Jacob Newberry’s ‘Summer’ and Vanessa Manko’s ‘The Interrogation’ both feature in the new issue of Granta, Exit Strategies. Here the two contributors discuss the resilience of the natural world, the dangers of submitting to categorisation and ways of escape.

Illustration by Michael Salu from ‘The Interrogation’ by Vanessa Manko in Granta 118: Exit Strategies.

Dear Jacob,

I like imagining you in Jerusalem, and I’m happy to meet you via this exchange. Your piece was one of the first pieces I read, drawn, I think, to its title, the succinct and direct ‘Summer’. I was immediately struck by the sense of place and the broader themes which, for me, seem to be grappling with the idea of city and self submerged or hidden – under water and closeted, respectively. I was so impressed with the way you spread the story out over time so that the reader feels the emotional erosion – of identity and relationships – and how that parallels the very real erosion of the Gulf coast. But there is also an active rebuilding here. Jay chooses to get married to Karen, to build a seemingly ‘normal’ life and homes and bars and offices are rebuilt so that both the literal landscape and the more figurative, psychological and emotional terrain is altered. With both comes a difficult redefinition of city and self and relationships. And meanwhile the water is still rising, future storms are on the horizon and I couldn’t help but feel that those new structures – the buildings, the fences, the feigned ‘normal’ life – may face impending future disintegration, which adds to the feeling of impermanence throughout ‘Summer’. Because your piece is so informed by, and about, a specific place, peopled with individuals shaped and changed by that place, and because I see that you are now studying in Jerusalem, I wonder if you are finding your current location to be an influence on your work or do you find that distance from a place is equally inspiring and/or necessary to your writing?

Thank you for writing such a complex, deeply moving piece.

Vanessa

Dear Vanessa,

Thanks for the very thoughtful comments on my essay, and for starting this exchange.

I’m really intrigued by your impression of the impermanence of reconstruction, both physical and psychological. I don’t think I intended to add that element in, but it certainly feels like an undercurrent in my emotional memory of that time and place. When disaster hits, once the shock has begun to wear off, I think what comes after is often a sense of resignation. For a lot of us from the coast, this has manifested as a lingering anxiety – that the ‘next one’ will be bigger. Jay’s marriage, then, feels like a stand-in for a certain variety of desperate hoping: for normalcy, for a simple and speedy recovery. Sometimes the only thing we can do in response to our deep panic is to flee it altogether. I hope I presented Jay’s decision as coming out of that complicated place.

As for the distance you asked about, I do think it’s essential. Living in Jerusalem is affecting my writing in a lot of ways, but I think most of them are currently unavailable to me. I feel like I’ll spend a great many years unravelling whatever is being stored inside of me just now.

Speaking of distance, I’m wondering how you would describe Voronkov’s central anxiety in your piece, ‘The Interrogation’. I was struck by the cross-genre presentation of it. What you’re taking from theatre seems to add to the reader’s feeling of alienation, though I was also very struck by the slow unfolding of Voronkov’s admission. The surface concern is deportation, but would you say that his real worry is the accepting of a label – and its accompanying identity – that he wishes to reject?

Best,
Jacob

Dear Jacob,

Yes. I think you are right to distinguish between these two concerns – deportation vs. the anarchist label. What’s happening here too is a clash of cultures, languages, resulting in misunderstandings. Voronkov is proud and passionate about his views of society and rejects the label ‘anarchist’ which implies violence and then overthrow of government. He is a peaceful idealist, but his forced confession results in a label he ends up railing against his whole life, which is harder to shake than deportation.

I hadn’t thought of this as cross-genre so I appreciate your interpretation. I read plays for dialogue and do enjoy how drama unfolds through that dialogue. My research led me to trials of arrested Russians and I was drawn to the immediacy of the Q&A form. Originally, I thought I’d write an entire narrative scene, blending into the rest of the novel, but when I got to the interrogation, there was a perfect moment for a page break and then, like the door to the interrogation room closing, it fell straight into the Q&A. I suppose it is very much like watching characters on a stage and I wanted to present how unrelenting the interrogator is; his inquisitor wants Voronkov to be something and makes him into it. I hope I’ve shown that here.

