Jon McGregor, Britain’s second best short story writer (his website proclaims), has published three novels – two on the Booker long list – but this is his first story collection. Each section, and each story, bears the name of a different town in Lincolnshire (I looked them up), an agricultural county on England’s Eastern coast filled with fens, salt marshes, and earthworks built up against the sea. It’s a strangely blank landscape, not quite dreary, but overcast, obscure. You could say McGregor knows that landscape like the back of his hand, only it’s doubtful we’d know our hands so well.

The stories begin and end in medias res. Horrible events occur offstage and the reader scrabbles over hard ground, looking for rise, rock, or weir to gain a vantage point. Ironic, since Lincolnshire is noted for its flatness. The word “suspense” springs to mind. McGregor holds a black belt in misdirection. In “The Chicken and The Egg” a man fears cracking an egg to find an embryonic chicken – a study in dread. “The Last Ditch” gives a detailed plan for surviving an anticipated crisis, which has obviously fallen into the “authority’s” redacting, footnoting hands. Even at half a page, “Dig a Hole” ignites terror as a mob chants, “Dig a hole and fucking bury him.” Many narrators remain unnamed, a canny choice in a collection that forces so many decisions – which characters to trust, what Prisoner J. Disputed – on the reader.

McGregor’s surprises feel honest. You settle into the story you think he’s telling, only to discover near the end that isn’t the story you’d signed up for at all. The real magic occurs – and often – when he lets the reader fill in all the dark, dread drama. The great horror auteurs know this – anticipation is all.  Cut away from the moment of violence at the last minute and you scar your viewer forever. The quick mind rabbits ahead to the worst.

In “Wires,” a sugar beet flies through a young woman’s windshield, demanding attention. We should know better. In this story, McGregor seamlessly includes technology: the girl tracks her mood in status-updates. We all – or at least 845 million of us – know exactly what she’s on about. It’s just there, as culturally universal and blasé as a toaster, no fanfare required. There has been much ham-fisted deployment of Brave New Technology in fiction; seeing it treated merely as a mental tic is refreshing.

Status update: Emily Wilkinson regrets not having signed up for breakdown insurance.

Meanwhile the reader frets: you should be worried about a hell of a lot more than that.

The stories, united by geography, cover a wild range of form and subject, but one mood prevails: loneliness. I pity the character who finds himself in McGregor’s hands, for isolation will plague him, and disaster will visit like an unwelcome guest. But it’s delicious reading. There are scenes of domestic unease and wide-scale societal breakdown, but McGregor refrains so fully from judgment that it’s never clear if the police state paranoia is madness, or a rational assessment of the situation. “If It Keeps On Raining” describes a modern-day Noah, building a tree house to escape a flood, untrustworthy – possibly insane – but impossible to dismiss. Besides, floods and rain recur throughout the collection – one can’t be too sure. One of the most inventive stories in the collection, “Supplementary Notes To The Testimony Of Appellants B & E,” give an appendix to a legal proceeding which reads like straining to hear the audio track of a horror movie from the next room.

“We Wave and Call” opens thus:

And sometimes it happens like this: a young man lying face down in the ocean, his limbs hanging loosely beneath him, a motorboat droning slowly across the bay, his body moving in long, slow ripples with each passing shallow wave, the water moving softly across his skin, muffled shouts carrying out across the water …

I wouldn’t trust anyone who thinks that boy is alive … and yet he is. McGregor embeds the shard of dread, then immediately turns to playfulness, but he makes his point: we survive by assumptions, but they also undo us. We’re never sure where the text ends and imagination begins. That’s the brilliance of any successful collection, and this one in particular: it’s all on the page. McGregor employs the alchemy between word and reader to great effect.

The collection that kept coming to mind was Dubliners, that restless unease that pulsed beneath Joyce’s epiphanic stories – people casting about for a revelation, a grand purpose, one that soon arrived in the blood-washed trenches of Europe. Even neutral Ireland felt the effects. What comes next in McGregor’s salt-blasted flatlands may be boogieman or apocalypse, but you can be sure it’s big and bad. As one character says of his friend, “Thing with Ray is he’s one of those people who can drink as much as they want without causing any problems. It’s when the drink runs out is when you want to watch him.” In this world, it’s no surprise that sobriety trumps drunkenness in misery. When Ray launches into an unhappy tale, his friend laments, “Later he told me how the story had ended. Like I’d been hanging on waiting for the final installment.” The thing is, we have.

Further Links & Resources

• Ever wonder what successful writers were doing a decade earlier? A Guardian profile of McGregor gives you a glimpse of the author as a young(er) man in 2002.
• Get a copy of This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You on Amazon, Indiebound, or Powell’s.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

Elena Mauli Shapiro, Cr: Hans Mauli

They say that good books eventually find their way into readers’ hands, and because of a fevered novel built around a box of unclaimed personal relics, I’m inclined to agree. A few years ago, while I was a preliminary judge for a fiction competition that will (for purposes of confidentiality) remain nameless, I encountered a riveting manuscript full of old pictures. It focused on an American scholar named Trevor Stratton who comes into possession of the abovementioned box of relics, and finds himself drawn into the life of a long-dead Parisian woman named Louise Brunet—specifically, into a brief stretch of 1928 when she has a short but delicious affair with a man in her apartment building. Trevor serves as the linchpin of the narrative as he explores the contents of the box, getting pulled ever deeper into Louise’s world (and into his own affair with the keeper of the box, a secretary named Josianne), until his life and Louis Brunet’s life become, for a few fevered moments, virtually indistinguishable.

Though I enthusiastically passed this manuscript on to the final judges, it didn’t win the prize; and since the competition was anonymous, I had no way to track down its author (it would have been tacky to try). I just kept an eye out for it, hoping that it would find its way into print, until this February, when I saw an eerily familiar book reviewed in the New York Times. Its title (new since I first read it) turned out to be 13, rue Thérèse (Reagan Arthur, 2011) and its author turned out to be Elena Mauli Shapiro, whose mother found the unclaimed box in a neighboring Paris apartment upon Louise Brunet’s death in 1983.

As a lifelong aficionado of second-hand objects, I couldn’t help but love this novel. It proves that (a) yes, good books do find their way into readers’ hands, and (b) all once-beloved objects in the world are alive in a way that only art can let us understand.

Interview

Steven Wingate: Your book jacket and promotional materials note how you came into possession of the Louise Brunet reliquary. But how did you come to weave a story around it? How long did you carry this book around in your imagination before you started to write, and what obstacles/encouragements fell in your way?

Elena Mauli Shapiro: When I handled the objects growing up, I always wondered what the story behind them was. The fact that I could never know made them all the more compelling; the objects could serve as projection screen for me. Because there was no story, I could choose any story I wanted. I knew for most of my life that I wanted to write a book out of that box, but I didn’t know what form it would take. I only knew that I wanted to be a good enough writer to do justice to these artifacts, or at least not to totally fail them. I wrote many stories before I started this book. Thousands of pages of crap! For practice. I could see myself getting better at the craft but I don’t know that I could have decided on my own, consciously, when I was “good enough.” It was my unconscious that made the decision: I started dreaming about the objects in the box. The first thing I saw was a narrative moving backwards from a picture of a melancholy elder gent taken in 1943 to an undated picture of that same gent taken in his youth. The pictures themselves were part of the story, and that’s when I knew that visual renderings of the objects were going to be in the book. That’s when I knew, “uh oh, better strap in, because now’s the time to get in the box!”

In your writing process, did you “shuffle” these relics a lot as you moved from draft to draft, or did you lay out a stable framework that you stuck with all the way through? Or did some change and others not change?

