Longing for a place to belong

A panel discussion titled ‘New Writings from Europe’ was conducted at HLF on Saturday. The panel consisted of Bruno Viera Amaral, Javier Montes and Eluned Gramich and was moderated by David Lopez.

Bruno Vieira Amaral is from Portugal, who wrote about his neighbourhood in Lisbon, which was beyond the glamorous avenues showcased on Lisbon’s tourist guides.

When asked about his motivation to write his tale, he expressed his good fortune to be living in a place that contained such mystery and intrigue that he had all the material to write about right where he lived.

The characters in his book were inspired by the people he had met in his neighbourhood. He recounts his musings about one such individual who for all his life had never gone beyond a mile from his house.

His fascination by how such limited lifestyle could be lead and how it feels to live such a life had inspired him to pen his tale.

Javier Montes is a Spaniard who lived in Rio de Janeiro. His book ‘The penultimates’ is a semi-fictional memoir that recounts his experiences by proxy of living in a city that has been romanticised by people in the world.

He attempts to answer the question of how it feels to be exiled in a city that one always considers paradise on earth. The nostalgia of home fighting with the need to assimilate and take root in a new city brought forth various possibilities.

Some flourish in the new environment cut off from the old while others withered unable to move on. When asked about the significance of place to his writing, he commented that place or location was just like a character in a novel.

A place had a profound effect of driving life in reality and by extension plot in the novel.

Eluned Gramich, a Welsh-German by birth, felt like an outsider as she grew up in Britain.
She moved to Japan, to escape and find herself.

But when she moved to the remote rural region of Hokkaido in Japan she found herself closer to her Welsh origins that she had ever imagined.

The parallels in the wet green rugged landscapes and the native culture of Japan had given her an alternative allowing her to document her experiences without being bogged down by the gloom she had once felt in the welsh countryside.

She felt a kinship with the people and the language of Ainu due to the kind of relationship that the region of Hokkaido had with the mainland Japan which was similar to the relationship between Wales and Britain.