Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon have posted a wonderful video of author Ursula K. Le Guin reading from her fantastic new novel LAVINIA and answering questions from the audience about the book and her writing:
LAVINIA is Le Guin’s interpretation of the Virgil’s THE AENEID. It focuses on Lavinia, who appears in the poem, but never speaks.
Here’s what the reviewers are saying:
“Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.”—Publishers’ Weekly (starred review)
“Le Guin has researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield ... Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companion volume to one of the Western world’s greatest stories.“—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A]pproaching a new book by Le Guin is like discovering a new Rembrandt. In some ways, the quality of the work is irrelevant, as it’s sure to be declared a new masterpiece—which it will be by most standards. The only thing to do is to judge the work against its creator’s own rigorous standards. Even in comparison to the rest of Le Guin’s body of work, Lavinia stands very high.“—The Winnipeg Free Press
“In one of the more impressive displays of feminist reconstruction since Margaret Atwood wrested Penelope out of the hands of Homer, National Book Award-winner Le Guin has rewritten the last six books of Vergil’s epic poem to create a rich life of the mind for the Latin princess. Unlike Atwood’s “Penelopiad,” the novel, as Le Guin writes in an afterword, is a “love offering,” and she writes with great affection for both the poet and his hero.“—The Christian Science Monitor
“This is a powerful and rewarding novel, a intricately layered narrative that weaves many themes into its rich tapestry, and touches on subjects that remain urgent in our own time.“—The Globe and Mail
“Le Guin does a fantastic job of bringing a tertiary character to life… Trojan horses, Vergil’s The Aeneid, ancient Italy, prophecies and quick witted maidens: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin offers a lot to like. I give it a 4 out of 5. High entertainment value.“—So Misguided
“Well-researched with epic battles and many interwoven threads, Le Guin has captured the spirit of Virgil’s work and presented it faithfully in her own measured, lyric prose. Le Guin’s Lavinia is a strong, fascinating woman, with a tale to rival any hero of old.”—Eclectic Closet
Dan Vyleta, the Edmonton-based author of the excellent thriller PAVEL & I, has been interviewed by Harriett Gilbert, for The Word on the BBC’s World Service!
Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?
The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher.
“We didn’t know you were coming.”
“I tried to save you a place.”
“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”
The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse. From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books. In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books. In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question.
Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?
My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV. The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.
Your prose is beautifully succinct. Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?
I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right.
There’s also a kinetic energy though. Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring?
I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.
Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?
As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals. I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close.
What motivates you? Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?
Reading is a provocation. Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience. As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly. This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection. Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual.
Thank you Christine!
Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER and NIGHTWORK (named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year) as well as the critically acclaimed novel FLORIDA, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist.
In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra.
Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.
What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?
First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden. Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it. The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast. The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments.
The novel is set in New York in 1997. Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?
Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness. In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends. (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical. As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.
All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care). Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?
Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on. The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look.
I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior. Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?
I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous. I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible.
Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!
Here’s the part two of our Q & A chat with Edmonton’s Dan Vyleta, author of PAVEL & I.
What motivates you to write?
There is a magic to writing. I can’t describe it any other way. Time disappears. It’s what it must feel like for a professional musician to pick up their instrument. It’s not that it isn’t work. Of course it is work to sit down at the computer and figure out what happens next. But there comes that moment when the book takes on a force of its own, and starts to carry you. On some level I think everybody should be writing. It’s wonderful.
When you first started your writing career, did you have a mentor or was there an author you particularly admired?
There were about a thousand authors I deeply admired (and still admire), though I can’t say there was one who made me write. I did not show my work to a great many people, but those who did read it were very encouraging. I never had any formal training in writing; for me reading has always been key.
Is there a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re writing a novel?
I listen to music. PAVEL was written to Beethoven’s piano sonatas. I am a huge Jazz fan, but there is something about those sonatas that put me in a PAVELesque mood. Other than that, I need lots of coffee and tea. I used to think I could only write at night, but that turned out to be a stupid excuse for not getting out of bed in the morning.
How much of yourself goes into your work?
Who knows, exactly. A friend asked me a while back: how much of what you write is true. None of the big things, I said, but all the small. I listen into myself, if that makes any sense, and try to trust my instincts. One could inquire further, but maybe it’s best not to know.
As a debut novelist how did you cope with the self-doubt?