It was eerily organic the way that came together. There are six main sections in the book and every section begins with a letter Trevor writes where he lists the artifacts that he is studying, that are forthcoming in that section. It just came out that way. I didn’t open the box and look through the artifacts wondering what would go in there next. Instead the story categorically demanded specific objects in the form of Trevor’s list. Then I would scan them. There was a little bit of shuffling around, order-wise, at first. But the momentum of the story was such that by the last section, in which Trevor has completely let go of the boundary between himself and his text, there wasn’t even a list. The story just had me get up and fetch it things when it needed them. I didn’t realize this was all that weird until the publisher wanted to add an extra to the enhanced e-book edition, a few scans of objects that weren’t used in the story. I realized then that they thought I had scanned everything in the box, and then curated the images. I was embarrassed to tell them that I didn’t really have any extra scans, that I had scanned only what the story asked me for. So then we had to take some scans specifically for the e-book extra.

French Soldiers WWI, Credit: Flickr - drakegoodman

Some relics get repeated—the WWI picture, for instance. Were they your favorites before you started to write, or did you find that your characters pulled you toward them? And at what point did the relics not “in the documentation,” such as the music written as a love token by Louise’s piano student, enter into your process?

In any story, repetition of certain motifs accrues meaning. It was the same with the story the visuals told. The ones that got repeated were the ones that my husband made some truly striking comments about. After I’d written about that WWI picture, my husband said, “hey look, the guys in the light uniforms are French, and the guys in the dark uniforms are British.” It blew my mind because despite my careful observation of the photo, I had not realized this before, and yet after he said it, it was so glaringly obvious. Then after I wrote about the bullets, he offhandedly pointed out in his casual physicist way, “oh those are supersonic.” “WHAT? How do you know that?!” “Oh because the ends are pointy.” “So wait, so, that means, the bullet is inside you before you hear the gunshot?” “Yep.” “Fuck! Harris! Why did you tell me that? I am never sleeping again!” And then obviously, I absolutely had to put that in the book.

Credit: Flickr-Arslan

The relics “not in the documentation” made their way in when the story asked me to put in the overheated love letter Louise writes for the boy in the staircase. That was an episode I lifted from one of my practice stories, which I wrote when I was twenty. At that time I had actually handwritten the love letter, which I still had. I wondered how I could morally put that in, since it was not part of the Louise Brunet reliquary but part of mine, and then I laughed at myself: I was having compunctions about forging documentation for a piece of fiction. How fabulous! That’s when I decided that as Trevor was losing sight of the boundary between himself and the story he was telling, he would start to increasingly insert objects “not in the documentation.”

The aesthetic space of 13, rue Thérèse is inhabited by two big shadows: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which any novel about an adulterous Frenchwoman must reckon with, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which arguably started a trend of books about research and romance that has lasted over two decades. How did you deal with these precedents, and did that change over the course of writing the novel?

Flaubert is in the book in a big way, explicitly referenced and even quoted. But not Madame Bovary itself—I thought that was not necessary, since the parallels, as you point out, are already so strong. He had a passionate, somewhat unhinged approach to his writing that I really relate to, that I tried to capture with the feral way Trevor tells the story. The book also owes a lot to Possession, but I didn’t really realize that until after. I was in academia at the time I wrote it, so it seemed perfectly natural to me to have research turn into channeling, into a giant romantic allegory about storytelling. Then when I emerged from the fever, I wondered, “hey, where have I seen this before? Oh yeah! Thank you, Ms. Byatt.”

The most intriguing thing to me about 13, rue Thérèse is the layering of voices within it and the fact that your narrator can’t be pinned down. Trevor narrates some of the story through his letters, but in other places it could be read as Louise herself, as Josianne, as an “altered” Trevor, or even as an omniscient narrator who can see through time. At one point the narrator says “this is the year of our story,” which makes that voice very conspiratorial with the reader without identifying it. Were these voices layered on top of each other from draft to draft, or did they all show up at the beginning of your process and duke it out for the right to speak?

At first I wrote snatches of text in the third person, the point of view being either close to Louise or uncannily omniscient, like the Voice of History. Also the text often addressed me directly. It was a bit crazy-making, which was why I decided to create Trevor—as a secondary containment device. He would tell this story, and he would lose his marbles a bit doing it, so that I didn’t have to. I made him on January 12th, 2006, and he started speaking quite naturally in a letter that was dated January 12, addressed to Dear Sir. When I saw that, I said, “what? Who the hell is this Sir?” Trevor laughed at me, said maybe I would find out if I stopped halting the proceedings every time I didn’t know what was going on and just went ahead and wrote the damn thing. So I did; it was quite a ride. I let him possess and be possessed; I let the narrative frame breach the story; I let the boundaries blur between collective and individual experience. I wrote the prologue “On the Record,” after I’d written the whole book to situate the readers a little bit, so that they weren’t dropped into the novel quite as unceremoniously as I was.

You have no actual relationship with the dead Louise Brunet, but you have handled her possessions—a fact that you share with the Trevor Stratton character. How did this commonality come into play as you rendered Trevor? And what about Josianne, the departmental secretary who serves as the gatekeeper to the mystery of the reliquary? At what point did she enter your writing process, and how did working with her character compare to working with Trevor and Louise?

Image Credit: Flickr-Twistiti

While I was writing, Trevor was my imp. He was throwing stuff around in my brain, being horribly disruptive and also quite a hoot. He was also, obviously, my double, since he handled the objects as I handled the objects. When I took a scan of a pair of lace gloves somewhere in the middle of the story, I noticed that I’d left fingerprints on the glass scanning bed that were perfectly rendered in the image. I thought, “damn,” and tried to wipe up the fingerprints and take another image but instead I just made ugly smudges. Then I decided I rather liked the fingerprints, these implied ghostly hands that happened to be on an image of a pair of gloves, which implied another pair of ghostly hands. Then I laughed when I realized—of course, these are part of the story: these are Trevor’s fingerprints. So I made a note in the text where Trevor refers to his own fingerprints—but these fingerprints cannot be seen in the finished book of course, because the image as printed is too small. Which makes the whole thing doubly delightful: the fingerprints of the author that are there but cannot be seen, posing as the erased fingerprints of a narrator who flickers in and out of his own text. So you see it was all very impish, and I wanted to capture that in the story too; I wanted to have a character who would be Trevor for Trevor. So then I made Josianne for him and for me too. We were all a bunch of total goofballs together.

Image Credit: Flickr-drewleavy

What happened with you and the book—both aesthetically and professionally—in those years between when I read the manuscript for the contest and when it got bought, and what was your journey during that time?

I finished the manuscript in late summer of 2008, and wondered what to do with it. I only [submitted the novel to one] contest—mostly I queried agents. When I was a finalist for the contest, I was completely and utterly surprised! I had sent the manuscript in with the assumption that I was tossing it into the maw of oblivion (which is really the only way to stay sane when submitting stuff). I actually landed an agent right around the same time I was told I was a finalist sometime in February 2009—it was weird how those two things happened at once! Then when I got my agent, we did a little tinkering around with the book before she sent it to editors. The book was purchased by Reagan Arthur in June, so the interim between submission and sale was actually pretty short. The interim between sale and publication is, however, NOT short! It is not unusual for that process to take over a year, sometimes nearly two.

The sub-header of your blog at elenamaulishapiro.com reads “Sophomore Novel Angst.” Can you tell us something about your current project (In the Red) How does it resemble 13, rue Thérèse, and how is the angst treating you now that your first one is out to the public and being read?

Image Credit: Flickr-Ahef

In the Red is about Irina Greene, a former Romanian orphan who grew up in the US from the age of four. She has no memory of her native land or language—she says, “English is when the memories begin.” Then one day she becomes embroiled in a passionate relationship with a Romanian immigrant named Andrei Vadrescu. Andrei is very charismatic, and he is bad, bad, bad. The book is about exile, about being drawn to things that should better be left alone. It has the same obsession 13, rue Thérèse does with history, with memory and forgetting. It’s very heavy and Eastern European, with an emphasis on the collective unconscious and fairy tales. It will be less elaborately metafictional than 13, rue Thérèse, more allegorical.

