Why we need storytelling

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Bookmarks – which is this week brought to you from inside a tent on the Welsh border, where I have been reporting on the Hay literary festival. Many of the speakers both here at Hay, and at Charleston festival, where I was last week, have been talking about the vital importance of stories. I’ve rounded up some of the best insights for today’s newsletter – and scroll down for reading recommendations from Vincenzo Latronico, whose novel Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker.

“For wisdom, among other things, we need the art of storytelling,” Elif Shafak wrote in the Guardian earlier this month.

The novelist made a passionate case for the importance of stories during her appearance at the Charleston literary festival, too: “I think it’s a bit unfortunate that in the English language we use fiction as the opposite of fact,” she said. “Fiction brings us closer to truth, and it does it in its own gentle and profound way.” She said she never starts out wanting to address specific injustices in her work, and dislikes the kind of fiction “that tries to preach or teach”.

“A novelist’s job is to not shy away from questions, including difficult questions, and to open up a space of freedom and nuance and pluralism. And then you take a step back, and you leave the answers to the reader,” she said.

At the Hay festival, musician Brian Eno also shared why he thinks stories are so important. “We can have all the excitement of jumping over the Niagara Falls without the danger,” he said. “One of the great freedoms of art is to allow you to have very dangerous or emotionally fraught, tense, difficult, wonderful, exciting, orgasmic experiences sitting in a chair.”

By accessing stories, “what you’re doing is you’re encountering all these simulations in order to have a sense of how you might feel about those things in real life and what you might do about them if you encounter them in real life,” he added. “The rehearsal process that is going on when you’re reading something or watching a film or whatever you’re doing is a preparation of a certain kind.”

Meanwhile Eimear McBride, on a panel at Charleston with the actor Denise Gough, spoke about how fiction can “give you some space” between fiction and reality. Experiencing something difficult via a story, she said, can make issues easier to process. It can be “easier to empathise when it’s fiction,” Gough agreed. “Sometimes the onslaught of reality, it’s a bit like, ‘oh, I can’t take that.’” But reading a book or watching TV and film can help to “open yourself up”.

Grayson Perry, also speaking at Charleston, thinks stories are important for creating visual art, too. “Narrative is the most potent form of human art,” he said, which is why he creates characters for himself, such as Claire and Alan Measles. He’s “a bit envious” of artists of the past who “had religion”, he said, as they were able to use “stories that everybody understood” from religious texts as the basis of their work.

Meanwhile former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, appearing at Hay, also expressed the importance of fiction – it can “tell you a lot about yourself” he said. The Iliad, his favourite book of all time, is trying to show us that “we can’t handle the truth”, he said. “We live in some level of denialism about our own mortality. We have to do that in order to survive. But the message is: deal with the truth, deal with your mortality. You’ll become freer and you’ll make your decisions more clearly.”

“It makes me sad when some readers say: ‘I don’t read fiction,’” because they want to prioritise reading about “important stuff” Shafak went on to say in her Charleston event. “Someone who says, ‘I don’t have time for fiction’ is telling us, ‘I don’t have time for my own emotions,’” she said. “That is not a good place to be in. So I hope we can read across the board: fiction, nonfiction, east, west, and keep this childish curiosity alive.”

I’ve just finished translating Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection into Italian – so in a way I’ve been reading it constantly for the last couple of months. It’s a book that transforms over successive readings. It’s being widely celebrated – and rightfully so – for being so twistedly funny, so precise in depicting the way our digital life can warp or constrict our physical existence, and so formally inventive. But looking more closely you realise Tulathimutte also tackles a serious question all writers are facing today: how can the novel, a form of storytelling that is linear and slow, depict a way of living fragmented and multiplied by technology? What use is a “scene” – things happening at a specific place and time – when, on the phone within our pocket, so many things are happening at once?

This week I’ve also been immersed in Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. It’s so masterly and engaging – even for someone who is no expert in Plath’s work. It can read as an investigative journalist’s take on Borges’s The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights, a favourite story of mine. Malcolm has such precise literary and human insight, and such compelling prose. I am ashamed to say I hadn’t read her before. I’m now planning on buying every book of hers I can.

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.