This makes me think of identity and labels in regards to the different choices that you and Jay make – one to live an authentic life; Jay taking what may at the time seem the simpler path, but, in fact, is probably filled with future strife. Jay does struggle with his choice, seeking your approval, and the line, ‘It’s not like he’s dead’ stayed with me, because, for you, it’s implied that Jay’s decision is very much like a death. The irony is moving too since Jay, at one point, in response to your coming out, is the one who tells you ‘this is what we’re living for’.

I wonder if his marriage then felt like a betrayal to you, even as ‘Summer’, overall, is a great exercise in empathy and an attempt to understand? And, also, if you find a paradox here: the strength for you to come out, to ‘live like this’, could be seen as equal to the strength it takes Jay to deny his sexual identity? Or is it more of a weakness in Jay, resulting in your disappointment in him that he cannot accept his true identity?

Enjoy your trip to the Dead Sea!

All best,
Vanessa

Dear Vanessa,

I’m really looking forward to my day at the Dead Sea. I can’t express how terrifically I’m in need of a day of glorious, barrelling sunshine.

I’m glad to hear you read the essay as empathetic. His marriage, yes, felt like a betrayal, as strange as that sounds. My friends from that time were so instrumental in the long process of gathering strength enough to be openly gay in Mississippi, and Jay was the best of all of us. (I think anyone who meets him would agree.) So to see him turning away from everything felt like a profound – if comprehensible – failing. And then what unnerved me most was the way it revealed the frailty of the entire underlying system: whatever hopes and longings were still sustaining me had already proven insufficient for him.

I hope in the process of writing about it that I’ve come to understand his decision a little better. And you’re right, it might have required a different kind of strength than I recognize. I’m probably still too close to it, emotionally speaking, to really know.

Thinking of this makes me further admire the emotional distance you utilize throughout your piece. In my reading, the pathos of the affair is appealingly muted, and I’m suspecting this has a great deal to do with your use of dialogue. In particular, the interrogator’s language is designed to penetrate Voronkov’s defences through the use of inhuman, almost robotic formulations. This has the effect of implicating the reader in a way that mimics the alienation and isolation of an interrogation. Was this a strategy you were aiming for, or did it come about naturally?

Warmly,
Jacob

Dear Jacob,

I don’t think I consciously thought of implicating the reader in the interrogation, but I did very much want to show how the repeated questioning, the insistence, and the rhythm and pacing was designed to strip down Austin’s defences, to catch him off guard. I also wanted to emphasize that the inquisitor had an agenda – to make him confess to being an anarchist. But I’m happy to know you felt the sadness of the whole affair was muted. I had feared it might be too over-the-top, too visceral, which is why I thought I might turn it into a whole scene, with narration and so on . . . Your comments help me to see that something is gained from not adding that narration!

Speaking of rhythm and flow and pacing, ‘Summer’, in its structure, weaves back and forth in time and place and is set over several summers, which, for me, added to the atmosphere of erosion. You’ve really captured the fleeting nature of summer and how it’s a season of homecomings and inevitable, summer’s-end partings. I felt an ebb and flow throughout the piece – the sometimes turbulent, sometimes tender emotions, and of course the sea – and it also made me think of the line you use from Long Day’s Journey into Night: ‘I’m always dreaming and forgetting . . . ’ which alludes to and emphasizes the sense of disintegration. I wonder if you had the play in mind while writing, if it was an influence on your work? And this also makes me think of your use of the word ‘frailty’ in your last email. Mary, in the play, Jay, relationships, the environment could perhaps all be seen as frail?