It’s suffering, pure and simple. I don’t think I coped; I endured. And then there is the conviction, deep down, that it’s a good story; that it has moved me, hence may move others.
What are you working on now?
A new novel, but the title is secret. We mustn’t jinx it.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I have been working at various Colleges/Universities for the past few years, teaching across the humanities. Other than that I read, play with the cats, watch The Wire, go for walks, listen to Jazz, do sports, go to bars, the usual.
What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?
I read a bunch of lesser known books by Graham Greene recently (e.g. The Ministry of Fear); a Walter Mosley mystery that I picked up in the public library (Fear of the Dark); re-read Faulkner’s Light in August in a funky 1960s edition that I got at a local second hand book store, and some essays by Joan Didion. I usually decide to read something because I read the first page in a shop or at a friend’s place and liked it. Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John is next on my list - I have just been to Jasper, in the mountains, and this looks like it’ll carry me back.
What was the last book you started reading, but couldn’t finish?
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, who passed away recently and deserves a better reader. The prose is fantastic, I just ran out of steam somehow.
Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?
I think everyone should read some of the nineteenth century classics: Dickens (Bleak House, or, if that seems like too fat a book to tackle, Great Expectations), Dostoevsky (any, really; The Eternal Husband if length is an issue), James (Portrait of a Lady; the late James is great but takes some getting used to), Stendhal (The Red and the Black) etc. For me this is the heyday of the novel - these books are popular and literary all at once, just great thumping reads.
As for contemporary stuff, I think Pete Dexter is terrific - his Train is a wonderful novel, part crime fiction, part meditation on race in the 1950s.
Do you have any favourite Canadian authors?
The jury is still out on this one. I had read a number of very famous Canadian authors before moving here (Atwood, Ondaatje, Robertson Davies), and am trying to get to know the Canadian literary landscape more systematically now. I have to say, I am tremendously impressed by the vibrant literary community that exists in Edmonton, and how proud people I talk to are of domestic authors.
How are you finding life in Edmonton?
I’m enjoying myself. The first day at -25 centigrade was a bit of a shock, but it’s a balmy -5 right now, and the snow’s sparkling down in the river valley. Obviously, after Berlin, it’s a very different type of city: very spread out, for one thing, and architecturally less enticing. I wish there were more independent cafés etc, though I keep discovering little gems. What I do like is the way consecutive generations of immigration have shaped the place; nobody bats an eyelid at my accent (which is English, with just a hint of something else: my German background, and some time I spent in the US), and there is an understanding that the world extends beyond national borders. I also like the French cultural presence. Myself, I speak very little French, and I understand that there have been very serious tensions between the Francophone and English speaking populations of Canada at various points, but again it injects a complexity and diversity into the place from which it can only benefit.
Thanks Dan! Good luck with book!
Author Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and recently moved to Edmonton, Alberta.
Dan’s debut novel PAVEL & I (Bloomsbury, 2008) is set in the ugly aftermath of World War II in an occupied Berlin short on food and medical supplies, and gripped by a freezing, deadly winter.
Struggling to come to terms with the horrors of war, lonely Pavel Richter, a sick and disillusioned decommissioned American soldier, befriends a traumatized street orphan named Anders. But when a frozen dead dwarf is stashed in his frigid apartment by an erstwhile army buddy, Pavel finds his peaceful existence shattered by a vicious British colonel, an unhappy Soviet general and the enigmatic, piano paying Sonia.
Peopled with pimps, prostitutes, spies, and a gang of child thieves, PAVEL & I is a stylish, cinematic novel heralding an exciting new talent.
Dan Vyleta and recently caught up on email for this two part Q & A.
What was the inspiration for Pavel & I?
Ideas come to me by way of images and feelings: a sort of emotional “tone” that is connected to a character and place. So the opening scene of the book coincides with its inspiration - it just popped out of my pen and urged me to carry on. Then, in retrospect, you construct all sorts of reasons why it made sense that you were drawn to the material, and what its ‘meaning’ is.
Did you have vivid mental images of other scenes in the book?
Whenever I write a scene I feel I need to be able to see it. Even before I sit down to write I see something, some detail, or hear something (a line of dialogue), but things only take on focus with the writing. Once it’s been put on paper, the scene becomes strangely real to me and strongly fused to a mental image, which makes editing somewhat tricky.
