The Great Salt Lake Book Festival, held last week at Westminster College, was a huge success. The keynote speaker, professor/novelist/poet/essayist Andrei Codrescu, was a dynamic presence.
Best-known to the local audience as a regular commentator on National Public Radio, his approach is deadpan, punctuated with humorous asides.
In person, Codrescu was grayer than his pictures. He was also sans mustache and sported stylish, tiny gold-rimmed glasses and a goatee.
A Romanian immigrant at the age of 20, Codrescu retains his accent, which adds to his sense of style. He came to America in the mid-'60s with a high school education, then developed, without a college degree, into a true renaissance man. Codrescu demonstrates the advantage of having lived in more than one country.
He has written approximately 30 books (most in English), including novels and poetry, and he holds a distinguished chair at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. And you need only listen to him briefly to know that he deserves it.
Codrescu asked more questions than he answered, but he asserted that all writers are storytellers — of diverse stories. "So whose story is it, anyway?" he asked.
Growing up in a socialist state, Codrescu was constrained to write nothing subversive. Novelists were expected to write an optimistic message — "that communism would prevail in the end, that workers would eventually create a paradise where they didn't have to work. The commie paradise resembled Wal-Mart — every time I go to Wal-Mart, I think I'm in the world that Karl Marx and Lenin promised me."
Codrescu said censorship was more complicated for poets who could "sneak a subversive idea into a poem via a metaphor."
When Codrescu left Romania in the mid-'60s, "the dam had broken, and the Rolling Stones occupied the red block from within." The Cold War had been won by popular American culture. Codrescu knew that what he wrote would be controversial, and he had "a great hunger for forbidden literature."
When he got to America, he was surprised that there was no "sacred script" to follow. It was just important for writers to produce something new. The question, "Whose story is it, anyway?" acquired genuine importance, because there are so many different stories in America; one master narrative would not do.
Codrescu tried to tell his own story when he was 23. About himself at age 4, he wrote, "He spent most of the day in the marketplace, snuggled between tied-up chickens hanging upside down from long bamboo poles. This is why his first sounds were not human. They were in chickenese, chicken language."
When he asked his mother about his grandmother's chickens, she said, "What chickens? Your grandmother had two little pigs. No chickens." He didn't trust her memory, so he left the chickens in it. Afterward. when his mother read the book, she started recalling chickens, too. "At first it was mine, whether remembered or imagined; then it was my mother's. Then our two completely different stories became one."
In 1989, Codrescu returned to Romania with an NPR crew to cover the collapse of the Ceausescu dictatorship. According to news reports, 150,000 people died. No one disputed the claim, but when Codrescu arrived in Bucharest on Dec. 28, he found it "quiet, with sporadic gunfire." In the end, the official figure was just over 1,000.
"The real story," said Codrescu, "was much more complex, more ambiguous and more sordid."
Now apply this insight to 9/11: "When terrorists attacked America," Codrescu said, "they had no idea who Americans were," except that we had "multifarious, contradictory and evolving stories. Our attackers were people schooled in the primacy of a single story, that of the Koran, and our very existence was a mortal threat to their belief in a single story and a single author."
Codrescu's conclusion? That "right now, it is important . . . to tell our stories — to look at who we are and where we belong."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com