Take care,
Vanessa

Dear Vanessa,

I’m not sure if I had the play in mind while I was writing, but I remember turning to it in the weeks after Jay let us know his decision. I had read it years before, and that moment of Mary’s wilful disintegration, her choice to fall back into the medicinal blackness, the despair of her family and their inability to do anything to change it . . . I needed that moment a great deal. Of course, that scene is one of the bleaker moments in literature, so whatever comfort I was getting from it was more of a consolation of some kind.

The fragility of the world was definitely a surprise for me after Katrina, though in truth this really only refers to the human-made version. The natural world is, of course, resilient and tenacious. I’d like to believe this is also true of the human heart.

Is it fair of me to ask for a bit of what happens after the deportation in your piece? I know it’s part of a novel you’re working on, so you don’t need to give me a plot summary. I guess I’m just really interested in how the deportation affects his life back in Russia. Or does he find a way to come back?

Cheers,
Jacob

Dear Jacob,

Thank you for leaving me with the image of the human heart being as resilient and tenacious as Mother Nature. When we use language like ‘heart-broken’ or ‘shattered’ to describe loss in love or life, it’s easy to forget that we can heal and rebuild and grow stronger, like the cities and towns on the Gulf coast, I hope.

‘Summer’ made me go back to ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ and on the back cover of my edition there is a great quote from the critic Walter Kerr. He interprets the play as something O’Neill wrote as ‘an act of forgiveness . . . ’ and to be ‘reassuring [his family’s] ghosts, wherever they may be, that he knows everything awful they have done, and loves them’. I thought of you and Jay when I read this line, and, so as much of an exercise in empathy, perhaps ‘Summer’ is one of forgiveness too?

As for Voronkov’s life after deportation, returning to Russia brings more upheaval since the country is in the midst of civil war and he deals with a different, though no less humiliating, kind of persecution there, eventually ending up in Mexico. Overall, I’ve tried to show how the events of his life affected him, while also dealing with his quest to return to the US. I won’t reveal what happens, but I’m glad I’ve piqued your curiosity.

There is a real feeling of persecution in ‘Summer’ too, if that isn’t too strong a word here. Living in New York City, it feels foreign to think about programs to ‘overcome’ homosexuality and so your essay reminded me that there are still places in our country where being gay is not acceptable (in the same way that being Russian was a danger for Voronkov in my piece). It’s so very different from New York and I admire the courage it took you to come out in such an atmosphere. But then again Mississippi is your home state which complicates the relationship to it for you, I’m sure. Do you return often? Will you one day build your life there or is someplace else more home for you now?

This has been such an enriching exchange for me, and I look forward to reading more of your work. Perhaps we will meet somewhere in between New York and Jerusalem.

Warmly,
Vanessa

Dear Vanessa,

Thank you for sharing that quotation! What a generous, perfect reading of the play. I realized in the course of writing the essay that it was intended as a means to forgive myself, mostly for not being clever or smart or strong enough to talk him out of his decision. I needed to believe that I had done everything I could, and by the end of it, I think I felt like I had. I came away from the essay finally believing that I had loved him well and loved him enough.

As for the camps – yes, they’re monstrous and real and looming somewhere silently in all our imaginations, colouring whatever joys and successes we accumulate. In truth, I imagine we savour our small victories perhaps more than people who’ve never been under that lingering cloud. This isn’t to say it’s all gloom and despair – as you said, it’s my home, and a beautiful place. I love it and miss it tremendously. The people I know who come from more liberal places (I have a lot of friends from New York) seem to find my descriptions of being openly gay in Mississippi as basically incomprehensible, and I have to say that gladdens me. An acquaintance from London recently described ‘Summer’ as ‘tropical and exotic’, which I also found quite charming.

I really can’t say if I’ll end up living there again. Sometimes I hope I will; other times I’m certain I won’t.

Thank you for giving me a peek into the future of Voronkov’s life; I’m eager to read the book when it comes out. Thank you for giving me an engaging, thoughtful look into a time, a place and a particular set of anxieties I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered.

I’ve also really enjoyed this exchange. I have a feeling we’ll meet before too long!