Were films a big influence?
No. I watched some stuff when I was almost finished to check on certain visual details, and I have a longstanding love for the film version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, but on the whole I tried to stay away from other people’s visualisations as much as I could, though I do read avidly during the writing process. I guess I trust that language will generate language.
What was it about post-war Berlin that interested you as a setting for a novel?
I lived in Berlin for five years or so. It is a city much marked by the war (and by the wall), and walking around looking at the bullet holes in old building facades set some things in motion at the back of my head. I was also attracted to a moment in history when civilisation has worn thin, and naked survival is the order of the day. It raises the question whether or not civility - and love - can survive under these conditions.
How much did you know about the period before you started?
I am a professional historian by training, and by the standards of the discipline I knew very little indeed. The research I did was very different from academic work. The book is not trying to capture an authentic historical “truth” about the period - that would be presumptuous, I feel. It deals with one man’s remembrance of the era. Diaries and memoirs helped me with this, as did some conversations with eyewitnesses.
Was there a particularly interesting fact you uncovered in your research that you weren’t able to include in the novel?
There are things I allude to but don’t flesh out. A great many things, in fact. One that struck me was the story of a man with a white cane who convinced children to follow him, then butchered them and sold them for their meat. It seemed too outlandish to convert into a central episode.
Are the characters in Pavel & I based on real people?
No, though I do steal details from real people, and take stock of real emotions, behavioural patterns, etc. One character, Colonel Fosko, is based on Wilkie Collins’s villain by the same name (from The Woman in White). I wanted to highlight the porous boundary between fact and fiction; the narrator, after all, is clearly somebody who models reality on things he’s found in books. Boyd White’s name is also borrowed, though the real man is nothing like my hardboiled pimp.
Tell me about the frozen dwarf...
What is there to say? The story of the de-nazification of the circus performers is based on fact, so I guess that gave me the idea. I have always believed there is a lot that’s surreal about the real. My friends claim I have listened to too much Tom Waits, and watched too many of Terry Gilliam’s movies.
Read Part Two of Dan Vyleta’s Q & A tomorrow!
In part two of our Q & A, Justin Cartwright, author of THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG, discusses his writing process and his reading habits!
What motivates you to write?
I find that I have to write, and that it is only by writing that I really know what I think and feel.
When you first started your writing career, did you have a mentor or was there an author you particularly admired?
I have admired John Updike since I was 20 or so, but there are many others.
Is there a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re writing a novel?
Yes, I go to the London Library, a private library, and write longhand in lined exercise books.
How much of yourself goes into you to work?
A lot. Sometimes my work is faintly autobiographical, but always it is written - and there is no other way - from within my own sensibility.
What are you working on now?
A novel about a family.
How do you relax when you’re not writing?
Play tennis, read, have as many holidays as I can manage and fish for trout.
What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?
Rachel Seiffert, the Dark Room; I met and liked her.
What was the last book you started reading, but couldn’t finish?
Couldn’t divlulge. Never inflict gratuitous hurt on writers
Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?
WG Sebald, Austerlitz, one of the most astonishing novels by one of the most original novelists of our time.
Justin Cartwright is the award-winning author of In Every Face I Meet, Leading the Cheers, White Lightning, and The Promise of Happiness.
His latest novel THE SONG BEFORE IT SUNG is based on the lives of Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin.
Described by the LA Times as “a quiet masterpiece”, it traces the friendship between charismatic Axel von Gottberg, an aristocratic German, and Elya Mendel, a socially awkward but brilliant Jewish scholar, in 1930’s Oxford.
Sixty years after meeting von Trott, Mendel asks a former student, Conrad Senior, to unravel his collection of letters and papers.
Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa but, since graduating from Oxford University, has lived all his adult life in London.
We met in Toronto in October 2007 during The International Festival of Authors and later corresponded by email.
What was the inspiration for The Song Before it is Sung?
It was seeing the showtrial of Adam von Trott and others in the Imperial War Museum, London
You’re perhaps best known for chronicling the foibles of contemporary society in your novels. Was it a challenge to write a story drawing on historical fact?
It was. The difficulty is in making judgements about what aspects of the story could be treated fictionally, and which had to be faithful to some underlying truths.
How did you start researching the book?
By watching the film and then meeting families of the resisters in Germany and the UK.
