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!