How is the angst treating me now? This is the part where I totally bum out unpublished writers: the angst never goes away. When you’re out there doing your thing alone in the dark, you’re all angsty that it’s not good enough, and you’re quite convinced that nobody is going to read it. This conviction is sad, but at the same time it gives you this incredible freedom: “wheeeeee! Nobody’s going to read it so I can write whatever the hell I want!” Then by some miracle you get published, and people do read your stuff—and then you sit at your keyboard thinking, “oh fuck, someone is actually going to read this shit now!” and it is totally terrifying in the most crippling way, because, of course, you’re still all angsty that it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough. Yipes. Good luck with that.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: mapsofworld.com

My first reaction was mixed; while I am not a blind fan of Roy or Chomsky or Ali, I have in the past agreed with some of their concerns about—for example—U.S. foreign policy. And I do have strong feelings about the government of Sri Lanka, about the war that ended in 2010, about repressive governments and freedom of speech all over the world. By the time the war was reaching its horrifying climax, no reasonable person, whatever their cultural allegiances, supported the Tamil Tigers’ methods (or perhaps I should say that I do not consider reasonable those people who remained supportive of those methods until the end). But it should not take cultural allegiances—which I have aplenty, being Tamil myself, and having grown up in another country that blatantly discriminates against Tamils and other minorities—for anyone who has followed the history and progression of the conflict to know that neither side has been blameless.

Yet the Reporters Without Borders petition made little sense to me on the most basic level: shouldn’t a literary festival be the last thing one should boycott in a country with a poor record of press freedom and human rights? I could see an argument for boycotting investment, or perhaps even tourism, but a literary festival? Really? Why sabotage an opportunity for free speech when they are so rare?

Image Credit: GLF web site

I decided on my own to ignore the boycott; then, early on the morning of the festival’s official opening, Shyam Selvadurai, this year’s curator and a writer I greatly admire, sent an email that confirmed my misgivings about the petition and strengthened my resolve to support the festival in any way I could. “I am a well-known Sri Lankan Tamil writer who has written in a very political way about the civil conflict in Sri Lanka,” Shyam wrote. “Why didn’t Reporters Without Borders think that my opinion needed to be sought? It feels, from my point of view, that they are guilty of the very same silencing they are fighting against.” He went on to say:

My own appointment to the position of Festival Curator embodies what the festival stands for. I am Tamil and the festival takes place in Galle, the deep Sinhala south, which has seen some of the worst violence committed against Tamils. I am, in addition, openly gay, and in fact was the first person to come out publicly in Sri Lanka. This, in a country where homosexuality is still illegal.

Shyam’s own identities aside, the program he put together deliberately included a BBC Forum on civil war—featuring, among other speakers, Chimamanda Adichie and the Sri Lankan human rights activist Sunila Abeysekara, an outspoken critic of her country’s government—and a “spotlight on Malaysia” in recognition of my country’s own struggles with ethnic tension and conflict. (I had been invited, along with my fellow Malaysian writers Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, Shamini Flint, Farish Noor, Tripat Narayanan, and Omar Musa, for precisely this reason.)

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan / photo credit: Preston Merchant

My friend V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan has written a powerful, poetic critique of the boycott for the Millions; there’s nothing I can possibly add to her response, which made me want to cry and cheer simultaneously when I read it. What I can say is that I fell completely and unexpectedly in love with Sri Lanka, with its urban and seaside landscapes, its people, its food, the vestiges of its colonial past in architecture and culture. All this, all of it reminded me of Malaysia as I knew and loved her best, twenty-five or thirty years ago, the Malaysia of my early childhood, still unspoiled by malls and self-conscious consumerism. And the similarity was not just a figment of my imagination; my compatriots made the same observations. I’ve visited India twice, each time hoping to feel at home, to find familiar elements and faces and ways of talking or seeing the world, and while this has happened to a limited extent in south India, it was nothing like what I felt in Sri Lanka, that almost painful nostalgia, like stepping through some cosmic peephole into my own past. Even the Viceroy Special, the 75-year-old train the festival had chartered to transport participants from Colombo to Galle, felt familiar: the smell of the upholstery, the limp white sandwiches.

Sri Lankan food, too, seemed to have less in common with the austere vegetarian cuisine that dominates Tamil Nadu than with what I’d grown up eating in Malaysia: the spicy sambols, the abundance of fresh and dried seafood, the dodol made with coconut milk and palm sugar, the pittu and string hoppers that were a staple of my childhood thanks to the vendor who bicycled around our neighborhood at dusk. On our last night we had dinner at the Closenberg Hotel in Unawatuna, where every last detail—the dark wood of the furniture, the greying white paint that covered even the old round light switches, the geckos on the ceiling—recalled the Station Hotel in Ipoh, the old FMS Bar and Restaurant, the family house of my oldest aunt and uncle in the far north of Malaysia.

Courtesy Closenberg Hotel web site

Like Sugi, I had encounters that could only have happened at this festival, in Sri Lanka, to someone with my particular background and baggage, a unique confluence of circumstances I would have missed out on if I’d decided not to go. Not just the exchanges with other authors after their events or over rice and curry like my mother and aunts make them, but, for example: the aunty and uncle (the kind who are not related, to paraphrase Sugi) who briefly adopted Shamini Flint at the closing luncheon, upon learning that she was of Sri Lankan Tamil extraction, and mysteriously convinced the kitchen of the Jetwing Lighthouse to produce a plate of coconut pancakes (which were, incidentally, identical to a confection we Malaysians know by a Malay name) especially for her. “But I’m not Sri Lankan Tamil,” I had to confess when I joined them at their table and was pressed to partake of the pancakes, “I’m just a regular Indian Tamil.” “Never mind,” said aunty, “never mind. We are all Tamils just the same. You sit down and eat too.” Which of course would be what she would say; there is no other possible response in the aunty script.

As part of this year’s festival, Shyam Selvadurai had also started a program to bring in Tamil students from the north, who shared accommodation and meals with Sinhala students from the south. These students then attended sessions dealing with multiculturalism and civil conflict, including the round table on “Writing Malaysia” at which Twan Eng, Shamini, and I read and spoke about our work. “Your presence at the festival,” Shyam had written in his email to all this year’s participants, “will contribute to this broadening of young minds.” And while we believed him, because we believe in the power of literature to do exactly that, it never hit home quite so effectively as when small groups of shy Tamil students would approach me or Shamini to introduce themselves, to ask questions, or, really, just to sit and smile at us. I recognized these moments for what they were, having not so long ago sought them out myself: that recognition, that glow of, Oh, you’re just like me, and you’re a writer. So it can be done. Whatever the inherent limitations of that conclusion—because of course, being a writer takes a lot more than being just like anyone—and however unaware one is of those limitations, it still remains a necessary milestone for those of us who grow up in the shadow of the West, who even now do not look or talk or think like the people in most of the books we grow up reading, and who, for this and other reasons, think of being a writer as something reserved for them, the ones with the power, the lucky ones whose stories the whole world wants to hear.

After our “Writing Malaysia” round table, I donated a copy of my novel to another initiative supported by the festival: the Books United Project, which collects book donations for the Jaffna Public Library. A major repository and powerful symbol of Tamil literary culture since the 1950s, the library was burned in 1981 by an organized mob that included police and government-sponsored paramilitary groups, in the spate of inter-ethnic violence that eventually led to the civil war. My donation was the tiniest of gestures, one copy of one novel that most Sri Lankans have never heard of, but it felt significant, particularly in light of the call for the boycott, and I was glad for chance to do it.

Traveling with my 20-month-old daughter, I didn’t manage to attend as many events as I would have liked, but among the most memorable ones I did attend were moderated conversations with Chimamanda Adichie and with Mohsin Hamid. Both writers impressed me with their honesty and insight on a subject close to my heart, the intersection of politics and fiction. I was sad to have to miss events by—among others—Lawrence Hill, Jung Chang, Judy Fong Bates, Ranjini Obeyesekere, Pauline Melville, Louis de Bernieres, William Fiennes, Sarah Dunant, and the fabulous British poet Daljit Nagra, whose first poetry collection, Look We Have Coming To Dover, is one of my favorite collections of recent years. But if I couldn’t hear them on stage, I could and did sit with several of them in taxis and at meals, for leisurely chats about everything and nothing, which is always, in some ways, even better. The best thing about traveling with my daughter? Everyone, even a literary superstar, loves a baby, especially one who politely requests to view their belly button at lunch. Ah, babies, the great levelers. It’s difficult to dwell on status or hierarchies in their presence: my fondest memory of the lovely Pauline Melville is the analogy she made between the sound of my daughter’s mild distress and the cooing of doves.