The Bodleian Library in Oxford provided the originals of letters from Von Trott to Berlin.
Conrad Senior, the researcher in The Song Before it is Sung, is often overwhelmed by his work. Did you ever feel the same way?
Yes. Knowing where to stop is the problem
Does the film of the executions actually exist?
Not as far as anyone knows, although it was made.
Oxford, which is one of the settings in the novel, is close to your heart and I understand you’ve written a book about the city called THIS SECRET GARDEN: Oxford Revisited. Why is it such a special place?
For me, fresh from South Africa in the sixties, it was as if I was visiting a place and a landscape of another but parallel life. The mythology of Oxford was, and is, very powerful.
Both Mendel and Von Gottberg as immigrants to England seem to aspire to some kind of ‘Englishness’ - a somewhat elusive quality - which (correct if I am wrong!) is something of a recurring them in your work. Where does your interest in what it means to be ‘English’ come from?
The English had an enormous talent for mythologizing their past and their character. Although it is out of fashion, it still has a hold well beyond the confines of one small island.
Another recurring theme, it occurs to me, is that your protagonists often seem to be struggling to find their place in the world. Could you talk about that little?
I think consciousness and the sense of self in a vast universe is the subject of my novels, although not too overtly.
The fictional friendship between Mendel and Von Gottberg is fascinating. It’s full of incongruities and contrasts, and yet the two men share a strange affinity. How closely does it mirror the actual friendship between Berlin and Von Trott?
In some aspects it’s very close. They were friends, but probably not nearly as close as I have made them in the book. That said, I think it is true that Berlin was in some ways an intellectual hero to Trott.
Do you think Von Trott was a hero?
Yes.
Could you explain the origin of the title, The Song Before it is Sung?
It’s from a saying of Alexander Herzen, which Isaiah Berlin loved: Where is the song before it is sung? To which Berlin replied, it does not exist. It exists only in the singing or the writing. And by this he meant it was like a life, which exists only in the living of it.
Part two of this Q & A will be posted tomorrow.
Over at everyone’s favourite Canadian Litblog, BookNinja, Tom McCarthy, author of the excellent REMAINDER and MEN IN SPACE, has a characteristically literary conversation with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Toronto-based author of the much lauded THE NETTLE SPINNER (Goose Lane Editions 2005):
I don’t think literature’s ever dead - or, rather, I think it’s eternally dead, dying, and that’s the precondition for its self-perpetuation.
Click here for Tom and Kathryn’s conversation at BookNinja.
Click here for my most recent chat with Tom on the Raincoast Blog.
Clare Clark’s dark historical novel THE NATURE OF MONSTERS and Ted Kerasote’s touching memoir MERLE’S DOOR: LESSONS FROM A FREETHINKING DOG were included in The Globe and Mail’s top 100 list of books for 2007 at the weekend!
Here’s what they said about THE NATURE OF MONSTERS:
Scientific and medical theories can survive for several decades past their refutation. The author of The Great Stink, set in Victorian London, now turns to the 1700s to illustrate the persistence of fallacies, in novel about an ambitious apothecary who tries to experiment on two maids in his household. The book is a fascinating blend of history, horror and humour.
And, about MERLE’S DOOR:
Merle’s Door is a thoroughly researched, philosophical, sentimental and sometimes breathtaking book, and an adventure from beginning to end. Kerasote is engaging and enlightening, and Merle is certainly a likeable character. His master’s anthropological and sociological observations are challenging, and his love for Merle undeniable. When Merle dies, Kerasote is inconsolable, and the ending is a work of art. Anyone - dog lover or not - will be deeply moved by the book’s last few lines.
Both THE NATURE OF MONSTERS and MERLE’S DOOR are published by Harcourt in the U.S., and they have very kindly set up mini-sites for both books:
In the final part of my conversation with Tom McCarthy, we talk about the future.
WARNING!: This conversation contains adults themes and references to German literary Professors!
Part Five
DW: So, can you tell me about your new novel ‘C’?
