CLAIRE MESSUD
Claire Messud is a Harvard professor, and is married to the esteemed literary critic James Wood. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.
Books never cease to amaze me -- not just individual books, but the fact of them. A person can have or imagine an experience, and translate it into squiggles on a page, which can then be communicated to someone else, miles or centuries apart, who uses those squiggles to recreate, in their brain, the initial person’s experience. In this way, each person’s experience of a story or novel is specific and particular to them: we own the stories we read in a way we don’t own the stories we see in images. Nabokov described it as the writer and the reader climbing the mountain from opposite sides to meet at the top.
All the books I’ve read I consider to be experiences that I’ve had, Madame Bovary or Things Fall Apart as firmly imprinted in my memory as a family picnic or a walk around the local reservoir—in fact, often more firmly imprinted! As a little girl, I got lost in stories; I believed passionately in the reality of their characters, like Eleanor Farjeon’s Elsie Piddock, who keeps skipping for hundreds of years to keep the wealthy landlords from fencing off public lands (in 19th century Britain, parliament passed numerous Inclosure Acts that took public spaces away from the people).
When I read Notes from the Underground in high school (that particularly self-obsessed moment in life), I marveled at its protagonist, his beleaguered self-obsession – a novel could do this? A character could speak so directly about their anxieties and depression?
When I read Bernhard’s The Loser, it was again the relentless first person narrator that hooked me – you either love him or hate him – but I also hugely admire Bernhard’s complexity and wit, his formal dexterity, the range and fluidity of his prose. Without Bernhard, there couldn’t have been W.G. Sebald; and without Sebald, literature of the 21st century would look quite different.
When I was asked to review a new translation of Magda Szabo’s The Door, about ten years ago, I felt a different sort of recognition: Szabo’s meditation upon a woman’s relationship with her almost mythic housekeeper is also a meditation upon the boundaries of the self, of what friendship and respect might be, of the ways in which, blinded by our own presumptions, we fail others. This is an exploration not only of the self, but of relationship.
And then, most recently, I fell upon Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King utterly compelled, finding in it so much to admire and innumerable satisfactions: she manages to unite history and myth, the classical and the contemporary, to bring alive for us the Ethiopian women warriors battling the Italians in the 1930s for Ethiopian independence. The book is formally ambitious, at once lyrical and vividly grounded; the language sings, as do the characters and their heart-rending experiences. Mengiste’s is a novel that inspires and exhilarates as much as it unsettles and moves this reader: see, the book says, what can be told; look what miracles language can conjure!