which blow into the water and are scattered across the world.

It is a beautiful image which sums the book up perfectly. If you are looking for a fresh read which will not be found in any 3for2 promotion, then why not give this a go? It really is a worthwhile read.

7.5 out of 10

The Lazarus Project - Aleksandar Hemon

In 1992 Aleksander Hemon was 28 years old and on holiday in America when Sarajevo (his home city) was caught up and in the Balkan civil war. Stranded in a foreign country, he began to build a new life for himself in Chicago. It took him only 3 years to publish his first story in English, 8 to write his first book, and within 12 years his first novel, Nowhere Man, was published to great acclaim. The MacArthur Foundation even awarded him its Genius Grant. And you can see why. For someone who adopted English at a relatively late age – scrap that, for anyone who has ever picked up a pen – his command of English is phenomenal. He is a fabulous writer, unsullied by the sort of repeated cultural errors and obvious clichés which can beset a native author. Like Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov before him, Hemon’s prose has that fresh exactitude, that startlingly exquisite touch which brings his books superbly to life.

Aleksander Hemon knows what it is like to be an immigrant in America and he writes about what he knows. Just as the central character in Nowhere Man, Jozef Pronek, seemed to borrow much from his authors plight, so too does the protagonist in The Lazarus Project. Vladimir Brik is an emotionally insecure Bosnian immigrant gloriously and successfully posing as a well integrated American. He is happily married to a brain surgeon named Mary, is financially comfortable, and writes a column on immigration for a newspaper. As he proclaims early on:

“Just like everybody else, I enjoy the unearned nobility of belonging to one nation and not the other; I like deciding who can join us, who is out, and who is to be welcome when visiting."

A Westerner indeed! So well has Brik convinced himself of his Americanisation, that any animosity he harbours is directed at what he feels is his distant and backward homeland, rather than his adopted life. But perhaps everything is not as he believes.

When he stumbles across the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Ukrainian immigrant who fled the 1903 Kishinev pogrom only to end up being shot by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908, he feels the urge to write about it. Was Lazarus part a vast and dangerous anarchist network populated by immigrants seeking to overthrow the American order? Or was his tragedy an example of the xenophobic and bitter struggle taking place following the Haymarket riots? Nothing is certain; the truth almost one hundred years old. If it ever existed. But it is this uncertainty that draws Brik to the story; he feels a sense of immigrant camaraderie for this forgotten man.

“The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge”.

So with these first lines Brik jumps headfirst into the story of Lazarus. Soon he and Rora – a compulsive photographer and fellow refugee – set off on a trip to visit the land of Averbuch’s birth and their own shady heritage. With its two interwoven narratives, Brik’s physical and emotional journey finds mirrors in his imaginings of the aftermath of Averbuch’s death. Getting inside the head of Averbuch’s sister, Olga - bereft and alone in a strange and hostile community, struggling to come to terms with her brothers’ death – Brik soon finds his own present mired in as much uncertainty as the past he is researching. And his patchwork identity begins to unravel.
The Lazarus Project is the story of Brik’s inability to make sense of his conflicting identities. American, Bosnian, modern man, house husband, immigrant, atheist. This list goes on.
“No, I am not Jewish. Neither is Mary
Nor am I Muslim, Serb, or Croat.
I am complicated…”
And it is this complication which is at the centre of his struggle. The Lazarus Project is not a blithe, simplistic look at the plight of sympathetic immigrants, but a witty and fiercely immediate book written by a man who pours all his life experiences, thoughts and conflicting emotions into his prose.

The culture clash is very real, with Bosnian jokes and storytelling bravado proliferating amidst Brik’s musings on contemporary American society. Parallels are drawn between the current War on Terror and the early Twentieth century War on Anarchy but these are not overdrawn or belaboured. Hemon presents his characters and their society in stunning 3D, complete with a whole spectrum of thoughts, emotions, desires and undercurrents. And as the plot develops it is the idea of ‘home’ that comes sharply to the fore.

As Brik travels further away from Chicago today, holes start to appear in his marriage. He is emasculated by his financial dependency on Mary, doesn’t want to have children because he is worried they will be too American for him, drinks too much. And yet, although his marriage is not the perfect union he would wish, there is no sense that it is about to collapse, there is none of that most American of issues: angst. Instead there is an emptiness here that spans the distance between their homelands, and Brik cannot stop his insecurities poking through. He loves Mary, that is for sure: at one point he lists all her little quirks and one gets a real sense of affinity, a really romantic attraction to this couple and the man who wants to close the gap but cannot bring himself to talk to Mary, to explain his uncertainty. Mary is the absent presence throughout, always on Brik’s mind: his conscience and his guilt. She is the strongest character in the book; Hemon brilliantly keeps her balanced on a fine line between caricature of Brik’s perspective and independent woman in her own right. They are two people who fell in love but whose love is being quietly eroded by there own insecurities. As he travels further and further from his present, the repeated motif of “home is where somebody notices your absence” takes on a life all of its own.

The Lazarus Projects is a fantastic book. Regular motifs decorate the narratives like a grand symmetrical mosaic, at one moment something seems irrelevant, only to emerge a few pages later as a central theme. From the plethora of Bosnian jokes, to Rora’s collection of dramatic war stories, and Olga’s aborted attempts to write a letter home explaining Lazarus’s death to their mother. Layer on layer on layer, Hemon builds a beautiful, intricate and subtly crafted tale of history and immigration.

Reviews are often blighted by their need to liken their subject to something else, to give solidity to their empty words. The word ‘reminiscent’ is a reviewers crutch; his drug of choice, if you will. And as such, more often than not these comparisons fail to satisfy the perfection they promise. But despite these pitfalls, it is impossible not to mention here the similarities between The Lazarus Project and one of the most widely celebrated novels of the past decade: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Not only is the plot familiar – an American searching for his family identity in the history rich lands of Eastern Europe– but the multimedia use of pictures to assist the narrative, the merging of storylines, the weight of history on the present; all recall the adventures of Jonathan Safran Foer. And both are simply superb works of literature. In its central themes of identity and belonging, The Lazarus Project is virtually unrivalled.

Imagining the fate of Lazarus Averbuch and his sister Olga is a feet of imagination; Hemon puts the words in their mouths, and flesh on their bones. It is an uncomfortable, grimy life that they lead, but one with odd sparks of hope and joy as well. This is a fantastic novel: witty, intricate and delightfully realised, it is a study of displacement and solitude, of our yearning for and ambivalence towards that most tricky of notions: that of home.

8 out of 10