Chekhov’s Mistess

Jhumpa Lahiri interviews Melania Mazzucco at Pen World Voices Festival

“I am looking for what remains of life when nothing remains of life.”

- Melania Mazzucco

We’ll call this the “style issue” because last night’s Benetton sponsored event at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò had a fashionable urbanity that is not often seen at literary discussions. Women outnumbered men six-to-one and the age makeup was well south of the usual suspects at something like, for example, the William H. Gass reading I went to last month. The small room – good event planners always underestimate the expected turnout just a little – was standing room only with all of its 90 seats filled, so there were literally smartly dressed women from wall to wall.

What was the draw, I wondered. Was it the elegant 19th century townhouse, the beautiful Italian fashion model who gave a very brief introduction to the well dressed John Ventimiglia of Sopranos fame who did the reading? No, it couldn’t have been any of these. I asked the man next to me if he was a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri and he replied “I’m a fan of free stuff” (he left early on).

Whatever the answer, style and literature are not diametrically opposed and the conversation about Ms. Mazzucco’s book was thoughtful and interesting. There was a fair amount of dissipation among the crowd as the night went on, but we could chalk that up to finals time at nearby NYU or the fact that the promotional material was vague as to whether this event was more about Ms. Mazzucco, which it was, or the well known Lahiri.

I initially didn’t want to go to this event (My wife wanted to go to see Lahiri and then couldn’t), and when I arrived in this decidedly non-literary feeling room with pulsating mood music and Fabrica made mood movie in the background I was ready to turn around. I would rather have gone to the depressing “Voices of Chernobyl” reading, which is more my speed, but after deciding to stay put, as the story goes, I was not unpleased.

Melania Mazzucco’s latest novel Vita, is about a boy and girl who immigrate to the United States at an early age and their struggle to find identity and belonging as they grow older. These pursuits are also what Ms. Lahiri has written about in The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, so she was an apt interlocutor. As with Ms. Lahiri, Mazzucco’s book is based in part on her own family’s experience and the conversation between the two revolved very much around their very different but emotionally shared experiences.

John Ventimiglia, Artie Bucco in the Sopranos, kicked things off with a reading from Vita that was pretty much just okay and then turned things over to Ms. Lahiri. She was so young when coming to the states, she said, she had no memory of the experience and therefore didn’t lose her childhood in the way that Vita and Diamante, the characters in Mazzucco’s book, did. This statement opened up the conversation by getting right to the heart of Ms. Mazzucco’s book.

Ms. Mazzucco writes about loss and being lost: “I am looking for what remains of life when nothing remains of life,” she said. Her characters (or you could say her family) know what it is like to not understand their own country’s language because they only speak a local dialect, and to come to a new country and not know that language or even the country tongue of those from your own land. This is to lose one’s childhood and still be like a child because you can’t speak.

The book begins during the early part of the 19th century and Lahiri pointed out that leaving one’s country then was more of an extreme experience than it would be today; with no phone or email, you were far more cut off from your old country and your past. Still, despite the harshness that immigrants a century ago underwent, it would seem from the conversation that even today immigrants experience similar issues of loss. Ms. lahiri talked about how her parents would “cling” to their Bengali friends even after 40 years in the states and then only secondly to their Bengali friends, they would keep friends with Indians in general before other Americans.

Interestingly, Lahiri brought home the universality of these issues by reading from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (probably an odd thing to do at a reading for another author). She happened to have been reading the book the night before and was struck by its relevance to the issues in Vita, despite being in a different time, place and circumstances. In the same way Ms. Mazzucco said that “The metamorphosis of my family is the metamorphosis of my country,” I might say that the alienation felt by immigrants may very well be the alienation many feel who have never left their home country.

Although there were a few questions toward the end, it wouldn’t appear any came from Benetton’s blog, which was touted as a way for readers to pose questions, “take place in the debate.” One of the audience members turned out to be an old friend of Ms. Mazzucco’s father, an Italian filmmaker who died some time ago. The friend had immigrated to America many years ago and had a collection of letters to give to her, which seemed fitting given the topic at hand.

It turns out that Vita will be made into a film (as will, I might add, Ms. Lahiri’s The Namesake) and I think I overheard Lahiri saying her next novel was not finished but should be by the fall. Fans take heart.

Final impressions: I think the event, for me anyway, did what it was supposed to do: through the voice of an established American author introduce us to a great international author. I may have felt less fashionable being there, but I did come away thinking about a new author.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 28, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Reading Railroad: Events

Tags: Pen World Voices Festival

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• Links to this Post: Technorati

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