I won’t lie: I do think the atmosphere of the festival was somewhat dampened, at least initially, by the withdrawal of Damon Galgut in response to the call for a boycott and of Orhan Pamuk and Kiran Desai due to a misunderstanding about the former’s visa status. Certainly they were some of the biggest names, and some people must have attended the festival just to hear them. But I felt amply justified in my decision to attend after the brave, moving closing speech by Geoffrey Dobbs, the founder of the Galle Festival. We’re not going to let Reporters Without Borders or anyone else close us down, said Dobbs, and the irony was not lost on us: free speech must prevail in the end, against the NGO that claims to fight for press freedom.

Doves credit: Flickr

Further Links and Resources

Read the Guardian’s coverage of the Galle Literary Festival.

Within this film noir framework, using the poison in Moth’s body as a literal “ticking clock,” Todorov takes us on a kaleidoscopic tour of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city, through the eyes of a man who has never seen communism and must learn his former world anew. In its most shining moments, Zift—which literally means a bituminous tar used to fix asphalt and occasionally as chewing gum—seamlessly blends its thriller aspect with socialist cultural critique.

Prior to its U.S. publication, Zift was adapted into a movie (with Todorov as screenwriter); HBO airtime made it the most broadly released Bulgarian film to reach American shores. Todorov and translator Benatov both teach at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Conversation

Steven Wingate: Most historical novels have some kind of resonance with the contemporary world in which they are read. Why is now the right time for Zift to come out? Why was it important for you to write it?

Vladislav Tordorov: The reason is complex. It concerns my personal fascination with the [historical fiction] genre itself. Also, it has much to do with the state of Bulgarian post-communist fiction. And it concerns the fictional representation of the communist past in Bulgaria today when we have conflicting versions of this past.

Novels talk to other novels, not only to the real world. Thus, they position themselves within various literary contexts. Bulgarian post-communist fiction of the 90s demonstrates a consistent “lyrical” approach—fictional reflections of a rather intimate and strictly personal, even idiosyncratic nature. Under communism novelists had to be markedly aware of their social and political environment, and [they had] to follow strict guidelines of its representation—the so-called “socialist realism.” After the fall of communism, they could engage in soul-searching, which led to the “lyrical novel.” This type of novel lacks eventful storyline and refrains from discussing social issues. The same goes for Bulgarian cinema, which at the time amalgamated personal frustrations and idiosyncrasies with folklore imagery and poetical fabulousness. Within such literary and cinematic contexts, my task was to create a type of narrative that would be both lyrical (Zift’s story is told in the form of a confession), and genre-and-plot driven (it consciously adopts the hardboiled style of noir). In recent years many plot-driven novels have been published in Bulgaria. In this respect Zift joins a new wave of narrative fiction.

Another aspect of Zift concerns the communist past. I have written extensively on this issue—essays, journalism as well as scholarly papers. Zift is my literary attempt to address it. Back in the 90s there were few novels that would deal with this past, although the situation has changed recently. The past that was ripping apart the nation in the public arena was generally ignored by fiction. In many respects this past defines the present state of affairs in Bulgaria, the common attitudes, the popular imagination, the public reflex.

Does Zift point toward any particular precedents outside of Bulgarian literature?

I wrote Zift as an indirect tribute to James Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. In these novels the narrator confesses to his crimes. I find Cain’s books much more interesting than Hammett’s or Chandler’s, wherein a private eye narrates while trying to crack a case. The criminal narrator is decidedly more fascinating than the private eye. I should also mention that Postman had a direct influence on Camus when he was writing The Stranger and on Visconti’s debut feature Ossessione that pioneered the Italian neorealism.

In your writing process, how did you balance the “socialist” and the “noir” aspects of the book? Did you always have a unified sense of how they would work together, or did that shift over time and fall into place in revision?

Zift draws on personal experiences—my early days of growing up in a communist country in the 60s and my later days of teaching fiction and film at Penn. So, I decided to couple my early memories and late intellectual pursuits in a novel.

Film still, Zift

In the Bulgarian literary tradition and its contemporary cinematic context the genre of noir is an exotic animal. On the other hand, in the American eye, the socialist content makes the classical genre of noir appear curiously estranged. This is probably why the movie Zift enjoys its highest critical acclaim and audience recognition in Russia and in the U.S.—the respective birthplaces of the socialist content and of the genre form. The form and the content are in a subtle way alien to each other. According to Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, this is what makes a work of art function effectively and become aesthetically pleasurable. He calls it “estrangement” or “de-familiarization” of the familiar. It is the result of the unusual coupling of form and content. The idea was to “unlock” the social reality of communism with a seemingly strange genre key, and vice-versa—to reinvent the political aesthetics of the genre by populating it with communist imagery. The clichés clash—these of the communist content and those of the noir form.

In the midst of following Moth through his adventures, you also give us moments that seem outside of time, in which people engage in circuitous philosophical debates, trade urban legends, etc. What were you going for in such scenes, and is there a unity of purpose for them throughout the book?

In the past, urban legends and popular anecdotes used to serve as potent antidotes against the daily dose of toxic communist demagogy fed to the public through various communication channels. The former were works of a collective anonymous countercultural genius that effectively resisted the official culture controlled by the Party. The urban lingo and legendary stories that the counterculture spontaneously and indiscriminately proliferated in effect subverted the official Party-speak, along with all the newspaper feature stories of shock-workers and mass exploits in the line of collective farming and industrial production. Vulgar philosophizing and anecdotal storytelling, the raw Pravda (truth) of life shared by outcasts, lowlife, barflies, and local idiots in the dark pockets of the city spectacularly outshouted the authoritarian, officially forged Pravda. The communist “speak” and its adversary—the countercultural lingo—presented a real challenge for the English translation, and I am glad to say that in my view, Joseph Benatov has done a great job.

Your uses of Wired Radio Outlet—Muzak-like songs often playing in the background—strike me as places where “socialist” and “noir” blend seamlessly. It’s creepy and Big Brother-ish, but at the same time your characters respond to it and even let the songs shape their behavior. What does Wired Radio Outlet mean to you, and what do you want it to mean to readers?

The Wired Radio Outlet brings back personal memories of many places and events. The everyday world around us was all wired. It was virtually everywhere—in schools, public baths, hospitals, etc. In the novel, the Wired Radio Outlet has a structural function. It measures the flight of time. It announces the exact time on a regular basis and thus serves the purpose of a public clock. The action deploys in one freezing December night, the longest night of the year. Time runs fast like sand in an hourglass, and Moth runs out of it as we read along.

Image Credit: Flickr

You also wrote the screenplay for Zift, which did very well internationally and was shown in the U.S. on HBO even before the English translation was released. How did you approach and manage that process? What does the story of Moth gain and lose in its translation from fiction into film?

Noir films are based on pulp fiction. So, in an effort to keep the tradition, I worked on the novel and the script simultaneously. I should point out that in the movie, the story has a different ending, which I thought was more dramatic for the viewer. In fact, the English version of Zift has the movie ending.

What did you learn from Zift that you’ll bring to your next fiction project? And do you mind telling us what that project is?

Yes, it is called Zincograph. The novel was published in Bulgaria last summer, and the script is in an early stage of production. Hopefully we could see it filmed by 2012. The story is about a cunning young man who becomes an informant for the Bulgarian communist secret police. He does his job with a great zeal, and yet he is dismissed, as Perestroika renders him useless. Spying and denouncing is his true vocation, so he decides to continue his activities secretly from the government. He creates his own phantom secret police department by recruiting a group of unsuspecting young intellectuals to spy on each other. As a result, he develops his own secret archive of denunciations and, after the fall of communism, benefits from that.

