you've got mail - saskia de coster & pauline delabroy-allard exchange letters (part one)
Unfortunately, it’s going to take a little longer before Belgian and foreign authors can get together at Passa Porta. In the meantime, we’ve invited several European writers to exchange letters.
Following Flemish author Peter Terrin's correspondence with his Swiss colleague Peter Stamm, and the letters written by the Belgian Hedwige Jeanmart and the Spaniard Javier Cercas, we asked Saskia De Coster who would be her preferred new penpal. She chose the French writer Pauline Delabroy-Allard, whose debut novel All About Sarah (Harvill Secker, 2020), the story of a destructive love affair between two women, she admired so much.
Here you can read Saskia's invitation letter and Pauline's first answer.
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Antwerp, 20 January 2021
The first thing some people do no matter where they enter is to look for the emergency exit. So as to know that they can escape. An earthquake, a deadly dull conversation, a sudden curfew: who knows what can sneak up on you.
I’m sorry, I’ve sneaked up on you. This is no way to start a letter, getting straight down to it like this, an unexpected letter, as if a passer-by in the street were to slap you in the face. A passer-by enters a house.
The door to my home opens and I briefly cut the scene out of this moment and glue it down here: my partner has just returned. Chuckling to herself, to my surprise. A friend of hers, from kindergarten, doesn’t have long to live, according to the doctors, and now my partner visits her faithfully every week. That may not be possible in a week’s time, the disease is unpredictable. Every time it feels less and less like a farewell, every time new stories emerge, stories from long ago.
They’ve just ‘committed another couple of murders’. When they were six years old, they secretly plucked and ate unripe apples in the school orchard. To punish them, Miss Amelie had said, ‘You murdered those apples!’ And today they spent all afternoon placing ladders against tree trunks and plucking apples and giggling. I get the impression that they always go further back into the wings of their childhood. It helps, en route like that to an unpredictable end.
So writes the Turkish writer Mehmet Murat Ildan. The easiest way out is the way in. Is that why we turn so often and so easily back to the past, because it’s safe, because the entrance is also the emergency exit in case of dire need, because it can calm and comfort us? This is something I often notice in literature, this turning back to history, that door to the completed story.
The difficult thing about the present is the lack of finality, we don’t know how it’s going to end. But perhaps that holds just as much for the past. The past too consists of a couple of main roads running across time, with a network of secret routes and signposts showing alternatives.
How do you let yourself be guided? I recently decided to follow the news less closely, to spend less time on the headlines. The news sometimes leaves me short of breath and too often looking for the emergency exit. In your marvelous novel All About Sarah you have one very clear focus, you follow one path to the extreme. The love story is set in an almost timeless environment. Were those deliberate choices, the focus and the timelessness?
Time flies. My son has turned on the tap and is sitting in the bath. He is pretending that one of his knees is Sardinia, the other Antwerp. Both will vanish under water, he explains, but Antwerp will be first. He pushes his knee under water. ‘I want to go back to Sardinia’, he says. We were there last summer, when the word ‘bubble’ had nothing to do with a virus. My six-year-old son explains to me how simple time travel can be, ‘if we gather all our thoughts and return to the summer we spent in Sardinia, and if we stay there and don’t know that we are in fact in the present.’
I believe more and more that the present needs that, a kind of underground tunnel that can carry us elsewhere, and that only art can do that. Otherwise time is locked up in the cage of the here and now, like a monkey that will die of deprivation because it’s not in its natural habitat.
Is this overly dramatic? Is this a way in for a conversation, or am I a passer-by slapping you in the face? I hope with all my heart that’s not the case. I would be honoured to be able to keep corresponding with you.
Kind regards,
Saskia
Translated from the Dutch by Patrick Lennon
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Paris, 10th February 2021
Snowed under!
It’s snowing here, which is a rare enough occurrence to be worth mentioning. We woke up this morning and my otherwise grown-up ten-year-old daughter, having opened the curtains, ran around our apartment shouting: it’s all white, it’s all white!
All white – she wasn’t wrong. From our third floor apartment, the road looked like a blank page and I realised that a general silence had descended upon the whole city. I immediately thought of you, of your tunnel story which called to mind a song I love by Arcade Fire: Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).
The lyrics evoke the idea of a tunnel which has been dug out under the snow (fittingly) by two children, a boy and a girl, who want to escape the monotonous melancholy of their neighbourhood which is buried under snow. They fantasise about living in this tunnel forever and thereby staying children for the rest of their lives. I’ve never suffered from Peter Pan syndrome and have always preferred to look forward rather than backward, but I think I understand the idea of wanting to freeze the present moment forever.
I put this into practice every day by keeping (alongside a diary in which I’ve manically recorded the most minute details of my daily life for the last 15 years) a photographic diary which allows me to keep, to archive, to put into physical boxes the positive and negative experiences that punctuate my life. I take a lot of photos alongside my writing practice. I also make the occasional “small film” – the name I give to my unpretentious short films. Images are very important to me.
A photographer once asked me to imitate one of the three wise monkeys – you know, the iconic image in which each monkey is hiding a different part of their faces with their hands. He asked to cover either my eyes, my mouth or my ears for him – and his question went even further. He asked me to choose which I’d deprive myself of: hearing, speaking or sight. What a difficult question! How would you answer this? Sight and images are incredibly important to me but the idea of spending the rest of my life without being able to hear or listen… impossible! I think I ended up choosing speech. A whole life without speaking; a monastic existence. Why not?
Though I sometimes feel as though this is precisely what’s happening to us now when I go out in the streets, get onto a bus or go into shops and see us all in masks.
I see this both with my shrinking parents and my growing daughter. In this permanent global commotion, in this auditory fog which we’ve been wading through for almost a year, in this strange life without plans or goals, all we can do is make do.
In fact, there is a goal and it’s the precise goal I had in mind when I wrote All About Sarah. That of a journey towards the extreme – you were right – towards death, whether that be symbolic or literal. And writing about death, in its finite nature, is no small matter.
I remember my whole body trembling as I wrote certain passages. You were right to ask me whether I wanted the story to be atemporal. That’s what I’d hoped for, yes, although now I realise that the story was completely of its time! The two lovers in my book have a blast meeting up in cafes and at exhibitions, shows and concerts. These are all things we’ve been deprived of for a whole year now… I’d never have believed it possible! It almost gives my book the flavour of “life as we once knew it”!
What about you? Are you able to create at the moment, in this simultaneously frozen and chaotic time? I’m very happy about this exchange. Like the two children in the song, I can picture us digging a tunnel under the snow and the pandemic where our words, sensations and truths can come together.
I look forward to hearing from you soon, I hope.
Pauline
Translated from the French by Daniella Shreir
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