Competing Claims of History and Literature

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Cynthia Ozick read Tuesday from her novel “Heir to a Glimmering World” (Houghton Mifflin). She told the audience about the book’s characters, such as Professor Rudolf Mitwisser. He was a German Jewish refugee living in New York, whose area of scholarly research is the Karaites, a small Jewish group who reject commentary and interpretation and follow Scripture alone.


Ms. Ozick told an anecdote about giving a reading at Yale. A scholar of Karaism, who had been in the audience, buttonholed her after the talk and told her she was wrong and that her research was not up to date. (In an aside, Ms. Ozick said, “I read a few encyclopedia articles” about the subject. Her novel ends in the year 1937.) She recalled pleading with the professor, “It’s a novel. It’s fiction.”


An audience member asked whether she was drawing a parallel between the Karaites in her book, who reject commentary and interpretation, and religious fundamentalism today. Ms. Ozick said one could find similarities, but the Karaites were not like televangelist Pat Robertson. The Karaites were lexicographers and grammarians, she said. The audience chuckled when she added that it was difficult to think of Mr. Robertson as a lexicographer and grammarian.


***


WOOLF AND WAR


The intersection of history and fiction were also discussed Wednesday evening as Ramapo College professor of literature Lisa Williams read from her book, “Letters to Virginia Woolf” (Hamilton Books).


Ms. Williams, who received her doctorate from the Graduate Center of the City of New York, has written a memoir in the form of a series of letters to the famed British author of “To the Lighthouse” and other classics. The book meditates on Woolf’s anti-war views while interweaving subjects such as Ms. Williams’s experience on September 11, 2001, and childhood recollections of summer camp. She made reference that evening to a character in Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” named Septimus Smith, who returns shell-shocked and broken from World War I.


During the question-and-answer period, an audience member in the back row asked about her response to the events of September 11, 2001. She said in her book, she was responding “very personally.” She referred to Woolf’s pacifist manifesto “Three Guineas,” in which Woolf wrote, “A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life.” She told him, “We need to unite.”


“Unite with whom?” the audience member asked.


“People throughout the world,” she replied.


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TRAGEDY AT HIGH ALTITUDE


An audience of travel and adventure lovers came out to the Half King in Chelsea earlier this week to hear David Roberts read and discuss “On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined” (Simon & Schuster).


Before the reading began, the Knickerbocker asked National Geographic Adventure magazine’s editor in chief, John Rasmus, what makes great travel writing. “It has to be more than about travel,” he said, “It can’t be the narrative equivalent of your vacation slides.” He said when travel writing is done right, the essay can allow the writer to talk about nearly anything.


In introducing Mr. Roberts, Mr. Rasmus said, “Before David came along, you could put most climbing books into one of two categories: grandly heroic or humorously self-deprecating. Neither approach tended to get to the bottom of the dark, fascinating psychology of adventure and risk.” Mr. Roberts, he said, has always brought total, “even uncomfortable honesty to his work.”


Mr. Roberts described having participated in three fatal climbs by the age of 22. He told about a tragic climb in 1965 with the Harvard Mountaineering Club. While ascending a new route on Mount Huntington in Alaska, he watched helplessly as his friend and partner fell 4,000 feet onto a glacier.


Mr. Roberts described calling his friend’s parents in Philadelphia to tell them the news of their son’s death, and traveling back East to visit and try to console them. He told how the parents never got over the loss and how, over the years, their son’s death remained fresh as though it happened yesterday.


Seen in attendance were NG Adventure magazine’s senior editor, Cliff Ransom; Jon Bowermaster, who has sea kayaked all over the world; Steve Byers, editor at large for National Geographic Adventure and NG Books; and poet Honor Moore.


***


THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IRVING


“I am from the ‘more is more’ school,” said John Irving, adding that he loves the longer novels of his favorite writers. He spoke recently about “Until I Find You: A Novel” (Random House), his 800-plus page book about a tattoo artist mother who takes her young son on a journey to northern Europe in search of his father, a church organist.


Mr. Irving commanded attention quietly, answering audience questions slowly and with care. This is the way he plots his novels, he told us. He said he can take up to 12 to 18 months of planning and research before writing a word. He has to know the pattern of the plot, especially the ending, and the reason the reader should get to the end, before he is free to write.


An audience member observed that there was fatalism and sense of destiny in his fiction, which she now understood to be how he structures the books, “But does it apply to your beliefs, too?” she asked.


“Yes,” Mr. Irving said, then paused. Things happened “when they were supposed to.” He believed there were “no coincidences” in life or in his novels.


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