Zincograph is a black comedy with elements of political psycho-thriller that draws on the very nature of secret policing under communism—the presumed authenticity of the agents and recruitment based on automatic trust and unspoken fear. The plot is driven by the workings of the conspiratorial mind of an overzealous conformist-turned-psychopathic schemer and wicket social engineer. The purpose of this story is to debunk the commonly shared assumption that totalitarianism is a society of victims and victimizers. I submit that many people enjoyed spying on their neighbors, took pleasure in it and pursued it proactively. Declassified archives show that on many occasions we dealt with true zeal on the part of the informants, who didn’t simply follow instructions, but demonstrated maleficent eagerness to “develop” harmful information regarding the lives of others.

Image Credit: Flickr

How does Zincograph’s dark humor compare to the dark humor of Zift?

The “black laughter” in the two novels is of a different nature. The action takes place on historical thresholds—before and after the imposition of communism (Zift) and before and after its collapse (Zincograph). These events could be viewed as collective somersaults or tragicomic stunts in the political circus of their own times—jumping in and out of communism. The aim was to frame the two jumps differently in terms of genre, plot and antiheroes, but to keep their tragicomic representation. Zift is a confessional narrative delivered by a man who recounts his misfortunate life and badly failed intentions while facing his ultimate demise. Moth defies death by means of unrelenting existentialist irony—the battering ram of wit. His sharp aphoristic attitude towards the communist world demystifies it.

Image Credit: Flickr

This should have a redeeming effect on both him and the reader. Contrastingly, Zincograph tells the story of a con artist who social-engineers a fake political institution that replicates and thus mocks the omnipotent system of secret police. The mimicking of the untouchable system, its shadowy doubling is subversively farcical, is diabolically comical by nature. A bold political con is launched by a seemingly ridiculous man. His creation becomes the Trojan horse, which eventually disorganizes the system by making it function like one stupendous lampoonery. In both novels, the machinery of laughter vandalizes two formidable representations of the Absurd—the fact of Death and the fact of the System.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: Flickr

Image Credit: United Nations, via Flickr

Haitian Literature Is a Living Art: Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour and Thomas Spear, a scholar of Halitian literature and a professor of French at City University of New York, discuss the past 200 years of vibrant, strong Haitian literary tradition. They explore writing by Gary Victor, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rene Philoctete and Edwidge Danticat and how they navigate issues of class, politics, the diaspora, and contemporary Haitian life in their fiction.

Haiti Noir: Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has written of her mother country, and the immigrant experience, over the past two decades. She’s published moving pieces in The New Yorker about family lost, and the state of Haiti a year after the earthquake, “A Little While” and “A Year and a Day,” respectively. Danticat also edited an anthology of 18 writers, Haiti Noir, published last month by Akashic Books. Poets & Writers contributing editor Kevin Nance has a great piece about the collection, you can read here.

Last week, Frontline aired a documentary about the island nation, a year after the disaster, called “The Quake.” The program puts into context the huge political, economic and societal challenges that face Haiti now, extending beyond the immediate havoc wreaked by the earthquake to the state of the country before disaster hit. The website, where you can watch the full documentary, also includes perspectives on how the country can continue to rebuilt in “The Way Forward.”

Eyewitness testimony about the earthquake and its after-effects is still being recorded and it will likely take years before the full weight of the effects are felt in the literature and art of Haiti. But I hope in the meantime, we continue – through collections like Haiti Noir – to support Haiti by reading her writers, remembering her struggles, and listening to her stories.

As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven — we here at Melville House were particularly proud to win an award that had been voted upon by a judging panel made up of representatives from some of the country’s best independent booksellers, not to mention some great indie bloggers and critics. And from its inception, we have always thought of the two-year-old award as a good thing for little indies trying to champion good books in a difficult market and culture — a market and culture made difficult in many ways by the predatory and thuggish practices of Amazon.com.

The post goes on to consider what it means for Amazon to be funding the prize, and why they feel it goes against their efforts to provide genuine support to translation, as well as independent publishers and booksellers.

Translation has been on my mind frequently of late, and I’m excited for what Granta has been doing in that department. The Harvill Secker Young Translator’s Prize, in its first year, went to Beth Fowler for a translation of Matías Néspolo’s ‘El Hachazo’. The judges focused on Argentina, homeland of Matías Néspolo. You can read the full story on the Granta website, here. I’m also very excited about Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. Granta writes:

After three decades and five lists championing the very best in new writing, Granta 113 is the first ever fully translated edition, published simultaneously in Spain as Los mejores narradores jovenes en español, both showcasing the work of twenty-two promising writers from across the Spanish-speaking world.

We depend on good translations to open the dialogue between writers around the globe and enjoy the feast of creativity going on in cultures other than our own. Be it story, novel, old or new – what translation have you read lately that felt like a revelation?

I was reminded of this irony when reading The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai, another tale of jealousy, betrayal, and exiles in strange lands. For while Ruiyan Xu’s new novel is, in part, a meditation on the failings of language—a study of a family divided by words—the book itself is a testament to language’s power. Blessed with the soft phrases Othello pretends to envy, Xu writes subtly and exquisitely, and she has delivered a brilliant debut.

Set mostly in Shanghai in 1999, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai begins with an explosion. A gas leak ignites, leveling a hotel; and when Li Jing, an investment banker, emerges from the wreckage, his body is intact (mostly), but he suffers from unusual brain damage. Now unable to speak Chinese, the only language his wife Meiling knows, Li Jing comes under the care of Rosalyn, an attractive American doctor. In the months that follow, Li Jing wrestles with his limitations, Meiling takes over his investment business, and the family threatens to break apart under the strain. Throughout the novel, Xu moves a rich cast of characters through varied estrangements and reconciliations. Each character, in turn, becomes a foreigner of some kind, and each will find some unexpected solace among strangers. More than just a single family’s story, this novel is an elegant and quietly profound chronicle of loss and recovery.

The novel first came to my attention years ago, when the author workshopped an early draft through our writers group. Last week Xu and I caught up at a food court in Manhattan’s Financial District.

Interview

BRIAN SELFON: In The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai, all three protagonists at times feel estranged and isolated from their surroundings. Why do outsiders fascinate you?

RUIYAN XU: We can start with the obvious—I moved to the U.S. when I was 10, and I was the outsider. I didn’t understand the language, I didn’t know the culture, and in my elementary school class, I was totally lost. I still feel lost sometimes—albeit to a lesser extent. Because I didn’t grow up here, there are references I miss, a kind a shared history or feeling that Americans have who grew up here together, watching the same TV shows, seeing the same events through the same perspective. And so I find myself, sometimes, feeling as though I’m watching things from a distance when I am supposedly participating in them. We can call that “Ruiyan as Outsider, Part One.”

“Ruiyan as Outsider, Part Two” started when I was 18, visited China, and became an outsider again. My skills in the Chinese language had deteriorated because I didn’t use it much. I spoke English, read English, wrote English everyday for eight years. And so speaking to everyone in Chinese—family members, passersby, shopkeepers—became incredibly awkward.

The UK book cover

Simultaneously, in Shanghai, culturally, even physically, everything had changed so much—it didn’t feel like a homecoming. Or, at least, it didn’t feel like only a homecoming. And I had changed too, of course. So even if China had somehow frozen in time, I wouldn’t have been able to just step back in.

Of course I’m not the first person to experience or try to write about this feeling. Immigrant fiction, for example, often deals with the sense that you’ll never feel entirely at home in either culture. Non-immigrant writers know and deal with this, too. Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s just part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.

What did you research for your novel, and what did you make up?

The story takes place in the summer of 1999. I lived in Shanghai during that summer, and I probably couldn’t have set the novel in Shanghai during any other period. When I came back and began writing the book, my memories determined, or at least informed, how I depicted the city in my book. I drew on specific images and scenes that I could recall. But just as important was the feeling the city had while I lived there—a mixture of old and new and glittering and impoverished. So even when I made things up, I stuck to the ambiance I experienced firsthand. Generally, though, the book’s interior spaces were imagined, though perhaps informed by specific memories. Outside spaces tended to come from what I could more specifically recall.

