George Saunders and Ha Jin read earlier today at Boston Public Library, which was was pretty impressive. Don’t despair if you missed it—Saunders has three Boston readings scheduled for February (link), and I assume Ha Jin will read again at some point, since he teaches at BU. Though they differ stylistically, both readers share a sense of humor and a love of literature, with emphasis (at least today) on “The Russians.” One of the funniest lines from the story Ha Jin read, entitled “The Bane of the Internet,” went something like: “Loaning her money would be like throwing a meatball at a dog. Nothing would come back.” I was also pleased to be able to hear Saunders say “dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery” as he read part of his story “Victory Lap” that appeared in The New Yorker back in October.

Ha Jin was a thoughtful speaker, who touched on the fact that he writes in English though it is his second language. He said he “suppresses” his Chinese while writing in order to remain in the mode of English, with its particular rhythms. He translated his latest book, A Good Fall, into Chinese himself. As influences he mentioned Richard Yates’ book Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, and Dostoevsky. Not surprisingly, Ha Jin expressed admiration for Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov as well, saying that the latter deliberately “displayed his foreignness” and incorporated words from other languages to evoke strangeness and delight. I took no notes, so these quotes could be slightly off.

In an interesting connection, Saunders’ story “Victory Lap” repeats various French phrases (ballet terms) when in the consciousness of one of the characters. When asked why he included the phrases in the story, Saunders responded, “Because I wanted to learn how to pronounce them.” To the best of my recollection, he then clarified that he was basically a “low-rent Virginia Woolf” trying to represent the complicated, often incomprehensible thought-processes of human beings in real time.

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