Windows on the World

by Matteo Pericoli

  ALSO BY MATTEO PERICOLI

  LONDON UNFURLED

  LONDON FOR CHILDREN

  THE CITY OUT MY WINDOW

  MANHATTAN UNFURLED

  MANHATTAN WITHIN

  WORLD UNFURLED

  SEE THE CITY

  THE TRUE STORY OF STELLINA

  TOMMASO AND THE MISSING LINE

  PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

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  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Matteo Pericoli

  Preface copyright © 2014 by Lorin Stein

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The selections with texts by the following writers appeared in The New York Times: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alaa Al Aswany, Rana Dasgupta, Marina Endicott, Nuruddin Farah, Richard Flanagan, Nadine Gordimer, Daniel Kehlmann, Maria Kodama, Elmore Leonard, Andrea Levy, Ryu Murakami, and Orhan Pamuk.

  The selections with texts by the following writers appeared in The Paris Review: Nastya Denisova, Lidija Dimkovska, Francisco Goldman, Sheila Heti, Andrea Hirata, Etgar Keret, Harris Khalique, Emma Larkin, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Andri Snær Magnason, Mike McCormack, G. Mend-Ooyo, Tim Parks, Tatiana Salem Levy, Taiye Selasi, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Lysley Tenorio, Binyavanga Wainaina, Rebecca Walker, Xi Chuan, and Alejandro Zambra.

  Front and back endpaper maps by Matteo Pericoli

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Windows on the world : fifty writers, fifty views / Matteo Pericoli ; preface by Lorin Stein.

  pages cm

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-61711-3

  1. Windows—Literary collections. 2. Authorship. 3. Windows in literature. 4. Authors—Biography.

  I. Pericoli, Matteo, 1968–

  PN6071.W56W56 2014

  808.88'7—dc23 2014032946

  Version_1

  FOR NADIA

  PREFACE

  LORIN STEIN

  Can you picture John Kennedy Toole, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces? I can’t. Say his name and I see his hero, Ignatius Reilly. How about Willa Cather? What comes to mind isn’t a person at all—it’s raindrops in New Mexico “exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air.” What did Barbara Pym look like, or Rex Stout, or Boris Pasternak, or the other writers whose paperbacks filled our parents’ bedside tables? In most cases we have no idea, because until recently, the author photo was relatively rare. You could sell a million copies and still, to those million readers, you’d be a name without a face.

  Things are different now. Nearly every first novel comes with a glamour shot, not to mention a publicity campaign on Facebook. The very tweeters have their selfies. We still talk about a writer’s “vision,” but in practice we have turned the lens around, and turned the seer into something seen.

  Matteo Pericoli’s drawings recall us, in the homeliest, most literal way, to the writer’s true business, and the reader’s. Each window represents a point of view and a point of origin. Here’s what the writer sees when he or she looks up from the computer; here’s the native landscape of the writing. If you want an image that will link the creation to its source, Pericoli suggests, this is the image you should reach for. Not the face, but the vision—or as close as we can come. To look out another person’s window, from his or her workspace, may tell us nothing about the work, and yet the space—in its particularity, its foreignness, its intimacy—is an irresistible metaphor for the creative mind; the view, a metaphor for the eye.

  It is crucial that these window views should be rendered in pen and ink, in lines, rather than in photographs (even though Pericoli works from snapshots, dozens per window). In his own writing and teaching, Pericoli likes to stress the kinship between draftsman and writer, starting with the importance of the line. His own line is descriptive, meticulous, suspenseful—one slip of the pen and hours of labor could be lost, or else the “mistake” becomes part of the drawing. Labor, it seems to me, is one of Pericoli’s hidden subjects. That is part of the meaning of the hundreds of leaves on a tree, or the windows of a high-rise: They record the work it took to see them, and this work stands as a sort of visual correlative, or illustration, of the work his writers do.

  Of course, most writers tune out the view from day to day. In the words of Etgar Keret, “When I write, what I see around me is the landscape of my story. I only get to enjoy the real one when I’m done.” I think Pericoli has drawn the views of writers at least partly because they are seers as opposed to lookers—because they blind themselves to their surroundings as a matter of practice. The drawings are addressed, first of all, to them, and their written responses are no small part of the pleasure this book has to offer. Each of these drawings seems to contain a set of instructions: If you were to look out this window—if you really looked—here is how you might begin to put the mess in order. Yet the order Pericoli assigns is warm and forgiving. His omniscience has a human cast. His clapboards wobble in their outlines. He takes obvious delight in the curves of a garden chair, or a jar left out in the rain, or laundry flapping on a clothesline. He prefers messy back lots to what he calls (somewhat disdainfully) “photogenic views.” He knows that we are attached to the very sight we overlook, whether it’s tract housing in Galway or a government building in Ulaanbaatar. These are the everyday things we see, as it were blindly, because they are part of us.

