“A lot of people were talking about Occupy Wall Street,” the author and artist Jacob Wren said of the time he began writing his latest novel, “Rich and Poor,” published by Bookthug this month. He mentioned that, specifically, his reading of David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” a book that was published only a few months before the Occupy movement’s official inception, and whose text was a powerful motivator of its chief aims, provided the first impulse for his own novel’s reflections of class and capital. “[It provided] this idea that capitalism wasn’t just some abstract postmodern machine that was operating on all of us, but there were actual concrete individuals getting very rapidly much richer off of it. What do you do about them?”In “Rich and Poor,” the answer is: kill them. The novel, structured around two narrating voices — one a billionaire, the other a former pianist turned dishwasher who decides to murder the other — that eventually collide, abounds with questions of the nature of political action and how you can change the world. It asks: Can one person change anything?“I think I would be an activist if I had any talent for it,” Wren said. “But I only have talent for art.” In addition to his fiction writing, Wren is a member of the Montréal-based collaborative performance group PME-ART, and often writes about contemporary art for different publications and on his own blog. “At one point at my life I had a strong desire to keep the writing and performance separate,” he said. “I have a strong belief in collaboration but at the same time I find it personally very difficult. Writing novels was an attempt to escape all the collective dynamics and do something where I could take full credit for it, which is maybe not the noblest desire. Over time I’ve really seen how they are really connected.”One of the links between Wren’s performance work and writing, he said, is the relationship between structure and spontaneity. “In the performances we make there is a structure but we do it differently every time; we’re trying to surprise ourselves,” he explained. “When I’m writing a novel there is a structure I have in mind at the beginning, but in the act of writing I’m trying to surprise myself, and have as much freedom within the structure as possible.”What he’s outlined sounds like a description of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close-Up” (1990), which Wren will present at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 18 as part of its Print Screen series. Kiarostami’s masterpiece, a hybrid-documentary about the arrest and trial of a man who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, appeared in Wren’s previous novel, “Polyamorous Love Song” (in a sequence based on a real-life incident at the 2002 New York Film Festival), and acts as a progenitor for a whole section of art across various mediums that are exploring questions of reality in their work.Wren first encountered Kiarostami in the early 1990s during a series dedicated to Iranian Cinema in Toronto, and was struck by “Close-Up” in particular. “You’re constantly wondering what is true and what is fiction,” he said of the film. “At that moment it was so much what I was searching for in art, the question of how to bring reality into art, and what reality is, isn’t, or could be in art.” He noted that a similar blending of fiction and non-fiction has become the literary zeitgeist at the moment, but is clear that his book is different from what other writers are trying to do. “My book is definitely not reality,” he stressed. “It’s much closer to a parable or a fable, and even that doesn’t quite get at what it is. But it’s in some dialogue or conversation with reality.”
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