Mulisch, Kadare and Writers' Talks

I used to head to writers' talks. All of them were worth it for two luminous encounters - with James Baldwin in Glasgow and Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles. A fair few others were uninspiring but OK - writers seldom make good performers it seems. Occasionally the transparency of a public performance undermines a reputation - was Doris Lessing just a lousy reader of her work, or had she really become a rotten writer? I had to suspect the latter after sitting through an evening with her.
Writers don't necessarily make great readers.
I tried Toni Morrison out on audio book, reading her own work. I had to give up after half an hour. I couldn't focus on the work, such was my concern for the state of her lungs. Her breath control couldn't get her through a sentence without gasping.
The South Bank pulled me out for a rare appearance (by me) at a writers' event last night - Harry Mulisch and Ismail Kadare being far from the usual suspects in these platform performances. I don't know Kadare's work (an Albanian, winner of the first International Man Booker award) but loved Mulisch's The Assault.
Kadare reading in Albanian was way preferable to Mulisch in English. Boy did Mulisch drone on - Kadare pleasingly crisp, with a translator in his wake, but Mulisch was like a foreign student struggling with the language of his end of term paper.
Kadare spoke in French for the Q&A period. He was pleasingly lucid, with considered words and a whole architecture of thought that was well shaped. He made a jolly comparison between the voyage of Columbus, which gave nothing to literature, and the near conemporary journey of an idiot from one Spanish village to another, which gave literature one of its masterpieces. Literature arises from the twilight zone of life. He viewed Albanian literature as part of Balkan literature, which stems back beyond the Greek tragedies. Literature stems from the sadder side of life, but this is not pessimism on the part of the writer. 'In Greek tragedy you can find everything but pessimism', as with Shakespeare and Marlowe. The writer's tone is more comparable to the emotion you find in a funeral procession. You appreciate life more from the sadness and gravity you feel at a funeral.
Writing from the Balkans has a great orality, and a consequent monumentalism. Greek tragedies had a few scripts for the actors, but for everyone else the delivery was oral. Epic writing is clear, dense and compact, to be compatred with the writing on tombstones. The oral tradition explains why masterpieces like Oedipus Rex are so simple. As an adolescent, Kadare found the simplicity of that play truly disappointing. Rather sweetly, he went on to reflect that adolescents all over the world find a similar problem.

My notes from Mulisch, scribbled in the dark, are sparser. He was not so coherent, and was less engaged with the process of writing - perhaps a little more engaged with his own image. He grew up wanting to be a scientist, writing landing on him at 18, so while he decries the notion of anyone 'becoming a writer', for one simply is a writer, he's outside my own court. One is a human being, yet it takes continuous effort to achieve the conscious state of being a good one. He saw a historical novel making 'things less guilty', so that evil becomes beautiful (eg Macbeth). His take that Stalin inspires few books because he was not intrinsically evil, simply part of the Soviet system, whereas Hitler was truly evil, so the writer's role is to diminish him and make him ordinary, is open to debate.
Was I illumined by the evening? Not dynamically. But in Kadare I did come across a writer I liked as a being, and felt genuine sympathy with. The format of the evening, the confused questioning from the chair, did not shine the best light on him, yet still he glowed softly.