Yesterday, I saw Benjamín Labatut in conversation at Seminary Co-Op, and he said some interesting things about his approach to writing. I’m on the record as an admirer of Labatut’s work, and it was great to hear him speak in person.

In particular, I was interested in some of the things he said about his use of fiction. (I’m going to paraphrase what he said because I’m not sure my sparse notes got his words exactly right—my apologies if I misrepresent anything he said.) For Labatut, the refusal of nonfiction—to which he opposes “literature,” rather than fiction—is a way of avoiding the self-evident statement of what is and what happened. It’s a way of not letting events and facts ossify (I discuss his relationship to facts and events in my review, linked above). But this kind of writing isn’t just making things up, by imbuing even historical accounts with fiction and literariness, he is able to open history to more expansive meanings and valences. For Labatut, the writer always arrives too late; they do not write the thing but write what comes after the thing. In this regard, lack of knowledge—a practice of not knowing—becomes the way to capture what is most significant about the events that we will never know directly. He describes writing as a practice of covering, rather than uncovering, truth, and I think this is crucial for understanding his literary practice. The magic (his word) of writing is in the layers it puts between ourselves and the world, rather than some neat and easy way of opening the world up to our feelings or empathies or whatever connections the understanding of literature-as-self-help might lead you to believe.

Labatut also interestingly pointed out that the last section of The MANIAC takes the form of sports writing (the first two adopt the essay and the oral history respectively). I don’t have much interesting to say about it, but that final section, on Lee Sedol and Go, offers a really excellent addition to the lineage of literary sports writing, such as Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions. Sports are boring; Go is boring. But many of my favorite writers love sports, and the technicality and details of games offer excellent material for literature, even if you don’t care about the game being described. There’s a pleasure in explaining something, in having something explained to you, even if the object of explanation is not itself pleasurable.