My book follows a character who loses the ability to speak. His condition is called aphasia. I first read about aphasia during college, and I immediately felt some personal connection to the disease—a sense of recognition. Moving to the U.S. as a child, fighting through a new language, and then later, losing my original language… aphasia seemed like an exaggerated, accelerated version of what I had experienced myself. So even before I started writing my novel, I had studied it through my coursework in cognitive science and neuroscience.

Probably no two writers will agree on how to research for fiction. My method is to read as much as possible on the topics or themes relevant to the story I’m writing—to read widely, but also to read haphazardly. Eventually I decide I’m ready to write. But it’s hard to write with a medical text next to you and the Internet open on your laptop. So I take all of the books and articles and whatever else I’ve read and put it away. And then I just write. My assumption is that the prep work will inform my writing, that all the information I picked up will come out almost unconsciously.

At certain points during the revision process, I had to go back and fill in details—and I needed to do supplemental research. I’d check on things I thought I had made up—little details of the book—and sometimes they turned out to be true. Who knows, maybe I read about things similar to those details during my initial research, put them into the novel without remembering where I’d gotten them from, and now was relearning them all over again. Or maybe I just guessed right. Anyway, in terms of the medical research, I sent my manuscript to a doctor friend to make sure I didn’t get too much wrong, and was quite relieved when she gave me her approval.

You’ve spent time at several artists’ colonies during the process of writing this novel. How have they affected your work?

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts / photo from the VCCA website

The practical aspect is hard to overvalue. Simply put, as someone who works full-time, I wouldn’t have finished my novel without the help of these incredibly generous institutions. Colonies give you time and space, a chance to make writing your workday. There’s something amazing–and incredibly challenging—about having nothing but the blank screen on your “to do” list for the day, day after day.

Images from Ragdale / from the Ragdale.org website

It takes away your excuses, your procrastinations, and forces you to be workmanlike. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that all novelists must have a touch of the peasant—you have to put in the time, you have to have patience, you have to put up with drudge work, and you have to return to that drudge work day after day. Colonies let you make writing your full-time day job, even if it’s just for a month or two.

There’s also a motivational upside. I don’t have an MFA in writing, and when I was accepted by my first colony, I had never published anything. Writing was an “on the side” thing that I did—and I definitely did not call myself a writer. Being accepted by that colony—and by other colonies in the following years—gave me a sense of validation. Someone is giving you space and time and financial support—these are amazing gifts. When you’re just getting started, this can mean confidence, and it can be just as invaluable as the practical benefits.

Writers at the Millay Colony (Austerlitz, NY) / from http://www.millay.org

Also, writing is such a solitary activity. It always is, and it always will be. But colonies surround you with other writers and artists, people who are going through the same struggles. You get a sense of community there, which is good in itself and also good for your writing. You learn things from artists in different disciplines. I once talked about rhythm with a composer at a colony, and he said something like “when the rhythm is too perfect, you have to disrupt it every once in a while.” I loved that!

What writers helped inspire this novel? Who influences your writing, and how?

I was just graduating from college when I started this book. I was reading Marguerite Duras, Michael Ondaatje, and Susan Minot, and all of them had at least some influence on my style. The style of those writers, at that formative age, definitely penetrated. I responded to the saturation (for lack of a better word) of their prose, I think, and wanted to create that feeling in my own work. But my style has changed too, over the years. Prose style, for me, was and remains a moving target, one I think about a lot, and something I often question myself about. I will always be in love with words and sentences, but these days I find that my writing feels a little looser, my sentences aren’t quite so careful. It’s definitely been interesting.

It’s hard to say that other writers are direct influences on this book. There are, of course, writers I love (W.G. Sebald, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro), but they are all geniuses. Geniuses are impossible to crib.

Henry James

At one point, when I was struggling with the structure of the novel, trying to figure out its shape and pacing, I was drawn back to my some of my favorite 19th and early 20th century writers: George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton. They wrote about flawed men and women, about the links between marriage and money, about bad choices and lack of foresight. And so much happens in all those books! So those novels made me think about my characters in a different way—about how they, despite their best efforts, were trapped by the world around them, by their languages and cultures and circumstances, by the society around them. Maybe the choices they made were the only choices they could make.

Apart from books, did other works of art play a role in the creation of The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghei?

That’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t know if any works of art directly played a role. I did listen to a lot of Arvo Pärt during the writing, but it wasn’t so much an inspiration as it was an accompaniment.

The messier answer, and probably the more important one, is that just about everything that passed through my life during the years I was writing my book could have played some role in how I wrote it.

It’s one of the advantages of writing a novel. You spend so much time with it that you start to see the world through the prism of the book. Everything is potential material. You notice new things, notice old things in a different light, notice everything more intensely through whatever you’re working on. Something you overhear, a work of art you see, some random gesture or the shape of a room—anything can fit into a character’s life or plug into some dramatic moment. This is one of my favorite things about writing—the way it allows you to see the world differently, as if writing was actively sharpening your vision.

It’s even more fun when this happens by accident. You’ve stepped away from the book and you’re going through everyday life, and the novel is hidden away but still shaping itself in the back of your mind, and then all of sudden you see or hear something that just drops into place and completes a scene.

To capture some of these things, I take notes, especially if I’m in the middle of working on something. Maybe the notes make it into the book, but more often than not I don’t look at them again. I think taking notes just trains me to observe, to take in details and be able to evoke them when they’re needed. You grow extra sensors when you’re writing—does that sound silly? The world becomes more alive to you. Some of what you see is terrible, and sometimes things are so strange or beautiful that you can’t quite believe it. And all of it makes me more engaged with being alive, and I hope it makes me a better writer. It definitely makes me a better person.

Further Links and Resources

- Read an excerpt from The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai on the author’s website.

- In August, Xu wrote about a two-part piece on Shanghai for Elle.uk; read Part I and Part II.

- Book Page’s Abby Plesser talked to Ruiyan Xu at BEA about her novel:

- Here is a recent opinion piece by Xu in the New York Times, about language and the search engine Baidu.

- On Galleycat, Xu offers advice about starting a successful writing group.

- Xu has also mentored young writers through the organization Girls Write Now. If you’re a professional woman writer and would be interested in mentoring, read more about it. Or learn more about more flexible volunteer opportunities.

Prague / photo credit: Pablo Sanchez

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national, identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent? What to make of the contiguities of the stories, that seem at times to overlap the national boundaries so as to “say something about that place”? The very assemblage of stories is frustrating, and self-confounding. What you could comfortably say about “Europe” after a summer abroad and a few hostels in Prague sounds positively Mrs. Mortimer-ian after the reflexivity (On se voit) and pure strangeness of these narratives (?): even naming them calls for fresh punctuation and some superior method of notation, a more fertile subjunctive.

Olympic Rings in Berlin / photo credit: Will Palmer

How to avoid taking roll? Three collections of unrelated vignettes, present. Three stories tangent upon a famous person and his or her actions as reflected upon the world stage, present.

Zinedine Zidane, in a Camus-worthy cameo penned by Bruxellois Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is gripped by nausea as he feels his presence–in the existential sense–at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 9, 2006. Toussaint, a cinematographer as well as an author, cites Freud among his influences, but it is a stunt double of Camus’s “dark wind” that seems to draw Zidane from the future that has become the present, and to the absurd act that will become immortal: the headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s chest. Like Meursault, ennui and pure fatigue lead him to the “unscripted action,” the endpoint that his entire career has determined for him. Everyone and no one has seen the action: there is only the “Italian player” on the ground, and Zidane’s own head, forever covering half the distance to his opponent’s chest, without ever arriving. What better characterization of the action shots, the contortions of perpetrator and victim immortalized on Google? How much of what we claim to know is based on circumstantial evidence about what we’ve missed?

Suspended almost dead center of the volume, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė lays out a handful of answers in her five criteria for evaluating texts. In a collection like this, the gesture is reminiscent of a primary-school exercise book: tear out this ruler, and use it to solve the problems on the other pages. The tenets–in short, memorability, connection to lived experience, immersibility for the reader, revelation of the banal, and the impossibility of formulating any assertion without doubt–hover over the rest of the stories, inducing the reader to flip back, like a dutiful student to the endnotes, even after moving on to a new region. Connection to lived experience? Check. Revelation of the banal? Half a check. Immersibility? Perhaps not; here we are, flipping around, taking measure.

