One of the greatest pleasures of the Miami Book Fair is listening to authors read from their works and then talk about them – their writing processes, answering questions about where characters and ideas come from, discussing what’s important to them and how they translate their views of the world into fiction, and their nonfiction.
This year seemed especially rich in opportunities for a book lover like me to hear what they had to say. For instance, three important women writers and National Book Award winners and nominees – Tea Obreht (The Tiger’s Wife a 2011 National Book Award finalist), Hillary Jordan (When She Woke), and Jaimy Gordon (The Lord of Misrule) shared how in each case, their “made up” stories required and depended on extensive research coupled with high imagination.
Gordon spoke of having lived and worked on a racetrack for three years, which informed her 2010 National Book Award winning novel about the three people whose lives revolve around a race horse named The Lord of Misrule. But one of her characters, the black stable hand, Medicine Ed, is a root folk medicine practitioner, and to lend accuracy to her account, she needed input from “Pockets,” an old black track hand who knew recipes and for Medicine Ed’s voice, she borrowed “Bubbles Riley’s sentences.
The author of Mudbound, Hillary Rainey, has written a novel that is a retelling of The Scarlet Letter and a cross between Margaret Atwood and Nathaniel Hawthorne. When She Woke is a dystopic vision of the future in which criminals are genetically altered so their skin is made a different color, depending on their crime. Rainey spoke to a geneticist who told her how the science behind her premise could actually be accomplished. According to Rainey, the more she talked to the scientist, the more excited by the possibility she became. But research, is an iceberg under the story and only a little sticks up underneath. For this author, writing about the future tends to free her from the shackles of facts.
Carolyn See, in The Washington Post, wrote a scathing review of this controversial novel that definitely pillories American "Christianists."
Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert K. Massie, is famous for his biographies of Russian royalty and Dreadnaught. His latest book is Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. He is an interesting writer whose background as a naval officer, targeting nuclear weaponry informs his writing and his world view, and led to his fascination and love for Russian history and people. “I am a very slow writer,” he says, “who writes very long books.” He remains optimistic about the dangers of a possible nuclear holocaust being more unlikely and much reduced since the end of the Cold War now that both the US and Russia are dismantling so many warheads.
The twists of fate intrigue him. Catherine became the ruler of the Russian Empire by a chain of events not designed to lead up to it. The Russian Empress, Elizabeth, was engaged to a German prince of Catherine’s family. Sadly, he died before the marriage took place, but Elizabeth remembered him and the German family she had met and liked. When the time came for her son to be married, she sent for a bride from that family, and at 14, Catherine was sent to Russia “on approval.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Massie revealed an interesting tidbit. Russian czarist history is well preserved, but the documents remained secreted under lock and key during the 70 years of communist domination and are only now open to Russian and foreign eyes. He told us that the desire for a benevolent tyrant glows within the hearts of many Russians. While the West hoped for change under Yeltsin, it had pinned its hopes on an alcoholic who turned state institutions over to oligarchs and made Putin PM. Then Gorbachev became the leader, which was a good thing because he recognized the dangers and horror of nuclear war – Chernobyl has been a significant lesson that still informs Russian thinking on that topic. With the return of Putin looming, Russia is now disenfranchising small businesses and journalists are being assassinated on the streets. Russia’s future is wobbling down a path that is unpredictable.
There is hardly any experience that can be likened to being in the same room with three great authors – four if you count the introducer – all at once. Alan Cheuse (new novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert) introduced Michael Ondaatje (The Cat’s Table), Russell Banks (Lost Memory of Skin), and William Kennedy (Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes) – three white-haired men whose body of work represents some of the finest being produced today.
Ondaatje has written a novel that may guarantee him the Nobel Prize. It is a lyrical coming of age story that employs the motif of being set in a closed and captive world aboard a ship sailing from Colombo to London and based, in part, on his own life’s story. The cat’s table is the table in the shipboard dining room placed farthest from the captain’s table, representing the station of the least favored and important in relation to those most favored and important. When he read aloud, I knew I had to read this book and ration it. It came to me that I should take the same amount of time to complete it as the days encompassed by the voyage – 21. Ondaatje’s premise is that “Our lives would be made larger by the presence of others in interacting strangers.”
