Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Renowned author Meir Shalev speaks on fact, imagination

Meir_Shalev_Leipziger_Buchmesse_2015
Meir Shalev, Israeli writer and newspaper columnist for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, is pictured at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2015.

Hedda Harari-Spencer, senior lecturer in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Tufts Judaic Studies Program hosted a conversation with Israeli novelist Meir Shalev on March 17. The self-proclaimed “unreliable storyteller” spoke about his literary career and his experience blending “fact and imagination.” Shalev is the winner of several Israeli literary awards and uses his lively stories to plot his way through history and into the present. 

For Shalev, the writing process is akin to gardening. Having not quite yet earned his green thumb, the author finds that both his personal garden and his writing need “a lot of patience.” He compared his drafting process to cultivating flowers in a desert climate; like seeds that “can wait in the ground for 10, 20, 30 years,Shalev said his novels are like “very old seeds” that sprout once they find the right water. 

Sometimes I forget about ... the existence of these memories,” he said. “I start to write, then they start to move.”  

Shalev’s novels — including his latest work, "My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer’s Eden" (2017) — feature collections of stories situated “on the borderline between the real and the unreal,” he said. He spoke to the words of Swedish author Dr. Axel Munthe, whose works also inhabit this “dangerous no-man’s land.” Shalev recalled how Munthe’s book of memoirs, "The Story of San Michele" (1929), included the imaginative story of a man who, while taking a night’s refuge in a stranger’s barn, awoke to the curious company of a 20-centimeter-tall man. 

“This is not fiction; this is an autobiography,” Shalev said. 

Shalev uses Munthe’s literary license to explain his own. 

“There is this freedom of imagination and this freedom of writing,” he said. 

Shalev also cited the German author Erich Kästner, who once concluded that a true story “doesn’t have to take place.” Rather, according to Kästner, any story “could have happened the way you explain it.” Shalev agreed that an author has the power to make any story true.

In his own writing, Shalev takes a similarly liminal approach. Within his stories, some elements are realistic and others could not “happen in the natural world.” Fact and fiction aside, Shalev writes all his stories in the first person, as it allows him to “write from the mouth and memory and principles and values of another person.” He likens himself to a ghostwriter, noting that such writing requires one to “remember [their] modest position.” 

Shalev enjoys how first-person narration allows him to play with his readers, as they “can always be suspicious about what the narrator tells.” His goal, he says, is to garnish concrete facts with imagined elements and alterations; his narrators “sometimes [have] reason to hide facts, sometimes [have] reason to change facts.” Ultimately, “a good reader should trust his writer,” he said. 

This is not always the case, however. Shalev recalled fielding an audience member’s complaints after delivering a lecture on his book, "Fontanelle" (2004), which features a main character whose skull is still soft and vulnerable from infancy. The audience member stayed behind after the lecture and followed Shalev outside to inform him that he had made a terrible mistake in his research — his character’s condition was scientifically impossible

“Writers have a license to lie … We tell stories that may not have happened, or are not even possible,” Shalev said. He admits that he did not know how to reply to the man; he believes that anything he says in his books can happen. In his books, “people with an open fontanelle are possible,” as are “people flying in the air.”

For Shalev, storytelling is not only personal, but cultural. He noted how storytelling is embedded in Jewish tradition, marveling at how ancient texts written in Hebrew are decipherable to this day. 

“These kinds of stories are important in our national identity,” Shalev said. “It is not only the rules and commandments that shape our identity, but also the stories.”