Warmly,
Jacob ■

You can read ‘Summer’ by Jacob Newberry and ‘The Interrogation’ by Vanessa Manko in Granta 118: Exit Strategies. The issue is in stores now and available for download as an e-book. You can also subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Want to continue the conversation? Jacob Newberry and Vanessa Manko will also be featuring in the following events:

Jacob Newberry:

The Tel Aviv Launch
9 February, 7 p.m., Sipur Pashut, 36 Shabazi Street, Neve Tezedek, Tel Aviv 65150

Join contributor Jacob Newberry for an evening of dramatic readings and conversation that explore personal and political exit strategies.

Vanessa Manko:

The New York Launch
7 February, 7 p.m., BookCourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Granta editor John Freeman launches the new issue with Granta 118 contributors Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko, Claire Messud and Susan Minot.

Thirty Girls, The Interrogation and City Boy
9 February, 7 p.m., 192 BOOKS, 192 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011

Judy Chicurel, Aleksandar Hemon, Vanessa Manko and Susan Minot explore the consequences of things beyond our control through readings from Granta 118 and conversation with Granta associate editor Patrick Ryan.

Yesterday Granta was delighted to announce two New Poets: Soledad Marambio and Caleb Klaces. In the week before the simultaneous publication of their poems the two talented young writers exchanged emails to discuss each other’s work, reading habits, being in several places at once and finding intimacy in the modern, hyper-connected world. You can read the full exchange below, beginning with a message from Caleb to Soledad.

Soledad,

It’s been a pleasure to read your poems. I’m very glad to be starting up this exchange.

It seems appropriate to be making contact by email, and odd, too, that I can send this instantly and directly to you without knowing even what country you are in. It occurred to me that in ‘sleeping far from home’, you have people speaking on the phone, watching TV, and asking for a book, which will soon be making its way from home to somewhere distant – all ways of sending messages, with different conventions and speed, across the world.

I’m tempted to draw a parallel between these and poetry. Phones and email speed talk up, but poems, and your poems in particular, seem to slow language down. They are deliberate and concentrated. They’re precisely regulated. I wanted to ask if you think about your poems like this – in relation to other ways of sending messages home? Are your poems anything like letters – or phone calls even? Have your poems been affected by email?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Caleb

Dear Caleb,

You are right. I do like to think of my poems as messages. When I started writing the collection ‘sleeping far from home’ belongs to, I was in my third year away from Santiago, Chile. Home. I hadn’t seen my parents or the friends I grew up with in all that time. And I’m not very good with Skype and I’m lazy with emails and phone calls, even though I prefer them. I like to feel the real distance and not pretend that it isn’t there because I have a computer. So the poems were a way to deal with that distance and the longing that came with it. A way to let my people know about my life here in New York because my other ways to talk with them are not very fluent or intimate. So, in that sense, I don’t think email has had much of an influence on my writing. If you see that influence though, I’d be happy to talk about it.

I’d like to talk about your poem, ‘The Sun in a Box’. I love the way it builds alternative spaces: caves, places to hide from a reality that is always present. I’m curious, now that you mention emails, about how the internet appears in your work (the suggestion to post footage of the expanding insulation, ‘like a sun in a box,’ a screen cracking). For you, is the web a place to hide or to open oneself up? What is the relation you see between that and your poetry?

Best,

Soledad

Soledad,

Yes, it’s amazing how Skype can end up making you feel more lonely, isn’t it. Often it’s more a reminder of the distance than a closing of it.

I can relate to your longing. The sequence that ‘The Sun in a Box’ comes from was written mostly in Austin, Texas, where I lived for two years. The poem was finished soon after I’d come back to Birmingham, which is where I grew up. While I’d been away, the place had been partially reproduced for me on Skype and on the phone, as well as on news sites and radio, and in books. So there were simultaneous layers of experience going on – memories, but also that feeling of looking down on myself while I was catching up with my dad in the house he now lives in on his own.

