Hay Festival Dhaka
A Profile – What Makes the Writer?
Aamer Hussein, Florence Noiville and Peter Pannke at the Hay Festival panel ‘Fiction, World's Apart’.
French writer Florence Noiville seeks to bring neurobiological knowledge into literature.
“The starting point is always a question,” says Florence Noiville, French author, journalist and foreign literary editor for Le Monde newspaper. We meet in the garden of the Bangla Academy at the Dhaka Hay Festival 2013 for an interview.
But she is not explaining how the interview should begin. She is discussing her novels, The Gift, published by Northwest University Press in 2012, The Attachment, due to be published in English next year by Seagull Publishing, and the third novel she is currently working on. Hers is a creativity of questions.
How do we make decisions? Why do emotions often guide us to the exclusion of unhindered free will? How are ways-of-being transmitted from one generation to the next and how can that repetition, that cycle, when negative, be broken?
For Noiville, the novel is an exploration of human complexity that comes from within. The Gift considers the impact of a bourgeoisie mother's unspoken about bipolar disorder on her daughter, who, while not mentally ill herself, is made prisoner of her mother's brain and forced to ride an emotional rollercoaster.
The Attachment is about a relationship between a woman and a much older man. It examines society's moralistic reprobation of such relationships. The novel she is currently working on is meanwhile concerned with erotomania – a delusional illness whereby a person becomes convinced that another person, usually a celebrity, is in love with them.
Why are we attracted to such unlikely targets?
“I write about the personal,” she says, “what is private, secret or lost. I enjoy trying to find the right words to exactly describe a relationship or feeling. If you write as sincerely and deeply as you can, without thinking too much, then perhaps, with luck, the story might appeal to others.”
When readers who have faced similar situations in life say “That is exactly how I felt” or “How did you tell my story?” she regards it as success.
Another surprise for Noiville was that her writings – translated into fourteen languages – found a wider readership, given the particularity of their setting. The Gift takes place in a French village in the Loire Valley. “How will they understand this little French village?” she wondered.
To explain, she recalls the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish born Jewish American winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, about whom Noiville published a biography: “There is a very strange thing in life – the more a character is unique the more it becomes universal.” It's a truth of relevance to Bangladeshi writings and story-tellers.
What is it, at the core, what is the essence of the human?
Noiville's choice of psychological themes is not accidental. “Science is a very enjoyable playground,” she says, “offering different images and metaphors that have freshness for a novelist.”
She does extensive neurobiological research in preparation – in the hope her works can act as a bridge between science and literature – this is true even of a love story like The Attachment.
“We know many new things about falling in and out of love,” she says, “When the experts explain the science of it, it is fascinating. People say it is not romantic but I think it is! Times have changed, knowledge has changed and even in a love story it is possible to bring our new scientific knowledge into literature. Otherwise a love story risks being at best, another Austen.”
In story-telling Noiville also draws from life experience. Like Noiville for example, the main character in The Attachment is myopic; and at one stage the character decides not to wear her glasses because without them the harsh angles in what she perceives are blurred – her way of trying to make life's reality softer and easier to cope with.
As a journalist meanwhile, Noiville was sent to Buenos Aires to interview María Kodama Schweitzer, the widow of renowned Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Theirs was a relationship of some controversy due to age difference and because the marriage occurred shortly before Borges died. At the end of the interview, Noiville recounts, “I found the courage to ask about how she faced a hostile society.”
Kodama took a moment before replying, “You know, I am very short-sighted.”
Yet Noiville's achievements as a writer might be underestimated if defined as bringing science into literature. Is it not possible she is also working towards something greater and still more useful: infusing literature into science?
Noiville herself is psychologically interesting – or rather, inspiring. As a result of societal expectations and doing well at school she studied business law and politics. She was too shy to admit she wanted to write.
Post-graduation she pursued a career as a financial analyst with an international heavyweight. “We used to give monthly presentations at headquarters,” she recalls, “and the response was always, 'Good Florence, your department is profitable, but how can we make more money?'”
“They were so happy if you fired someone,” she says.
“Then I woke up,” she explains of her decision to pursue literature. With some considering her a lunatic, she took to her passion at half her previous salary. “Even now,” she says a decade and a half later, “I earn about as much as I did then.” But Noiville is fulfilled in her career.
At the time of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, she was surprised to hear that her former peers working at big banks were thrilled, had never done better. They simply dismissed considerations of poverty and human suffering. For Noiville came the questions: Where did such attitudes come from? Were they formatted at business school?
It prompted her in 2009 to pen the popular short narrative, “I Went to Business School and I Apologise.”
It prompted her first visit to Bangladesh – to meet Muhammad Yunus. She sought to find an alternative business model. She took a tour to Bogra to visit the factory of social enterprise Grameen Danone, whose aim has been to provide key nutrients to the diet of the Bangladeshi poor.
“It was a short visit,” she says, “But I was impressed by the landscape's beauty and the inner beauty of the people.” Noiville interviewed several women who had taken Grameen loans – including one whose investment goat had died. What struck her was that each woman's journey seemed both an individual and collective struggle. I could only suggest that sense of community is strong in Bangladesh.
Noiville's life experience might raise its own question: Would it not be profitable if Noiville were to embark upon a new challenge, of taking literature's light into the dark realm of Wall Street finance? She might be just the person to make ground.
As we chat I find I admire Noiville's thoughtful and enlightened responses. In them is something of a scientist, a discoverer; but there is also humility. She demonstrates compassion for the human condition and a genuine dedication to her chosen field.
“I would like my writing to be subtle and moving,” she says, more like an orchestra than a brass band.
I must've put more thought into a few of the interview questions than I'd realised, because when inquisitive Noiville – the starting point is a question – threw them back at me, I found it really did take a while to consider how to respond.
When Noiville's three children were young, to explain her hectic work-travel schedule for Le Monde she introduced them to a motto: mothers always come back. Likewise in Bangladesh we can hope that Noiville, writer and questioner, always comes back.
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