Banks’ edgy novel is set in the panhandle of Florida and is about a sex offender who, after serving his time, must find a place and way to live. Because of draconian laws in Florida prohibiting such people from living within a certain number of feet of where children live and congregate, it’s nearly impossible to relocate them after their prison time. This is a working class or blue-collar novel that explores the limits in logic of a life in limbo. The main character is forced to live on a boat under a bridge in Apalachicola where he meets the Professor and other characters who help him find a future.
Kennedy won the Pulitzer for Ironweed and, compared to Ondaatje’s soft South African vowels and Banks’ drawled ones, his accent grates with harsh overtones of the North delivered in an almost aggressive manner. When he reads, he acts the parts of his characters with emphatic gestures and fumbling fingers. The book is a delightful melange of fictional characters meeting historical ones. Quinn, an ex-Miami Herald reporter, goes to Cuba in 1957, believing he’s going to write a novel. He meets Hemingway at the bar of the El Floridita Hotel who gives the aspiring novelist the following advice. “Remove the colon and semi-colon keys from your typewriter. Shun adverbs, seriously.” About his book, which is laugh out loud funny (in sharp contrast to Ironweed), Kennedy says this, “Sometimes the quest for failure fails.”
During the Q & A that followed their readings, they were each asked if writing their novels gets easier or more difficult.
M.O.. Always feels like it’s going to be more difficult.
R.B. I think I’d be concerned if it didn’t stay difficult or confusing.
W.K.. I took six years to write my second novel; 3- 4 years for the next. This one took 10 years. I thought I’d learned, but you have to make it up each time.
Q. It seems each of you read passages about meaning and can you ever know what you think you know.
M.O. I wrote about a boy, then half way through, he looks back to discover that his memory is unreliable.
R.B. We’re all of a certain age (indicating his fellow authors) and we all realize you’re no longer sure about what you know.
W.K. That’s just the nature of life. I never know where I am. Where am I? This isn’t the Miami I knew when I was here in the mid 50s. My novel isn’t finished, by the way. I just abandoned it, and there it is. I think that’s where it is.
Q. (to M.O.) I didn’t understand the ending of Divisiadero. Why?
M.O. I didn’t see it as an ending. The way I see it, the story of the French poet is sort of upside down version of Anna. Some readers are furious that Coop disappears. But that does happen in real life – brutal endings to relationships and acquaintanceships.
Alan Cheuse “We do offer counseling. But the best thing to do is buy another novel.
And that’s what I did.
Next installment: Dava Sobel and James Gleick talk about Copernicus and the Information Age, respectively.
Last installment: China's most important and influential writers come to SoFla where they stir the pot.
Hope to see you then!
UPDATE: The e-Readers & Book Lovers Club Selection Announcement Oh dear -- it's a tie. Another executive decision is required. So, I've decided to save everyone money for holiday gift buying and we'll read (a free on Amazon e-book) Spirit Falls by Robert E. Townsend that received high praise from Robert Olen Butler. Discussion here, THU, Dec. 8th, 2 PM (ET).
Spirit Falls is a coming-of-age novel set on the empty and hardscrabble borderland between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, a story of childhood friendship growing into profound love.
The gypsy-like refugee Marina Svetaeva unexpectedly joins Ricky Belisle and Marie Jeanne Charbonneau at curtain call on the night of that last Christmas program. The stranger’s arrival looses a cascade of events that ultimately finds Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100-year Lake Superior storm. If she survives he vows an ultimate sacrifice in expiation of his shame.
Ricky Belisle is a boy born to first-generation immigrants. They bring with them the beliefs, manners and stories of the homeland and in so doing they create a disconnect in Ricky that forces him to begin the exploration that will eventually take him away from the land that has leached into his bones.
Marie Jeanne Charbonneau, “M.J.,” a French-Canadian tomboy, is his best, his only, friend who shows Ricky that the world is wider than he thinks and that much of life takes place in the space between the words. Their relationship sparks the hunt for truth within themselves.