{"id":1701,"date":"2012-10-11T10:58:43","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T09:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1326"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:50:59","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:50:59","slug":"tamara-stanton-on-constantine-and-huelle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1701","title":{"rendered":"Tamara Stanton on Constantine and Huelle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th<\/sup> October 2012<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

On Monday I heard the celebrated novelists, Salford-born David Constantine, and Gdansk-born Pawel Huelle each read one of their short stories at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Constantine read \u2018Asylum\u2019, a story of a disturbed teenager in a psychiatric institution who is encouraged by a visitor to write a story. She chooses to write about a mother and child migrating from a war zone in Somalia to sanctuary in Swansea. \u2018Asylum\u2019 is also interwoven with the visitor\u2019s daughter who has discovered the Ukrainian shtetl where their family was wiped out. <\/span><\/p>\n

Huelle read \u2018The Flight into Egypt\u2019, a story about a striking Chechen woman and her child who, on migrating into Poland, intrigue an artist who muses on her story through an iconic image of her he sees. By chance they meet, and he presents his painting of her to herself and her suspicious husband. Huelle read in Polish (the audience read the translated version on a screen), which was at first as distancing as the enigmatic energy of the woman in the story, but very quickly Huelle\u2019s tangible and warm stage presence changed my mind. <\/span><\/p>\n

It was fascinating to observe the way Huelle and his translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, communicated, with a sense of spoken but also unspoken understanding. Communication was a theme that ran through both pieces of writing. The artist in \u2018The Flight into Egypt\u2019 who believes he could tell \u2018how far the look in someone\u2019s eyes conceals the goodness or badness in their soul.\u2019 The desperate way the patient in \u2018Asylum\u2019 tells her story to her visitor, \u2018transfixing him with the eagerness of her fiction.\u2019 Also the beautifully described way he watches another patient (who desires to be an owl), contemplate and describe herself to him in the mirror. <\/span><\/p>\n

The two stories worked brilliantly in conjunction, both mainly portraying the theme of escapism; stories within stories to escape the dark realities of the worlds of the protagonists. The artist in \u2018The Flight into Egypt\u2019 fantasises about the background of this woman, whilst unintentionally remembering the wife who left him and the friends and other things that are no longer his. The teenager in \u2018Asylum\u2019 wants to free herself from the war in her head, but poignantly claims \u2018I can\u2019t free them (the migrating mother and child in her story) when I can\u2019t free myself.\u2019 The visitor encourages her to write, not about herself as she suggests, but to displace herself. <\/span><\/p>\n

This idea of displacement was interestingly challenged because Constantine seemingly used the visitor to represent himself – before he began the reading he explained that he used to visit the school in a hospital where he would talk to girls who were mostly being treated for anorexia. Huelle, like the artist in his story, said his inspiration for his story came partly from a photo which circulated around the world, of a Chechen woman with a baby on the Polish border not knowing whether she would be allowed in.\u00a0 <\/span>He had always thought that people had wanted to escape Poland, like his family, but after the Chechen Wars he saw an influx of refugees who wanted to come into Poland. Both stories fantastically contrasted the idea of freeing oneself in displacement, with being placed in the centre of one\u2019s literary self. However the spontaneity and intensity of seeing both authors in person, and hearing them connect with their work, wonderfully diminished any sense of displacement. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Tamara Stanton<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October 2012 On Monday I heard the celebrated novelists, Salford-born David Constantine, and Gdansk-born Pawel Huelle each read one of their short stories at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Constantine read \u2018Asylum\u2019, a story of a disturbed teenager in a psychiatric institution who is encouraged by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[16,283],"tags":[171],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nTamara Stanton on Constantine and Huelle - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1701\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tamara Stanton on Constantine and Huelle - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Review of David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October 2012 On Monday I heard the celebrated novelists, Salford-born David Constantine, and Gdansk-born Pawel Huelle each read one of their short stories at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. 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