This Friday, a friend and I braved the crowds at the 92nd Street Y to see Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, and Salmaan Rushdie say smart things on stage.  The event was part of the Pen American Festival, an annual New York City gathering of Writers Who Care About Stuff.  The center was founded to promote freedom of expression and to celebrate courageous authors who stand up for their right to write.  Rushdie shows up at the festival every year - undoubtedly as a result of his authorial history - ready with his sharp jokes and blunt comments.  I had seen him speak once before in college, and had been impressed, and was excited to see him again, particularly because he has a new book coming out next month.

Overall, it was a great night.  The men read from their books in their original languages.  Umberto Eco read from Foucault's Pendulum, which wasn't particularly new or exciting (the book came out in 1988).  However, it was refreshing to hear it in Italian, as it was originally written.

Then Rushdie read two related passages from his new book, The Enchantress of Florence.  According to the author, the book, which is set in Emperor Akbar's court the way Midnight's Children is set post-independence India (i.e., some of the history might be true, but who really cares whether it is or not), is about a blonde, European man who charms the socks off the formidable Mughal emperor.  Between the reading and the excerpt recently published in the New Yorker, I'm sold.  The book appears to be Rushdie at his best: even when the  characters breach the outermost boundaries absurdity and the historical context twists and tangles beyond recognition, I never quite de-suspend my disbelief.

Next, Mario Vargas Llosa read from his book The Bad Girl, which came out last year.  I personally loved hearing the text in Peruvian Spanish, which I'm convinced is the most melodic brand of Espanol.  (Full disclosure: I spent 5 weeks in Peru piecing my soul back together after my first year of teaching, and one of my favorite people in the whole world is from Lima, so I may be a tad biased.)  He was the strongest reader, in my opinion - while Eco mastered the rhythm and melody of his prose, and Rushdie mastered the dryness and comedy of his, Vargas Llosa allowed the text to master him.  He read lyrically and lovingly, and you could tell from the way he rolled the words around on his tongue that he is a man who adores words above anything else.

Unfortunately, the discussion was disappointing, mostly because the moderator, Leonard Lopate, was disappointing.  It all began promisingly enough: the three men had barely sat down before they started trading friendly jabs about whether or not Dumas was a bad writer.  (Eco began by ranting about the mediocrity of Dumas's prose, particularly in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Vargas Llosa disagreed, saying that any book that transports the reader is a good book, regardless of the grammar and syntax (or lack thereof).  "In English, we have a term for this," Rushdie said, talking about the poorly written book that still manages to transport.  "It's the good-bad book.")

The moderator, however, felt obligated to intercede - he did so unnecessarily and clumsily.  At times, it seemed he was trying to prove to the authors and the audience how much he knew.  ("If the Japanese hadn't come to Peru, you might be president," he said to Vargas Llosa, referring to an election the author lost to the corrupt and morally questionable Fujimori.  Way to open old wounds, Leonard.  Party.  Foul.)  Mostly, though, he proved his ignorance.  (At one point he asked Rushdie something about the Indian Peninsula.  I'm sorry, Peninsula?  Florida is a peninsula.  South Asia is a subcontinent.)

Still, the authors overcame the moderator and brought up some good points.  They talked about the future of the English language.  Eco said that English is spreading across so many continents so quickly that it is sure to dissolve.  Rushdie argued that English's journeys around the world are only enriching it (he used the examples of "police encounters" and "eve-teasing" to discuss the ways in which Indians are making English their own).   They all strangely ignored the role of television and media in the evolution of the language - and the possible standardization of the language - which suprised me.  But then, all three of them seemed to be cultivating an old-school curmudgeonly quality, and at times they seemed a bit stodgy and outdated  - despite the fact that they mentioned many other authors from all of the world, not one of them mentioned a female author the whole night.

Of particular interest to this hoppity blogger was a short discussion they had about the role of authors and public intellectuals in America.  Why, they wondered, are authors so rarely called upon to give their opinions on politics, particularly during the present election?  Rushdie said that it was because in America, we have designated commentators, some of whom are writers, and that we tend to rarely look beyond these commentators for opinions.  Certainly an interesting question for roti-passers like ourselves, who, by virtue of a little program called word press, have designated ourselves Writers Who Care About Stuff.