  Some of the writers in these pages are household names. Many you will never have heard of, and a few live in places you might have trouble finding on a map. That, it seems to me, is part of the idea behind this book. Here are streets and alleys you won’t recognize that someone else calls home and takes for granted; look long enough and they will make your own surroundings more interesting to you. In Pericoli’s sympathetic—you might say writerly—acts of attention, the exotic becomes familiar, and the familiar is made visible again.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Matteo Pericoli

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE by Lorin Stein

  WINDOWS ON THE WORLD by Matteo Pericoli

  ORHAN PAMUK and Istanbul, Turkey

  ETGAR KERET and Tel Aviv, Israel

  JOUMANA HADDAD and Jounieh, Lebanon

  ALAA AL ASWANY and Cairo, Egypt

  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE and Lagos, Nigeria

  ROTIMI BABATUNDE and Ibadan, Nigeria

  BINYAVANGA WAINAINA and Nairobi, Kenya

  NURUDDIN FARAH and Mogadishu, Somalia

  LAURI KUBUITSILE and Mahalapye, Botswana

  NADINE GORDIMER and Johannesburg, South Africa

  LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA and Skopje, Macedonia

  LULJETA LLESHANAKU and Kruja, Albania

  TAIYE SELASI and Rome, Italy

  TIM PARKS and Milan, Italy

  DANIEL KEHLMANN and Berlin, Germany

  CHRISTINE ANGOT and Paris, France

  JON McGREGOR and Nottingham, Unit
ed Kingdom

  ANDREA LEVY and London, United Kingdom

  MIKE McCORMACK and Galway, Ireland

  LEILA ABOULELA and Aberdeen, United Kingdom

  ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON and Reykjavik, Iceland

  KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD and Glemmingebro, Sweden

  NASTYA DENISOVA and St. Petersburg, Russia

  G. MEND-OOYO and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

  HARRIS KHALIQUE and Islamabad, Pakistan

  RANA DASGUPTA and New Delhi, India

  XI CHUAN and Beijing, China

  EMMA LARKIN and Bangkok, Thailand

  RYU MURAKAMI and Tokyo, Japan

  ANDREA HIRATA and Jakarta, Indonesia

  RICHARD FLANAGAN and Bruny Island, Australia

  CERIDWEN DOVEY and Sydney, Australia

  REBECCA WALKER and Maui, Hawaii, United States of America

  MARINA ENDICOTT and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

  SHEILA HETI and Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  ELMORE LEONARD and Bloomfield Village, Michigan, United States of America

  GERALDINE BROOKS and West Tisbury, Massachusetts, United States of America

  BARRY YOURGRAU and Queens, New York, United States of America

  TEJU COLE and Brooklyn, New York, United States of America

  LYSLEY TENORIO and New York City, New York, United States of America

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN and Wilmington, North Carolina, United States of America

  EDWIDGE DANTICAT and Miami, Florida, United States of America

  T. C. BOYLE and Montecito, California, United States of America

  MICHELLE HUNEVEN and Altadena, California, United States of America

  FRANCISCO GOLDMAN and Mexico City, Mexico

  RODRIGO REY ROSA and Guatemala City, Guatemala

  ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA and Santiago, Chile

  TATIANA SALEM LEVY and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  DANIEL GALERA and Porto Alegre, Brazil

  MARIA KODAMA and Buenos Aires, Argentina

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

  MATTEO PERICOLI

  It has been ten years since the day I paused in front of my Upper West Side window and noticed something. And felt something: an urge to take the view with me. I had looked out that window for seven years, day after day, taking in that particular arrangement of buildings, and now my wife and I were about to move out of our one-bedroom apartment. Without my knowing it, that view had become my most familiar image of the city. It had become mine. And I would never see it again.

  It is hard to pay close attention to those things that are part of our daily routines. “They will still be there tomorrow.” It is often when we are about to lose them or have just lost them that we realize their importance. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t paid more attention to my view. That oversight made me wonder how we live and perceive what is outside our windows. About how we live and perceive, period.

  For me, a window and its view represent a “reset button” of sorts. An instant, like the blinking of an eye, when I allow my brain and my thoughts to pause by wordlessly wandering outdoors, through the glass, with no obligation to analyze and, so to speak, to report back to my conscious self. My eyes simply gaze, without seeing, at a landscape whose subconscious familiarity allows for distraction: the usual rooftops, the well-known moldings, the nearby courtyard, a distant hill. I look passively through the sheet of glass, which is a point both of contact and of separation between me and the world.

  So, on that day in 2004, I finally paid attention to my window view. I tried photographing it but soon realized that the photos didn’t work. They were not able to convey my view, but simply what was outside the window. And so I drew it, frame and all, on a large sheet of brown wrapping paper using pencils and oil pastels, and noticed for the first time the quantity of things I didn’t know that I had been looking at for so long. Where had they been hiding in my brain?

