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 Pulitzer finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin (This Is Where the Serpent Lives; In Other Rooms, Other Wonders) about the big-hearted sketches of Ivan Turgenev, and Booker nominee Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History; The Emperor’s Children) about the universality of Albert Camus.
Daniyal Mueenuddin on Ivan Turgenev
Where would you recommend a first-time reader start with Turgenev?
His masterpiece is Sportsman’s Sketches. Before it, he wasn’t really a writer. He was fumbling around, and then he wrote these stories, and suddenly he became the most well-known writer in Russia. Part of it was that nobody had written about Russia in the way that he did, so it was surprising and overwhelming to the people who read it. It hadn't occurred to anybody to write about the peasants and the serfs like that—he humanized them. In that first book, I think he's most himself, before people started telling him he was a writer.
He lived through tremendous personal and societal tumult and transformation. What do you see of that in his work?
An argument can be made that he was instrumental in the emancipation of the serfs, because almost no one right up to the Tsar who signed the emancipation decree had thought about the serfs as humans. And Turgenev was the person who, for many of his readers, first humanized them. I don't think he thought of himself as a political person, but he played this very important political role at the time.
Do you think he set out to be a social writer?
No, I don't think he was a social writer in the sense that he was trying to fix social problems. I do think he was very humane, though, in that the center of his work was based in his appreciation of the people he was describing. There’s a tenderness in his work, which is part of what draws me to it. There's a softness about it. He really cares about these people, about whom nobody else of his class cares.
What do you think of his work on a craft level?
He’s somebody who's just intuitively very good at telling stories. There are all sorts of brilliant innovations in his stories that I don't think he thought about very deeply. I can just imagine he loved to sit down over a fire with a glass of beer or whatever and tell a story, and especially with Sportsman’s Sketches, you really feel that. You feel like you might have sat down next to him, and he just sort of pulled up in front of a fire and started talking.
His endings—which I've studied, and which are wonderful— almost seem to just trail away. The story happens, and then it naturally stops happening. And endings are so, so hard. They're the hardest part of anything.
What do you think other writers can learn from him?
Certainly, they should look at both his beginnings and his endings. I think they're worth studying over and over. And there's something about the particular quality of his empathy—there's a generosity to him, I think, that we all could learn from. He really allows each of his characters to have their own little place, or big place, and that's really hard to do. Even the least character is fully alive. I think that to be big-hearted to the extent you can be in your work is a worthy lesson.
Claire Messud on Albert Camus
What makes Camus so important to you?
There are so many threads that make him important to me. One is that, as an artist of ideas, he had this project of tackling philosophical themes in three genres: the essay, the novel, and the theater. I can't say I'm so familiar with his plays, but the fact that the novel was one way for him to work out his ideas is very meaningful to me, because, as a novelist myself, I'm interested in what it's like for humans to be alive on the planet. That's the central interest for me.
For him, it wasn’t about fiction as entertainment. but it also wasn’t about fiction as ideology, because ideology is not about the actual human experiences of being alive. And I feel that, as a philosopher and as an artist, Camus brilliantly navigates that strait between human experience and the ideas that we might have about human experience.
His thinking, which was very concerned with justice, was also self-knowing about the limitations of his heart. There's that famous thing where he said of the Nobel Prize, “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” And that is controversial, but it's also humanly true. I feel like if it came down to it, for many of us, between justice and our mother, we'll choose our mother. As an artist, that surely is the place you have to start—not with the fantasy of what you wish people were like, but with your sense of people as they actually are.
What do you think of his work on a page or line level?
Stylistically, he's a very lucid writer. I remember, years ago, telling a French editor, “Oh, I hope it's not difficult to translate my novel, my sentences are very long,” and he said, “Long sentences in French, that's no problem. Hemingway is what's hard to translate into French.” But Camus, actually, is not a long-sentence writer. He's not Proust. He's very clear, which is why L’Étranger is readable by students learning French.
I love the directness of his prose. I've discovered over many years that it's amazing to have great ideas, but if you write them in a language where almost nobody can understand them, that's either a failing or a very particular choice. But to be able to think profoundly and express lucidly is really wonderful. There are certain thinkers of whom that's true, and then there are a lot of amazing thinkers where it's like chopping at a glacier.
Camus grappled with the great issues of his time, working as an editor for the French Resistance and so on. What do you think his example suggests about the value of a literary life in a time of strife and turmoil?
His Algerian essays, which were not translated for so long—they only came out 12 years ago—show that he was very politically engaged in his youth as well, writing pieces for the Algerian press before the Algerian War about famine and poverty in the villages. He was writing about things that actually got the newspaper he wrote for into trouble.
What I feel is germane is the question of whether art is irrelevant in times of strife. And I think the answer is no. Art is only more relevant. And it's not the same as polemic. It is a different way of approaching the political, with more entry points and less absolute certainty. His work has endured for a reason. There are contemporaries of his who were writing stuff that was very timely and important, but it doesn't speak across time in quite the same way.
What do you think that writers today can learn from him?
There are so many answers to that question. One would be almost extra-art, outside art: that question of thinking about how you live, and what our choices as individuals in our everyday lives will mean. Whether or not we want to call Camus an existentialist, he was looking at what happens if you act without thinking, what it means to think before you act, what the limitations of thought and action are, and so on. And maybe the thing I would stress is that he was raising questions rather than insisting on answers.
