Of course I’ll finish my novel, just as soon as you give me that Aegean villa

Like many people, I am a huge procrastinator. And like many writers, my favourite procrastination activity is filling out application forms for fully funded writers’ residencies in glamorous locations.
When I first discovered this time-wasting outlet, I’d write sensible applications, summarising my modest credentials and outlining reasonable project proposals.

But these days – as I’ve filled out more and more – my applications are full of experimental, genre-defying prose. I guess you could describe my work here as speculative autofiction, rich in fantastical flourishes and epic hallucinations.

Gotta be in it to win it, I murmur, pinkie twitching over the “submit” button. After all, I’ll make huge progress on my novel if I get to spend two weeks in my own quaint villa overlooking the Aegean Sea. Across the world, thousands of other writers – some of them possibly Pulitzer winners – murmur the same words.

In extreme cases of task-avoidance, I’ve sourced and read books from the host country to show familiarity with the local literary culture. I’ve tried to weave these references into my applications. I can report that I’ve had zero success with this strategy. On the upside, I’ve read some very interesting works that I might not have encountered otherwise.

Last year, when I was applying for a program in the Czech Republic, I read All My Cats, a 1986 confessional memoir by Bohumil Hrabal. It’s about Hrabal’s obsessive relationship with the feral cat population living in, and around, his country house near Prague.

All My Cats begins with cosy, idyllic scenes: “When it rained, I’d dry their paws with a dishcloth, because when morning came, when the fire died out, all five cats would jump into bed with me.” But the narrative quickly turns dark. Hrabal is both flattered and oppressed by the cats’ dependence on him. Soon the cat population – and his living circumstances – spiral out of control. There are scenes of terrible violence, paranoia, guilt and madness, reminiscent of Crime and Punishment. It is not for cat lovers, but it’s one of the most fascinating and disturbing books I’ve read in recent years.

The End. And Again by the Slovenian writer Dino Bauk is another book I read for similar reasons. It’s about four young people in Ljubljana around the time of Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution – and their intersecting lives in the years that follow. There is one dreamlike scene, where a young soldier discovers a library with the roof blown off in an abandoned, decimated village in Bosnia. The top floor – exposed to the elements – is home to the library’s novels. The historical and political books are on the floor below. When rain is about to come, the soldier and some local librarians set about swapping the fiction and non-fiction.

“Those six young people made the decision to give preference to stories, all kinds of stories, over various kinds of truth that sometimes contradicted one another. Truths went upstairs to await the rain, and stories went downstairs to safety.”

It’s an unsettling scene that takes place in the aftermath of horrific political violence. Somehow it conveys abject pessimism and hope all at once. I keep thinking about it.

Finally, I might never have read Five Bandits, by the South Korean dissident poet Kim Chi-ha, if I were not trying to convince someone in Wonju that I knew something about the city’s literary icons.
But Five Bandits is a wild ride and I loved it. It’s a raucous satire of crony capitalism, published in 1970. A narrative poem (the form, in Korean, is called tamshi), it contains some hilarious imagery. My favourite is of a repulsive government minister who “conducts the National Defence with a golf-club” in his left hand while tickling his mistress’ breast with his right. (The image brings to mind an Oval Office-dwelling grotesque of the present day.)

After reading the poem, I lost a lot of time down the Five Bandits rabbit hole. The poem was banned, Kim Chi-Ha was sentenced to death in 1974 and Simone de Beauvoir and Kenzaburō Ōe were among the famous writers who successfully campaigned on his behalf.

As far as procrastination activities go, I guess I could be doing worse things. Applying for far-fetched travel opportunities might be a waste of time, but reading widely – and reading in translation – has got to be good for me, both as a writer and as a human being. After all, to quote Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”