"People who read my book think they know me..."
Interview with Thomas Glavinic
By Clara Huber
Two Austrians made the German Book Prize shortlist, and speaking of a number of promising new publications the Neue Zürcher Zeitung referred to a "once-in-a-century season in Austrian literature." What is the secret behind the success of Kehlmann, Glavinic, Köhlmaier, and co?
Needless to say, literature knows no citizenship. Several Austrian writers have been enjoying success for years, and it undoubtedly has to do with the fact that even though their writings are formally sophisticated, they are also marked by good storytelling and readability. For a long time, in Austria the discussion of so-called avant-garde literature dominated. This may well have provided fodder for literary scholars, but not too many people actually liked to read the stuff. Because what is being written today is both polished in style and highly readable, it is finding an audience, just as it would in any other country. For a long time, a number of people in Austria - and probably in Germany as well - felt that whatever finds an audience can't have any real value. In the USA, the position has always been the opposite, as it has been around the world. Thankfully, this kind of provincial nonsense is no longer given much credence in Austria.
If literature knows no citizenship, how can we even speak of Austrian literature?
I think Austrian literature may well be more playful than, say, what is coming out of Germany. But I don't consider it necessary to go out of the way to look for differences. I'm not denying that every national literature has its idiosyncrasies. What's important, though, is that we speak of narrative literature that can be read all over the world. I want my stories to work anywhere in the world.
You write novels, but you also write newspaper columns. Which do you consider more fun?
You can't compare the two. Actually, I never wanted to write columns, but a couple of weeks ago the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contacted me and then I got ambitious again. It's a challenge for me, because it's a different audience and a different paper. So I accepted.
In your latest novel, Das bin doch ich (That's me), a number of the protagonists are known people from public life. Doesn't that mislead readers to believe the story actually happened?
Das bin doch ich is about a game with the border between reality and fiction. I'm not a literary character. One problem I've been encountering a lot lately is that people who read the book think they know me really well now. I think they're wrong.
It says right on the cover that it's a novel and not an autobiography, so the text is clearly identified as fictional. It's harder for Viennese critics to accept the book as a novel than most of the Germans, where the reception is more or less what I was hoping for. It's totally irrelevant who the real people behind the novel characters are. I didn't want to write a roman a clef, and I didn't want to write a book about the literary business. It's really about fear and vulnerability. I wanted to tell a story that's both existential and witty.
Das bin doch ich is a novel about a writer, but we hardly ever experience him writing. Would that have been too intimate for you to write about writing, or more precisely to write about your writing?
I wasn't interested in conveying the experience of writing. I wanted to write about fears, vulnerabilities, about absurdity and the insanity of everyday life. At the same time, I wanted to play a game with fiction and reality and treat one of the topics that's closest to my heart, which is time. The literary business itself doesn't play a big role in the book. Of course the central character is a writer, but for what I wanted to express he could have had a different profession. For example, how do you deal with your best friend's success?
Even though you don't reveal anything about it in your latest novel, could you describe what the process of writing is like for you?
I write two pages on a manual typewriter every day. The next day, I take those two pages and rework them and write two new pages that I go over the day after that. This is how I arrive at the first and second draft of a book. The third is later entered into the computer. I work on the hard copy by hand. This version is input in the computer again, and this results in multiple versions in the course of several months - eight, nine, ten versions, sometimes more. Finally, the text goes to outsiders for the first time, my personal editors. They share their opinion with me. I think ultimately there are fifteen to twenty revisions.
I need those steps. For a text to sit right, it has to be polished again and again.
Your novels are teeming with ingenious ideas. How do you come up with them?
I don't know about ingenious. Let's just talk about ideas. Where do they come from? No idea. Peter Handke formulated it really nicely. He said ideas just drift up to him.
The best thing is probably to seek out relaxed situations. I'm most relaxed when I'm sitting somewhere just staring in front of me. Driving a car can be extremely fruitful - just driving straight ahead at a comfortably high speed, listening to music, not thinking about anything.
Elfriede Jelinek once said that she considers her works untranslatable or that an Austrian has to be involved in the translation process. Do you consider your literature translatable?
I think most successful novels lend themselves very readily to translation. Of course there's a better chance at a good translation if the translator also has a talent for literary writing and discusses the novel with the author. I hope my novels are fairly easy to translate well.
Which of your novels have been translated so far?
Carl Haffners Liebe zum Unentschieden was translated four or five times as far as I know. The English title is Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw. Der Kameramörder was already published in France, and as far as I know it will be coming out in Turkey soon. Wie man leben soll is available in Hungarian and Dutch and will now be printed in Croatian too. And of course Die Arbeit der Nacht has been translated into more languages than any of my other books. We're just working on the English version. I have a strong feeling that it will be a really good translation. If everything goes well the book will appear in 2008.
Would you be willing to tell us what you're working on right now?
No! A story only belongs to you for as long as you don't talk about it. I can only develop it and bring it to a point where it works for everyone if I keep it to myself for as long as possible.