This seems increasingly the norm in parts of the world with broadband and smartphones. Just sitting in front of a computer in an office, or walking around a supermarket with a phone in your hand, you can see from space and from tiny cameras inside the body at the same time as everything else actually in front of you. With all the screens you’re both looking at and living inside, reality can feel a bit like a Cubist painting, so that often I don’t feel a separation between this proliferation of points-of-view and my experience of the basic things, like keeping the house warm. But it’s always one of the questions that poetry is a way of pursuing: how much of this experience is shared, and what of it is different for different people across the world?

One of the things I found being away was that I was more deliberate in what I read, partly because reading was a more fluent and intimate companion, as you put it, when relations with other people weren’t. I wonder what and who you return to in your reading, and whether that’s affected by your being away from home?

Warmly,

Caleb

Dear Caleb,

Since I left Chile (four years ago) I haven’t returned too much to anything, except Roberto Bolaño. Last year I reread The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile and The Insufferable Gaucho. His dark sense of humour and the rhythm of his prose always make me feel that I’m in a familiar place. But other than that I have been reading a lot of authors that I have always heard about and never read before and also a bunch of names that I have discovered for the first time here. Being away has been a certain influence on these discoveries I’m making. Everything is new: the streets, the bread in the morning, the subway, the bookstores, the language. The first two years I just read fiction and nonfiction prose and after that I felt that I was ready to start reading poetry in English. Since then I’ve read a lot and keep going back to Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Donald Hall and in translation the amazing work of Zbigniew Herbert and Cesare Pavese (I always think that Pavese must sound better in Spanish than in English, but I didn’t want to wait to get a Spanish version of his complete poems so I got a bilingual one: Italian-English. Not that I know Italian but I like to pretend that I do while I read his poetry out loud.)

The English language has very much influenced the way I write in Spanish. I was wondering how the two years that you lived in Texas changed the way you write (the style, the voice, the subject or any other feature of your work). I know that you continued to write in English, but was there another way of speaking that you picked up? More importantly I assume that in relation to Birmingham, Texas might not be just a different culture but a totally different world?

Abrazos (that’s Spanish for hugs)

Soledad

Soledad,

I love what you said about Pavese. I’ve been reading Peter Handke’s Nonsense and Happiness in a bilingual edition recently. I know no German at all, but sometimes, where the English translation feels wrong, I end up staring at the original, trying to divine from it a better poem. If the German wasn’t there, I think I’d be less likely to imagine this third text for myself – so it makes for a different, and hopeful, kind of reading.

For me, there seems to be a time lag between being in a place and its effects. Looking back, I may have been protective over the language I was using while in Texas – and how I wrote was defined to some extent in opposition to American English. Not even how other poets I knew were writing, which was in very diverse ways, but the spoken language. While I was there, I was writing a lot with Sir Thomas Browne – a seventeenth-century doctor from Norfolk, England; now, in London, I seem to be looking more often to contemporary Americans like Ben Lerner and Jack Gilbert. I’ve also become interested in the possibilities of more expansive, extended verse (like Carson’s
Autobiography of Red). There are loads of dead writers from both sides of the Atlantic to read for that – Milton, Blake, Pound – but, of those writing now, the vitality and stamina and risk seems to me concentrated over there.

The landscape has to have had an effect, too. Texas is endless and empty. I’m fond of London, but it sometimes feels like it’s built underground.

I’m intrigued by how English has influenced your Spanish. Are there ways you write now that you couldn’t have done before?

Caleb

Caleb,

Totally. I used to write much longer sentences or verses. This creates a specific and intricate rhythm, a texture that I like but that I’m happy to be breaking. English is more economical and direct than Spanish. It’s common to find a phrase or a verse that in just one line gives you a punch. I think – I hope – reading in English has helped me to be able to construct powerful images with very few words. Before, to write an idea that now takes me five words I would have written at least three lines. I think that living in an English-speaking environment gave me the opportunity to listen and contemplate Spanish from the outside, like if it weren’t so naturally mine. Because of that I saw my language and understood it and used it in ways that were new for me, which at first was a very subconscious process.