TM: It’s advancing slowly, is the main thing I can tell you - not least because I find myself constantly doing interviews about Remainder and Men in Space (which don’t get me wrong, I love doing, especially with you Dan). I’m about a third of the way into the first draft. In a word, it’s a novel about mourning. In more words, it’s a novel about the relationship between mourning, communication technologies and family structures. It’s set around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, when radio was emerging and acquiring a quasi-mystical dimension: whereas spiritualists, for example, used to wait for their departed relatives to communicate with them by rapping on tables, now they’d trawl through the white noise, scanning the aether for hidden signals. I’ve been reading this brilliant book by a professor named Laurence Rickels called Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts. He says that in this period, technology itself becomes the crypt in which the dead are mourned - and, further, that German literature in particular is one big death cult. I love that. If Remainder was, as 3:AM Magazine claimed, essentially a French novel written in English, C will be my German one.
DW: Any final thoughts?
TM: Yes: big love to all my friends at Raincoast - and in Toronto, Canada and www-land.
DW: Thanks Tom. I hope you’ll be back in Canada soon!
Here, in the third installment with my conversation with Tom McCarthy, we talk about art and Tom’s work with the semi-fictional avant-garde network the International Necronautical Society.
WARNING: This conversation contains adult themes and references to modern art!
Part Three
DW: You frequently explore and imitate the Kafkaesque nature of the Cold War (show trials, propaganda, arcane secrecy, sound recordings, radio broadcasts etc) in your work. On top of this, your interpretation of Soviet bureaucracy/totalitarianism is almost Dadaist. Do you see yourself in that tradition as artist and writer?
With the work I’ve done in a fine-art rather than literary field, I’ve definitely plugged into those histories. My semi-fake organisation the International Necronautical Society, or INS, deliberately uses the forms and procedures both of early twentieth century avant-gardes such as Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism - manifestos, proclamations and denunciations - and of totalitarian political processes. So when we held a series of INS ‘Hearings’ in a London art gallery in front of the press and public, interrogating prominent contemporary artists and writers about their work, we looked at photos of the Stalinist show-trials and got a top theatre set designer, Laura Hopkins, to copy and reproduce the layout of the rooms: where the microphones are, where the press sits and so on. Later we broadcast a continuous stream of coded radio messages from the Institute of Contemporary Art, sending it around London by FM and over the web for rebroadcast by collaborating radio stations throughout the world, like some Cold War propaganda. What’s really interesting when you look into these histories is how the artistic and political realms mirror one another: after all, both come out of a period in which the world was being remade by man, moulded by technology, ideology and aesthetics, like an art piece. The Russian Revolution is amazing in that artists were actively involved in shaping public life during and after it - for a moment at least, before they were packed off to labour camps by Stalin.
DW: Thinking of the sound-recording aspect of both your INS work and MEN IN SPACE, have you seen the movie The Conversation?
I have now, but when I wrote the first draft of Men in Space I hadn’t. I’d seen an old Czech movie, made in the hiatus after ‘68 and quickly banned, called Ucho or ‘Ear’, all about audio surveillance, planting bugs in people’s flats. By the time I came to redraft Men in Space I had seen The Conversation, and I’m sure it had an influence. It’s a piece of genius: the audio surveillance expert lost in the labyrinth of his own phantasms and of a social and moral (or amoral) order too big for him to navigate; the death of God as represented by his hollowing out of his statue of Mary as he searches for bugs in it… My police agent in Men in Space, who starts out boasting that he can always get a strong signal from his bugs, then ends up losing the signal, all signals, and becomes a symbol of humanity abandoned by the message, by totality, by God: he has a lot in common with Coppola’s hero - whose surname, by the way, is Caul: watch that space…
DW: Parts of MEN IN SPACE reminded me of Andy Warhol‘s ‘Death and Disaster’ series (death, repetition, etc). Is Warhol an influence on your work?
Absolutely. I think he’s probably the best visual artist of all time. On top of that, his roots are Slovakian - or more precisely Carpathian-Ruthenian (the subject of a very funny documentary I’d love to see again, about Ruthenia’s bid for independence with Warhol as their national symbol: I never quite worked out if it was a parody or not) - and after the Velvet Revolution he was very big in Prague. All the Czech artists imitated him without really working out why or what it was they were trying to do. There was even this one big graffiti portrait of him that appeared on a wall opposite a flat I was sleeping in one night, which became a kind of shrine.
DW: What other artists interest you?
