Writers Talking Writers: Elif Shafak on José Saramago and Mathias Énard on Marcel Proust

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with Booker nominee Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, There Are Rivers In the Sky) about the intellectual beauty of José Saramago, and with Booker nominee Mathias Énard (Zone, The Deserters) about the self-discovery of Marcel Proust.

Elif Shafak on José Saramago

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Saramago’s work?

He’s not an easy writer. His writing is very dense, particularly the way he plays with punctuation marks. But once you allow him to guide you and you hear his voice, it flows very easily, and you enter into another world. He reminds us that novels deal with reality, with politics, with history, with memory, with what can happen in the future or what has happened in the past. I think it's unfortunate that the word fiction in the English language is used as the opposite of fact, as if fiction has nothing to do with reality. Saramago is a good reminder that fiction is actually very interested in the truth.

I find there’s a strong sense of mystery to his work.

I'm with you, but not mystery as something that the author has deliberately calculated or developed to make his work more interesting. It’s mystery as something that organically exists in life, in history. Saramago is very interested in silences, not just stories, so when he talks about the past, whether it's Portugal or Spain or the Iberian Peninsula, he does it in a very nuanced way, and he's aware that so much of the past has been erased, forgotten, or pushed to the periphery, and he tries to make it more visible. Perhaps when you're a novelist, you're a little bit like a linguistic or cultural archaeologist. You try to dig deep through layers of stories and silences.

He wrote many diverse works. Which is your favorite or would you recommend for someone just discovering him?

Blindness is a good starting point. And then if you’re interested, you can also read Seeing, which is a little bit like a sequel. I find it interesting that these works were, in their original language, titled An Essay on Blindness and An Essay on Lucidity. He's very interested in crossing genres. He’s very aware of Kafka and Camus, but also Montaigne, so not only fiction writers. I like that. In Saramago's work, there are also very strong female characters. That's another reason I love his work. He’s very critical of patriarchy—how it works, how it holds people back.

I love his portrayal of Mary and Joseph in his book about Jesus. The little ways she’s an oppressed figure, and the little ways Joseph is almost comically patriarchal. Saramago’s books are very serious, but he's also so funny.

Absolutely. He has an amazing sense of humor. Not a cruel sense of humor, but a wise humor that understands we're all capable of good and evil in different degrees, and of change for the better or the worse. He’s not an author who treats his characters as monolithic blocks. He allows them to shift, to doubt, to reconsider, and then, when he puts them in different situations, even the nicest character can do awful things, or vice versa.

What do you think writers can learn from him?

He’s a thinker. In the Anglo-Saxon world, we use the word intellectual in a very negative way. Particularly here in the U.K,. we associate the term intellectual with arrogance and hubris. No one wants to be called an intellectual. I find that very puzzling. I come from a country where the term intellectual is not used in that way. In Turkey, we incarcerate our intellectuals, but we recognize that there are public intellectuals. In my opinion, Saramago is a public intellectual. He is a thinker, and he gently urges us to think about history, philosophy, politics, but also human psychology, the human condition. He has compassion. He sees our flaws, our ridiculous ambitions and desires, and then he tries to understand. That is really beautiful.

He has a quote, probably I'm misquoting, but he talks about how it's easy to live with other people, but the most difficult and important thing is to understand them. His is the kind of writing that encourages us to understand, to take a closer look. In this age of hyper-information and fast consumption, we have to remember Saramago's work. He tells us, slow down. Do not focus on these snippets of information. Give it time. He also talks about corruption, how power corrupts, the dangers of the monopolization of power. It’s definitely worth discovering or revisiting Saramago in today's broken and polarized times.

Mathias Énard on Marcel Proust

What do you think is the value in reading or writing a difficult novel like In Search of Lost Time?

Every novel is difficult to write, but a long odyssey like Proust—it's the work of a lifetime. Not all of us would engage in such a thing. And for the reader, you need lots of time to read it. It accompanies you for a long time, months or years for some people, so it's almost like the people who read lots of long fantasy works like Frank Herbert’s six or seven volume Dune. It can become addictive, an experience that’s totally different from other books.

When I first read Proust as a teenager, I got maybe 50 pages in before giving up. It took me several tries to get into it. What was your first experience like?

Yeah, it happens to all of us. It was my grandfather who told me, Oh, you should read this. I was 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn't understand a thing. The French Proust uses is literally from the turn of the century, very different from how French is written nowadays. I read it again when I was 20 or something and studying in Paris, and I remember it very well: getting the first volume off my uncle’s bookshelf, reading it on a bench on the Seine. It was a great experience, because Proust is so Parisian. I think I read all seven volumes in two months. I realized a couple of years afterwards that I didn’t remember it especially well, so I started again, and afterwards, I was writing more about memory and our relations to our youth or our past. So I read it again. Each time, it's a totally different experience. The reader shapes their own novel when they read it, and it's very true that, with Proust, you really transform the books, transform the characters, make them look more like you or less like you.

Do you have a favorite volume?

Yes. Everybody loves the seventh book, Time Regained. It's not really the end of the story, because this story has no real ending, but you see what the characters have become after WWI in this totally new world. That’s probably my favorite for the content, but the language has an incredible peak right at the beginning of the first volume, in the opening chapters about the childhood of the narrator—this little place where he lives, and the way he waits for his mother every night to come and say goodbye. That would be my favorite part for the poetry and the language, and because his French is incredible. He has this incredible style. You can try to imitate it, but you cannot do that for a 4,000-page book. Somehow it's so natural to him.

Every writer knows the old writing adage show, don't tell, and I feel like Proust is the exact opposite of that. He’s tell everything and see what comes out of it.

Oh, I totally agree. He has to discover for himself what he feels about certain things and certain characters by writing. He doesn't know at first which characters are going to be important. First it’s Swann, then he disappears for more than half of the work, and then it’s Swann’s daughter. Then there's Albertine and Charles, and then Charles disappears due to age and the narrator’s tiredness towards him. It’s really a whole world in the making.

On one hand Proust is an ultra-realist, but then at the same time, he's rather avant-garde in terms of the scale of his work.

Yes. In a way, I think he’s classical. His way of writing would not have been considered avant-garde at that time. But the scope of the project, it's really avant-garde in that regard. And socially speaking, the people he talks about are not who the avant-garde would focus on, all bourgeois and noble. But his vision of those people is very progressive, as is his relationship towards homosexuality. If we compare him to Joyce, as many people have, it's totally different. Joyce totally breaks the sentence; Proust doesn't do that. In some ways, he’s probably the most classical French since Montaigne.

What do you think other writers can learn from him?

What I've learned is how to think and develop characters over a long distance, even if I have never written something as long as In Search of Lost Time. You have to imagine your characters in the process of becoming something or someone else.

There are so many ways of reading Proust. One way is to read with the senses, and to see, for example, the text’s relation to music. Sound and music are very present in all the volumes in very different ways. Or you can notice what he does with taste or touch. All the senses are at work, and it's really interesting to see how masterfully he can turn it all into a novel.

These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.