Speaking about new things that give meaning to old things, I’d like to know more about your literary trips to the past. Why did you decide to write with Sir Thomas Browne? Were you reading or rereading his work at the same time you were writing your poems?

Soledad

Soledad,

I came across Browne and loved his writing, then became interested in him personally, so I was reading biographies and history too. He was devout, but completely single-minded; he wrote dogged and popular myth-busting books (with the results of experiments he’d undertaken on an ostrich in his garden, for example), and what we’d now call autobiography. Generally, I would say similar things you’ve said about learning a new language as I would about writing using other texts and people’s lives. It helps you see your own life and language from a distance. Or even more than that, it’s an attempt to be in several different places all at once. To make yourself bigger and contain more. There were tensions with Browne because I both feel a real kinship with him, and can’t help having arguments with him. He gets under my skin, so there’s a push and pull in that attempt to expand and speak in different voices.

The poems of yours I’ve read are enviably concise. Browne had the opposite effect on me – the poems started to sprawl.

Sincerest thanks for this exchange.

Keep in touch,

Caleb

Caleb

Thank you very much.

To finish I’d like to take what you said and tell you that reading you was for me a way to be in different places at the same time: a prehistoric cave, an afternoon in front of the computer, a moment in a box. Thanks for the marvelous trips. I’ll keep in touch.

Best,

Soledad ■

You can read Caleb Klaces’s poem ‘The Sun in a Box’ here and Soledad Marambio’s poem ‘sleeping far from home’ here.

Photo by Dan Sinclair.

Jon McGregor talks about reworking his first published story ‘What the Sky Sees’ from the female perspective and reads from both the original and updated version, ‘In Winter the Sky’. He also discusses his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire and his new short story collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.

The Granta Podcast Episode 30. by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

‘In Winter the Sky’ is taken from This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor, published by Bloomsbury on 2 February 2012 at £14.99. © Jon McGregor 2012.

Exit Strategies Live
6 February, doors open at 6.30 p.m., event starts at 7 p.m., The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. £7, including a copy of Granta 118. Please RSVP to events@granta.com to reserve your place. Payment will be taken at the door.

In this special edition of Liars' League, Jon McGregor joins us to read from and discuss ‘In Winter the Sky’, his first-ever published story, found in Granta 78, and recently revised for his new story collection and the online edition of Exit Strategies. But first, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of desire and conflict from Granta’s latest issue.

John Burnside made his first contribution to Granta in issue 94: On the Road Again. One of the most prolific writers of his generation, he has, since 1988, published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Asylym Dance, one collection of short stories and eight novels, including Glister. He is the winner of the Whitbread Poetry award (for The Aslym Dance) and has twice been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He talks to Rachael Allen about the presence of nature in his poetry, the role of myth in his latest novel (A Summer of Drowning) and learning to live with a feeling of nothingness.

RA: In your poems, nature and humanity often appear to swap roles. Are you trying to show us the tangled relationship between the two?

JB: I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace. I do hope that I come up against the harsh, the bloody, the seemingly cruel in what we think of as nature – including human nature. And I hope I preserve a sense of the mystery of that cruelty. Sometimes it’s a very beautiful cruelty – it’s not cruel, per se, of course, it only seems so to us, because we are attached to our own interests – and, on I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace.occasion, a sense of that beauty lifts one above one’s attachments. So that line between ‘the human’ and ‘nature’, the ragged edge of culture, so to speak, is still a source of fascination to me and a challenge. A challenge in the sense that an annunciation is a challenge – it calls us to possibilities that we hadn’t imagined, and perhaps wouldn’t have chosen, in what we think of as an ideal world. Maybe there’s a suspicion, alongside this, that the ideal world is sort of there, if we can only meet it halfway. Poetry is, I think, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of speech that closes down the possibility of such a meeting, an attempt to keep oneself open linguistically and sensually and imaginatively to the world as it is, rather than using it as a movie screen for received ideas and second-rate wishes. Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.