Back to the roll call for a moment. (What is about this collection that calls forth the spirit of the schoolroom? Do we, with an anthology, become students again? Do we read it because we assume it’s good for us, because there is some moral good in having read it, in the plus-que-parfait, like “the classics” our Brit-Lit teachers upheld?) A pair of stories about futuristic death-obsessed bureaucracies, present. Now this is the sort of gritty, dubbed stuff we expect to tune into when we delve into the European humanities scene. Flamand Peter Terrin tracks pro-/ant-agonist Ferdinand, noir-style, through his unauthorized murder of a loud and boorish neighbor. Haunted by some indistinct memories that he may have already drilled through more than his allotted share of murders (two per citizen, thanks), Ferdinand has some “Tell-Tale Heart”-ish moments as he attempts to sneak out of his victim’s house. His reasoning, though, about his neighbors, about others in general, is purely modern: “They’d rather see me dead than alive.” We all sort of feel this way about each other, in a way, which makes the two-murder ration seem at once gratuitous and not quite enough. If “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” then “le ciel, c’est la solitude.” It is in this solitary utopia that Ferdinand lurks farther and farther afield, into les quartiers difficiles, waiting for the sound of the punitive shot, knowing that the actual bullet to the brain will have preceded it. It’s a dim and sardonic story, one where you wonder more about what it’s like to off someone than get off with them, and where the two-murder-per-person method of population control is considered kinder than asking people to cut back on their childbearing.

Over in futuristic Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov reports on the anesthetic–literally, flowers no longer have scents and the sky gapes at the seams like an old baseball–conditions that follow our depredations upon genetics and the ozone layer. Castor P., an elderly astronomer who still remembers real bees and who, way back in 2011, discovered the universe’s smallest black hole, is about to sign over the last several decades of his allotted twelve and a half. He’s only waiting for the arrival of his son, on some other star; the silent recipient of his brief telegrams. As he waits, Castor arrives at the conclusion that loneliness has become the only organic substance, having escaped from its container like a gas and filling the vacuum where air used to be. His son never does arrive, and Castor is extinguished, mortal as his namesake. We’re left to wonder: who is his twin? Is the reader meant to be his double? There’s an Oedipal universality to this narrative: we can picture our old fathers, in their felt shirts, sending us voice mails and shakily lettered cards from our old ZIP codes. We only respond ceremonially, when we have to go back because they are sick, or dying or, finally, when we have to sort through their crumbled old papers and photographs of a world where they were at ease. He’s touching, this untwinned Geminorum, because he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he doesn’t tear up in front of the young woman clerking at the death office, still hoping his son will take a shining to her when he gets there.

Not everyone is so moving: in the other corners of Europe, a john runs off from a bust in a public pay toilet, leaving his homeless young servicer unpaid and beaten by cops; children kill a dolphin in a salt-water novelty tank during a dinner party, and the adults laugh it off; a girl rejects a boy during a secluded picnic and makes him drive her back to town; and a couple, lost on an idyllic bike ride, tie their dog to a tree and abandon it just before the husband proclaims his affair with his wife’s half-sister. But what’s the difference, anyway? In the first collection of vignettes, Austrian Antonio Fian’s narrator confesses to an eerily similar act with a friend of his wife’s sister who, surreally, turns out to be his wife–and every other woman in the world–after all. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” asks the adulterer, unsettled. They might as well–as in Gregory Corso’s poem, “Marriage,” we’re all alike–”All streaming into the same cozy hotels/All going to do the same thing tonight.” The only rebellion we might possibly enjoy is to remove ourselves from the honeymoon suite altogether: “Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!” Sexuality, so fascinating and individual to the self is, in reality, one of our most banal habits.

Another of humanity’s more banal projects, pop culture, finds an apt definition in Victor Pelevin’s description of “the merely comfortable selling the poor fantasies about the lives of the rich, the very rich, and the fabulously rich.” One immediately visualizes the same photos duplicated and recaptioned in the high-budget celebrity mags down to the press-release reprints in the low: if magazine layout was still analog, these images would be peeled bare by masking tape. From Professor Potashinsky, pioneering theorist of “Friedmann Space,” we learn that there is a whole field of quantum mechanics specific to wealth; apparently, the wealth-traveler, or “lucrenaut” (take that, Laika) ceases to perceive time and cannot recall any lucreventures if he or she is once again separated from the critical mass of wealth. Not for lack of trying, though–lucrenauts live it up, eating and drinking and–here is Pelevin’s most brilliant line, at least in translation–”transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transactions already resembled love.” At the end of the experiment, the brain images of the lucrenauts’ perceptions during these brave ventures are uniform: a green corridor. The proletariat struggle, the rise and fall of communism, the corruption and trafficking, and drug-cartel stabbings for wealth, and what does it feel like? A waiting room in a third-rate clinic.

It would be a Short-Story-210, too-clever-by-half reader who would state that the motifs of overmanaged, generic nation-states and transactional, interchangeable relationships–and the substitution of celebrity gossip for village tongue-wagging–directly correspond to anxieties about the European Union and any amalgamating tendencies it might have on the cultures within its borders. Without putting words in anyone’s mouth, it’s fair to assume that no one wants the mother country to turn into the Epcot version of itself: a souvenir stand with a few snack specialties–extra points for chocolate, fried stuff in cones, and sausage. It’s limiting, though, not to mention a little boring, to read literature symptomatically, and we’re often so immersed in our era that we tend to overdesignate themes as specific to our own time. Reading with an inflection is one thing; “getting the news through poems,” or short stories, for that matter, is another.

Europe isn’t the only continent where people are overwhelmed by market psychology and looking around at each other to define themselves. The laments that nothing is genuine anymore, that style is winning over substance, that there’s nothing original left to do or say, are almost as old as recorded history–or, cynics might say, as old people themselves. Somehow, there have been new utterances and new pastimes and, much as the new is always indebted to its antecedents, the breath hasn’t been entirely snatched from us yet. In fact, if anything, there’s a little too much breath–together with text and bandwith and airtime and any of the other major transmitters. Of course, surplus doesn’t equal substance, and language doesn’t equal an utterance. We’re watching the same shows, in different languages: celebrities are whittling their faces and bodies down to the same androgyn; music is so produced it’s hard to name the instrument; and food–at least the affordable, available stuff–is so processed you can’t name the food animal or the preservative. The vacuum-inflating loneliness and ersatz bees may not be far behind.

Further Reading and Links

Aleksandar Hemon

- In this interview, World Books talks to series editor Aleksandar Hemon about the challenges of promoting first-rate European fiction to American readers.

- Here on Fiction Writers Review, read a review of Hemon’s most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles.

- Read interviews with some of the anthology’s contributors: The Quarterly Conversation talks to Jean-Philippe Toussaint; Dalkey Archive Press talks to Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), to Antonio Fian (Austria), to Peter Stamm (Switzerland), to Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark), and to many others.

- Via BookBrowse, read an excerpt from Best European Fiction’s preface (by Zadie Smith).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this book, support indie bookstores by ordering it from Powell’s.

Helen Oyeyemi / photo by Kate Eshelby

To say Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, White is for Witching (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday), reinvents the Haunted House story would be a vast understatement. Oyeyemi manages to dismantle and rebuild the haunted house narrative brick by brick, creating a book filled to the rafters with innovation. The novel attempts to unravel the mysterious disappearance of Miranda Silver, a young woman in Dover, England who is afflicted with a rare eating disorder that compels her to eat only inedible substances, and with living in a house that has a mind of its own. But for all its terrors – there are scenes that will make your skin crawl with fearful delight – Witching is also a book about the weight of ancestry, the nature of xenophobia and the impossibility of saving the ones we love.