Loads. I like Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Josef Beuys, Francis Bacon - and then some of my contemporaries in London are doing amazing stuff: Rod Dickinson with his re-enactments of traumatic events like the Jonestown Massacre and Milgram Experiment; Mark Aerial Waller with his strange, cryptic films about nuclear contamination and secret technological undergrounds; Margarita Gluzberg with her warped shopping-and-slashing drawings. The creative dialogue in the UK seems to be taking place in the artworld at the moment: whereas mainstream publishing has purged itself of almost all high-literary content, these people I just mentioned are thinking seriously about literature in their work. Nauman too of course, with the enormous evidence of Beckett’s writing in his images and actions…
pornography/forest (1 of 5) by Eva Stenram
DW: What is hanging on your living room wall?
I’ve got a large photo by Rut Blees Luxemburg called Orpheus’s Nachtspaziergang or ‘The Night Wandering of Orpheus’. It shows a public toilet bathed in blue light, and it was taken with a twenty-minute exposure, which means that there are actually people in it who passed in front of the camera but whom you don’t see. In the same vein, I’ve got an image by my girlfriend Eva Stenram (who was a pupil of Luxemburg) from her ‘Pornography’ series, in which she’s downloaded hardcore porn from the internet then digitally removed the bodies, so you just get an ‘event-space’ with no event in it - in this case, a quilt in a forest clearing. I’ve got an Alex Hamilton print in which he’s redone the front page of a German newspaper as a series of illegible ciphers, and a drawing by Jim Harris in which two figures sit on a carpet shunting an empty canoe between them. Oh, and a postcard of Yves Klein leaping into the void, that a friend’s altered to put his own face in the background (we’d had an argument about whether Klein actually leaped or faked the whole image).
Photo: Tom McCarthy with John Calder
Continuing my chat with British author Tom McCarthy (click here for Part One), the conversation turned to recurrent themes in Tom’s work…
WARNING: The conversation contains adult themes and references to post-modernism and at least one Belgian deconstructionist!
Part Two
DW: Disintegration and death predominate in MEN IN SPACE, and they’re central in your other work. What attracts you to these themes?
TM: They’re core themes for literature. This is true from literature’s ‘highest’ form, tragedy, to its ‘lowest’, comedy - which, as everyone who’s best thought it through points out (I’m thinking of Baudelaire in The Essence of Laughter or [Paul] de Man in The Rhetoric of Temporality), is to do with breaking and falling, the end-point of all gravity being the grave. Men in Space is a tragi-comedy, and the comedy part of it is very much in the Baudelaire-de Man vein: its characters are held in gravitational force-fields, orbiting around death.
DW: Despite all the disintegration and death, there is a certain optimism in your novels too. They’re not bleak. There’s not a lot of despair. Do you see creative freedom, opportunity, possibility or even hope in disintegration?
TM: To bowdlerise Yeats: when things fall apart, some revelation is at hand. When the world shatters and falls away, transcendence becomes a possibility. To a large extent, Men in Space is an allegory of failed transcendence, as is Remainder: this is what the two books really have in common deep down. Transcendence fails - but some radical transformation takes place. I wouldn’t call my disposition in them ‘optimistic’, and, to borrow a great line from Lacan, I never speak of freedom - but in both books disintegration induces dynamic and exhilarating states, sends people somewhere extreme: to the limits of the self, the world, the whole symbolic order. That’s where literature should take you, its proper territory.
DW: Repetition, authenticity and absurdity are recurrent themes in your previous work, and they appear again in MEN IN SPACE. All these themes - death, disintegration, repetition, authenticity, the absurd - are characteristic of 20th century Modernism. Do you feel a particular affinity with the Modernist ‘project’?
TM: My god yes. That’s where we’re at - or at least the legacy we have to deal with. Modernism (which in reality isn’t a single project but rather a whole wave of interlinked events - wave upon wave, a giant tsunami) is as seminal an event as the Renaissance was, and the shock-waves of something that big take centuries to play themselves out. In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realised that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realised and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result. And then the half-ass response, that we’ve moved on into ‘post-modernism’, is just ignorant, a misuse of the term: as the man who put the word into circulation, Jean-Francois Lyotard, points out: ‘postmodernism’ isn’t some thing that comes after Modernism. Rather, it’s ‘an attitude of incredulity towards grand narratives’: that is, the tendency within the modern towards rupture and fragmentation.
Part Three Tomorrow...
