2006 Edinburgh International Book Festival

The town mouse and the country mouse

James Smith discovers that although Edgardo Cozarinsky and Per Petterson may never be able to live together, they share common ground when it comes to writing.

An inspired piece of programming at the Edinburgh Festival brought together two fine authors for whom place exerts a strong hold over both their writing and their lives.

Petterson's wonderful novel Out Stealing Horses won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Award, a huge surprise for its author (and, presumably, its translator Anne Born). The book was praised by Boyd Tonkin, one of the judges, as 'a novel of consistent beauty, subtlety and wisdom, but one that creeps up on the reader and gets unforgettably under your skin rather than announcing its virtues and its visions with a loud fanfare.'

All of which is true, but for Petterson it was the challenge of writing a novel in which landscape plays an integral and inescapable part that inspired him: 'I wanted to give the characters to the landscape.' He may regret having once said 'I hate plots', but it nevertheless holds true for the character- and landscape-driven Out Stealing Horses.

In the book, Trond, a middle-aged man living alone in the Norwegian forest, looks back to a significant summer spent with his father in the forest away from their home in Oslo. If you are setting your book in Norway, 'it is difficult not to have a forest in your book', Petterson said, adding, 'when you’re dead, it’s still there'. What he manages to do with understated skill is weave a cocoon of spruce, pine, birch, pasture and rivers in which his story is played out.

By contrast, the rural existence is anathema to Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinian writer who now lives in Paris. In fact, the countryside makes him nervous, especially at night (for Petterson, conversely, 'darkness can be a friend'). The Moldavian Pimp, his compact new novel (or series of linked short stories depending upon your point of view) conjures up the urban thrum of sprawling Buenos Aires. Cozarinsky loves the culture of late-night coffee shops and chatter, the eternal on-ness of the city. He lived in Paris from 1974 to 1986, but upon his return to Buenos Aires immediately felt at home, even chastising his taxi driver for taking him the long way round to his mother's home. He was surprised by how much he remembered.

Cozarinsky shares Petterson's dislike of plot-driven writing; characters, situations and landscapes interest him more. Both authors also share an interest in the way history bleeds into the present. The Moldavian Pimp is about young Jewish girls from Ukraine recruited by Jewish pimps in the 1920s to go to Argentina on the promise of a new life,  only to find themselves sold into prostitution, but for Cozarinsky the historical references in his book are intended to resonate in the present with the current influx of central European girls forced into the sex trade in countries such as France and Britain.

Petterson also sees the past in terms of how it affects the present. Trond’s fateful boyhood summer with his father has consequences that have led him to live a solitary life in the forest, but he is aware that he could have either been a victim or chosen to take his life in his hands. As Trond’s father tells him, 'You decide for yourself when something is going to hurt'.

Both Out Stealing Horses and The Moldavian Pimp are short works (Cozarinsky bores himself if he writes more than a hundred or so pages), but their power is all the greater for their brevity. Cozarinsky wants his books to be icebergs for his readers, in which nine tenths of the story is hidden.

Both authors are delighted that their books have been published in English; Petterson admires the rhythm of Anne Born’s translation, Cozarinsky wants to communicate with as many people as he can and sees an English translation as an obvious way of doing this. What is certain is that English readers have benefited enormously from Harvill’s decision to publish these books in the UK.

It is still pitiful that only 3% of books published in this country are translated from other languages, but maybe, just maybe, the brilliance of Cozarinsky and Petterson will encourage British publishers to seek out more writing from abroad.

18 August 2006