At 25, Oyeyemi has established herself as a writer in control of both the supernatural realm and stories of young British women dealing with the often upside-down real world. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl (Doubleday), was published to great acclaim during her first year at Cambridge University. The Icarus Girl tells the story of Jessamy, a bi-racial Nigerian and British girl who meets a magical friend named Tilly Tilly on a visit to her grandfather’s compound in Nigeria. Jessamy invites her new friend home to London, where things go terribly wrong. Her next book was The Opposite House (Anchor Books), about a young Cuban woman, Maja, living in London and trying to negotiate her past and her future, and the intersection of her story with that of Yemaya – a Santeria emissary living in a parallel spirtual world.

I met Oyeyemi when we were both in residence at Hedgebrook Writing Retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington, where she won me over with a short story about a girl in a wedding dress and a probably-dead boy. We conversed across many time zones (she in Cambridge, myself in San Francisco) on the magically real wonder of Skype.

Interview

NEELANJANA BANERJEE:When I first met you, I was prepared to dislike you (and your writing) for being a child prodigy. Do you ever feel like you have to defend yourself as a young writer in the publishing world? Does it affect the way you have to present yourself?

HELEN OYEYEMI:No. I think it affects the way I’m reviewed. I’ll read reviews and I’ll know they’re coming at it from a sort of: “Oh, well done, you can write,” kind of thing. Or there are people that just evaluate [me] on the whole youth thing, and hopefully that’s going to go away because I’m actually quite old now.

The story of your first book is somewhat legendary: You were 18 years old, secretly writing the novel that would become The Icarus Girl and when you had some 20 pages, you sent them to an agent you found in the phone book. Is all that true?

It was really to get advice and was just curiosity to see whether, I don’t know, if [the writing] was going to turn into something eventually, because I only did just have those first 20 pages … so it just wasn’t a serious inquiry. I thought: “Well, if he tells me I can write, then I can sit on it and do something later,” but he was quite urgent about it in an exciting way and I guess that’s why all this happened.

Had you written a novel before that?

I had lots of short stories about [the character] Tily Tily. They were really quite short and quite bad. Tily Tily would just show up and ruin someone’s life and then leave pretty quickly. The beginning of The Icarus Girl was the best shot I’d had at the whole Tily Tily thing.

I think your work is fascinating. As a person of color and an immigrant, your books really speak to me because of the fresh ways you tackle issues of being bi-cultural. Where do you think the origin of your style came from?

I’m not quite sure. It’s not really what I want to write about. I’d rather write a heart-warming tear-jerker or romance or something just nice, but it doesn’t work. These two things just keep coming out, the immigrant thing and the supernatural thing. But I don’t process consciously. I do like reading [supernatural narratives]. I like imagining that sort of stuff. I find ordinary realist narratives just lacking in something, like realist narratives just aren’t real for me. They don’t make that much sense. Whereas reading stories in which the world suddenly changes, I’m like: “Yeah … that makes sense.” Strange mental states, all that stuff, just seems to be a more – not an honest way – but a more interesting way of describing the world.

I recently saw the writer Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply) at a reading and he told a story about a creative writing class in college where he turned in a “genre” story and was told: “This kind of writing is not accepted here.” Have you ever felt that people take your writing less seriously because it is not a “realist narrative”?

I don’t really think of it as speculative or genre writing, and I think I’ve been quite lucky that people haven’t labeled it that way either, but maybe it is just because it is because of being black and being an immigrant to be honest, so that they’ll just go: ‘Oh, it’s just magical realism,” and just try and maneuver around the fact that a lot of crazy stuff happens. They’ll be like: “She’s talking about something else, a whole nother experience.” When really I’m saying, there actually is this racist house. It can be more easily read as a metaphor when you’re talking from the standpoint of an “other,” so it’s probably easy to get away with it if you have another identity issue going on.

Reviews of White is for Witching especially [in England] have been kind of wishing that it would not be about the supernatural and that I would just get down to the nitty gritty of immigrant life. While reviews in America and Canada have been like “Yeah, the supernatural bit is great, but maybe there is too much of a political agenda.” I can’t win. (Laughs.)

Speaking of magical realism, would you ever use that term to describe your work?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No, I wouldn’t. I think there are so few books that it actually even applies to. I’m starting to think it’s actually only [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez that it applies to. Even Isabelle Allende doesn’t really write that, whatever that is. I don’t write [magical realism]. I just call what I do … stories.

In all of your books, there are some really scary parts and horrific moments. I was surprised because I feel like I haven’t experienced that frightened feeling while reading since I used to read Stephen King when I was in middle school. It made me realize I miss the sensation. Is there a special process to writing frightening narratives?

Edgar Allan Poe

It’s hard to say … but when writing it, I am conscious of wanting to be affecting in that way. So there are points of the story when I’m like “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (sinister laugh), when I was writing and feeling really good about it, because I was freaking myself out, so I hope I’d be freaking other people out as well. Just like you with Stephen King, I remember reading him and being like: “Oh my god. I can’t believe what is being done to me.” And that was fascinating that there was like a whole technology to it. He handled the story that well that he could suddenly cut you, and then withdraw and keep going. I’d come to Stephen King after reading some heavy existential texts and it was just a whole other way of seeing what a book could do. And Poe as well, another great master.

Another of my favorite parts of your writing is your ability to explore reality on all these different levels. The characters are dealing with certain supernatural occurrences, but then also dealing with being young people in 21st Century Britain. For example, Maja’s younger brother Tomas in The Opposite House, is dealing with racism in a very real and sometimes hilarious way. At one point, when describing a fight at school to Maja, he says of his classmates: “[B]ut they were all on my side, because we’d watched Roots in history last week.” In White is for Witching, Miranda is dealing with some powerful supernatural events, but still ends up at the local pub where the girls are described as “all strawberry lip-gloss, halter-neck tops and bare legs.”

It was something I hesitated about at the editing stage [of White is for Witching], but it made the characters that much more real to me. If you’re going to have things swing into strange territory you’ve got to have some sort of foundation that’s at least familiar and “real” – otherwise, everything’s at a certain pitch, which is like “Ahhhhh!”

In White is for Witching, and all your books for that matter, there is a really interesting range of characters when it comes to ethnicity. The main characters in Witching are white British, but there are Kosovans, Azerbaijanis and Africans. Why did you chose to write the novel from the point of view of Miranda and her family?

Initially, I wanted to write the book about this black family moving into this racist house but it just seemed far too obvious. I could just see how it was going to go and you don’t want to write when you already know all about it. I thought it would much more interesting to have a girl living in this house that’s essentially poisoning her and for her to not understand fully what is happening. It seemed a lot more insidious. [This story] says a lot more about the race situation and the whole immigrant situation than just having a black family move in and be instantly repelled – because that’s just not how it is. It’s much more all these little hints and unsaid things, that’s how racism works these days. It just ran alongside my whole idea I’ve been developing about vampires and how vampire stories are really about race. Well, I thought, I’ve got to have somebody who’s part of the dominant group – I could tell it from that perspective. It was a fun, interesting experiment as well, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it. Because there were all those times growing up when I was like: “Ahhh, white girls … I don’t know! I don’t understand them. We’re so different.” Then it turned out that Miranda is the character I’ve most related to, because she’s having a crack up, and I’ve had one of those. It was easier to come from that perspective.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Hedda Gabbler. I just read A Doll’s House.

Do you read when you write?

I do tend to read after I’ve got the quota done for the day, otherwise life just seems really bleak.

Sometimes I think that being a writer means you never really get to go on vacation. When you finish a book, do you not write for a long time, or do you start on the next one immediately?

After I finished White is for Witching sometime last year, I did take two months during which I was just reading lots and thinking lots, but it was in preparation for the next book. I do think you have to just keep doing it or suddenly it just becomes really hard to get started again.

White Cliffs of Dover, by Diamond Geezer

Further Resources:

- Visit the book’s official website, and, watch the very cool book trailer for White is for Witching:

- Check out Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, two short plays by Helen Oyeyemi.

- Listen to Helen Oyeyemi’s 2007 conversation with NPR’s Michel Martin about The Opposite House.

- Order a copy of White is for Witching from an independent bookstore.