Photo: Tom McCarthy with John Calder
After humble beginnings at French art-house publisher Metronome Press, Tom McCarthy’s debut novel REMAINDER hit the mainstream when it was republished Alma Books last year. Rapidly attaining the status of modern classic, it garnered remarkable, at times breathless, reviews from The Toronto Star, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and The New York Times.
Something of a departure from the clinical detachment of REMAINDER, Tom’s new novel MEN IN SPACE, which arrives in stores this month, is a looser and, in some ways, more humane novel. Already critically acclaimed, it has confirmed Tom’s position as “one of the brightest new prospects in British fiction” (The Independent).
Tom and I caught up over email during the summer and discussed his new book, the success of REMAINDER, his influences and the cultural significance of My Bloody Valentine.
Taking my lead from Mark Thwaite at Ready Steady Book, the conversation will be posted in five parts through the course of the week.
Part One
Dan Wagstaff: Could you tell me about your new novel MEN IN SPACE?
Tom McCarthy: The publisher’s blurb sums it up pretty well: “Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent and a stranded astronaut as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and onwards. The icon’s melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters’ ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.” I couldn’t put it any better myself.
DW: Where did the title come from?
TM: When the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was this Soviet cosmonaut up on a two-month mission, and none of the independent states wanted to take responsibility for bringing him back down. The Russians said it was the Ukranians’ problem, the Ukranians the Azerbaijanis’, and so on. So this poor guy had to stay up there indefinitely, stranded. He could look down on the landmass he’d left, but it wasn’t the same country anymore. He’s only a leitmotif in my book, something going on in the background while the other stories take place - but all of the characters are like him in some way or another: alienated, stranded, watching a fragmenting world through a screen. The saint in the stolen icon painting is also floating in the sky in a Plexiglass-like halo while the landscape below him is dismantled: another man in space. In a way, he’s the main character, even though, again, he isn’t a character properly speaking; but he embodies all the other characters’ quandaries. There are women in the novel as well as men by the way, but ‘People in Space’ would have been a rubbish title.
DW: The novel is set in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution. Was the book based on your personal experiences?
TM: Yes. I lived in Prague from ‘91 to ‘93. It was an amazing time. A writer, Vaclav Havel, had come to power and put all his friends in parliament. You’d go to some gig and the drummer with five earrings and a spliff in his mouth was the minister for culture or whatever. I fell in with all these artists who were surfing on the wave of post-revolutionary euphoria - before the whole thing wiped out. The city was also a hub for young international Bohemians, because it was extraordinarily cheap and had a certain mystique about it, a real buzz. All these excited articles in American magazines were billing it as ‘The Paris of the Nineties’, which brought thousands upon thousands of sub-sub-Hemingways bearing down on the place…
DW: The subsequent break-up of Czechoslovakia is a key backdrop to the novel too. What is it that interests you thematically about this?
TM: It’s the fragmentation: things falling apart, the old order collapsing. It’s always a dynamic situation, whatever period of history it happens in. There’s a sense of enormous opportunity, and also of enormous disappointment when this opportunity isn’t seized. Heinrich Böll finds a similar situation in post-war, post-partition Germany in And Never Said a Word: the chance to create a new, autonomous order that will uplift a generation flickering into view like something delicate and miraculous - and then being snuffed out, with enormous human consequences.
DW: The events in the book are seen through the eyes of various different people living in Prague, and yet MEN IN SPACE is more intimate than the first-person narrative of REMAINDER. Why do think this is?
TM: It’s a much more human book, most definitely. Not more humanistic, but more human. As a critic from the London Review of Books pointed out, the characters in Remainder become less and less human as the novel progresses, tend more and more towards the status of automata, until they’re just tokens to be shuffled around by the psychotic narrator, figments of his warped subjectivity. In Men in Space each character has his or her own subjectivity - but those subjectivities don’t connect properly. So ultimately it’s not more intimate: just more intimately disconnected.
Part Two, tomorrow...
Photo credit: Alisa Conan
Although Jim Bartley’s startling debut novel DRINA BRIDGE has been out for almost a year, it still seems to be garnering a lot of attention. Prairie Fire Magazine have just reviewed the book for their website:
Jim Bartley’s Drina Bridge is a sophisticated novel. The weaving of tales is deft… Characters are well drawn and tensions are well crafted… He writes a compelling story, a poignant lesson in a particular history and in the contradictions of war. Drina Bridge, inventive in the telling, takes a close-up look at brutality, at love and friendship
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