Do you attempt to bring about some kind of environmental awareness in your poetry?

Well, I’m not sure how I feel about this now. When I started writing poetry I had some naïve ideas about it, but that’s changed somewhat – partly because there is so much ‘environmental’ poetry about these days and some of it is marvellous and challenging, but some of it feels a bit New-Labour-Focus-Groupish in its orthodoxy. I still succumb to an old temptation to think poetry can make a specific point - the last very obvious environmental poem I wrote was a bemused gasp of horror at the simplistic view of the pro-wind lobby, so-called ‘greens’ who haven’t given the issue a moment’s real thought (or done much research), with the result that they are merely helping fat cats get (huge to massive) subsidies to erect gigantic commercial turbines that will have no effect on our carbon footprint, but will make a lot of the wrong people even richer, with further disastrous consequences for social justice and the environment. They are being played, in short. Frieda Hughes wrote very eloquently about this recently – but she was wise enough to do so in prose. And I think this is important: poetry sacrifices something when it starts campaigning for the environment, it has to work more subtly on how we imagine ourselves, and we could do with imagining ourselves as fuller, more sensual, more responsive – wilder, in the fullest sense of that term - than we are. If we could become authentically wild in our way of being, then we might save – in a wu wei sense of saving by not needing to save – ‘what’s left of the planet’ (by which, I mean not physical fabric as much as imaginative space).

You have been publishing poetry collections since 1988 and have brought out either a novel or collection just about every year. That’s a pretty prolific output by most standards. How do you manage to produce so much material so regularly?

There’s probably something reflexive in this, but I don’t actually think of myself as prolific. And I have to confess that I find my lack of a writing schedule fairly frustrating. I have a very full-time job and two incredible, captivating and endlessly challenging sons – and I do protest that fitting in the writing I’d like to do (both in terms of ambition and quality) is fairly difficult. That When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam saysmay sound odd, for someone who publishes so often, but the other side of my life is that I never stop thinking about my writing, or almost never. When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam says – rolling the lines around at the back of my head while in business meetings or driving to see clients or whatever. I work in similar ways now – which means I can seem distracted, occasionally lacking in the social graces, or just plain rude at times. I do write a good deal at night – insomnia may well be the defining malaise of my life. But really, I very rarely have the luxury of a writing schedule – in the past I have spent time away on residencies or retreats, and I got huge amounts of actual writing down on paper then. But the thinking, the working out, the imagining – that happens pretty much as and when.

Your new novel mixes myth and legend with what is actually true. What was the inspiration behind the novel?

It all started when I first visited the Arctic Circle, (which I now realise was back in 1996). I was invited to the University of Tromsø to take part in a symposium. As soon as I got there I fell in love with the place – especially with the island of Kvaløya, to which my friend Dag Andersson introduced me on that first trip, and to which I returned several times over the next few years (as well as travelling in Finnmark and northern Finland at various times). During one of those visits, I heard the story of the huldra. She is usually associated with places further south (if you go on the little tourist train at Flåm, you can actually see her – the company pays a local beauty to dance around in a red dress through the summer months, hard by the railway line), but some further research suggested that she was a more or less universal figure. Briefly, she is a troll who appears as a beautiful woman to beguile a young man, drawing him away from his safe world and into danger, usually leading to his death. What interested me about the core story is the detail that, if the young man can look behind her, if he can look past the illusion for a moment, he sees through it – in the Norwegian version, by noticing that this lovely woman has a cow’s tail, and in the Swedish version, by discovering a kind of Sartrean nothingness at her back, and so understanding that there’s a sort of flaw in the fabric of the universe there. This is what caught my attention initially – this sense that the story said something about the illusions that inform our social and sexual lives – and what happens to someone who sees that gap in the fabric of the world and has to accommodate it in order to carry on. For me, this is a central concern, even an obsession: Sartre says ‘nothingness haunts being’ – and I cannot help but feel that living in the wild demands that we learn to live with that nothingness. ■

The Summer of Drowning is published by Jonanthan Cape.