  Since then, I’ve spent years drawing window views. Between 2004 and 2008, while I was doing research for a book on New York City, I came to realize that writers often find themselves in a similar position to mine: Stuck at a desk for hours on end, they either position themselves near a window in order to take in as much as possible, or they consciously choose to protect themselves from it. And when I would ask writers to describe their views, something extraordinary happened: All the elements that I had been able to capture in my drawings were complemented (or, perhaps, even augmented) by their words.

  This was the simple premise of the “Windows on the World” series, which started in 2010 in the New York Times and continued in the Paris Review Daily: drawings of writers’ window views from around the world accompanied by their texts—lines and words united by a physical point of view. The fifty drawings in this book (some never published before) offer an observational platform, an “opening,” you could say, a place to rest and meditate during a fifty-leg journey around the world.

  After all these years, I have finally learned to pause for longer periods of time in front of windows and often wonder what it would feel like to have those views as mine. How would they affect me? Would I be the same if I were to look at these buildings or trees or boats passing by every day? I have come to feel that a window is, ultimately, more than a point of contact or separation with the outside world. It is also a sort of mirror, reflecting our glances inward, back onto our own lives.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Most of my writing time is spent forming the next sentence in my imagination. When my mind is busy with words, all by itself my eye moves away from the page and the tip of the fountain pen. This is the landscape I have gazed upon through my Istanbul window for the last fifteen years. On the left side is Asia and in the middle the Bosphorus and its opening to the Sea of Marmara, as well as the islands I have been going to each summer for fifty-eight years. To the right is the entrance to the Golden Horn and the part of the city that Istanbul residents refer to as the Old Town, home of the Ottoman dynasty for four centuries, including Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sophia, and the Blue Mosque.

  I sometimes proudly declare I am a writer who wrote a historical novel, My Name Is Red, set in a location constantly before my eyes. To the popular question inquisitive guests and visiting journalists ask—“Doesn’t this wonderful view distract you?”—my answer is no. But I know some part of me is always busy with some part of the landscape, following the movements of the seagulls, trees, and shadows, spotting boats and checking to see that the world is always there, always interesting, and always a challenge to write about: an assurance that a writer needs to continue to write and a reader needs to continue to read.

  ISTANBUL, TURKEY

  2010

  Etgar Keret

  The nicest place I ever got to write in was in MacDowell. My studio there was surrounded by a beautiful snowy forest, and looking out of the windows I could often see deer. During my residency there a friend came to visit. After having a beer together he said, “There is so much beauty around you, yet I can see from the angle at which your computer is placed that when you write all you can see is the toilet. Why is that?”

  The answer was simple. When I write, what I see around me is the landscape of my story. I only get to enjoy the real one when I’m done. In the Keret family tradition my writing space is always one of the least desirable spots in our apartment, a place which only a person who is busy writing can bear. Currently it is a small metal table placed between the living room and the kitchen. The moment I stop writing I can notice on the other side of the road a beautiful grand tree allegedly planted sixty years ago by one of Israel’s finest children’s poets, as well as the happy mess my son and I left on the balcony the day before, but this is just for a moment; most of the time I just see my stories, which are usually much messier than the balcony floor.

  TEL AVIV, ISRAE
L

  2012

  2014

  Joumana Haddad

  At the beginning there was a sea; a sea that saved a little girl from drowning; a sea that saved her altogether and represented to her the meaning of the word “freedom”; the same word that she was deprived of while growing up, and that she learned to snatch again and again with her fingernails all along her life; the same word that taught her to dream and to scream, in her head and on paper; the same word that is now tattooed in Arabic on the right arm of the woman she became; the same word that helps her stand up, every time she stumbles and falls to her knees; the same word that will be waiting for her, right there at the end of the journey, gleaming like a never-ending discovery.

  Yes, at the beginning there was a sea. And the little girl, who was born and raised in a modest family that could barely afford to give her a good education, could only catch a glimpse of it from the balcony of their small apartment in one of the ghettos of war-torn Beirut. She had to climb on a plastic chair to actually be able to see it, but that’s exactly what she used to do, obstinate, fearless, and most of all THIRSTY. To her it was a window on a better future, and she would promise herself, looking at it, that one day her life, and that of her parents, would be different; that one day she would wake up, open her bedroom curtains, and have the whole sea in front of her, with arms wide open to receive her loving gaze. A promise that she did, and still does, her best to keep, for the sake of that helpless, trapped little Joumana who used to fly away over the Mediterranean in her thoughts. “Sea, one day I will own you,” she chanted in her head between the blasts of the militias’ fights outside, and the frustrations of her personal fights inside . . .

  Now, some thirty years later, as she sits by the window of the house of her dreams—a house that she fought long and hard to build—and as the blue coast of Jounieh is entirely displayed in front of her, she finally understood the lesson: The sea, just like the freedom she has been yearning for, can never be owned.