Photo of Juan Pablo Villalobos discussing his novel with the Liberian Pigmy Hippos at London Zoo, by Rita Platt.

Juan Pablos Villalobos’s novel Down the Rabbit Hole (published by And Other Stories) tells the story of Tochtli, the son of a drug baron who lives in a palace surrounded by luxury, corruption and mystery. This hilarious and experimental first novel, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, follows a child’s quest to acquire a new pet for his private zoo, a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. The author spoke to his translator, Rosalind Harvey, about the way that Mexican politics informed the writing of his first novel, why there are few women in it and writing from a child’s perspective.

RH: One of the things that drew me to Down the Rabbit Hole was the voice of Tochtli, which is extremely strong and insistent. I read several books with child narrators as research, including Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and I think Tochtli’s voice is as searingly authentic as Roddy Doyle’s young protagonist. We’ve talked before about how for you it was more important to achieve a successful ‘literary’ child’s voice than simply a believable child’s voice – can you say a bit more about why this was important to you, and also which literary voices you drew on, if any?

JPV: While I was writing I wasn’t thinking about creating the plausible voice of a child of a certain age or condition. I was more interested in doing something with language, finding a voice that captivated me. I think that as writers our responsibility is to language, in my case Spanish, and that our commitment I’m not interested in ‘transparent’ or ‘objective’ narrators, I’m just looking for gripping fictional voices. lies in exploring and expanding the possibilities it has, including at a musical level. For me, there should be no difference between the ways a poet and a novelist work with language. The same thing happens to me as a reader: I’m not interested in ‘transparent’ or ‘objective’ narrators, I’m just looking for gripping fictional voices. Once I found Tochtli’s voice, I worked very hard at refining it, which is why it took me six months to write the novel but two more years to edit it. With hindsight, his voice has three important literary debts, two child voices and a teenage one: Un mundo para Julius [A World for Julius, University of Wisconsin Press] by the Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique; Cartucho [published in English, also as Cartucho, by University of Texas Press] by the Mexican writer Nellie Campobello; and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

After the trip to Liberia, Tochtli has supposedly seen something of the world outside the palace, but has also witnessed the brutal killing of the hippopotamuses, and he seems, at least temporarily, to have rejected his father Yolcaut as a figure worthy of respect. Yet once back in Mexico, he’s coaxed out of his samurai dressing gown and his muteness and into a bizarre family tableau, and calls Yolcaut ‘Dad’ for the first time. There is an oppressive ‘closing up’ of the novel and of Tochtli’s world here. Did you have this (or any) structure in mind before you wrote the book or was it more of an organic process?

I’d almost completely decided on the plot when I began to write. Obviously there are always ideas that come up during the writing process that you incorporate, but since it’s such a short novel there was very little space for improvisation. From the start I conceived of it as a triptych: enclosure–journey–enclosure. The structure corresponds to the basic premise of the novel, according to which the protagonist must undergo a change over the course of the story. In this sense, it’s a very traditional structure, and I associate it with coming-of-age stories. At heart, this is what Down the Rabbit Hole is: a coming-of-age novel about the loss of innocence, loneliness, loyalty, and learning how to exercise power.

You’ve said that this is a political novel. Was that intentional or perhaps simply unavoidable?

It was intentional and unavoidable. I started writing the novel in 2006, which I think was the year when drug-related violence in Mexico began to escalate. I remember that every morning when I sat down to write, first I would read the front pages of two or three online Mexican newspapers and they would be full of bodies and severed heads. On the personal side, the book is a reflection on my perception of Mexico from afar, about how my way of seeing the country changed due to my living abroad.

Many readers have commented on the lack of women (and above all the lack of a mother) in the novel as being significant, and it’s true that the only female characters conform to the stereotypical ‘whore’ side of the traditional Catholic dichotomy. I feel the novel would have been very different had there been more rounded female characters in it. Are there any female characters in your new novel and, if so, does this affect the book’s style or outcome in any way?

Down the Rabbit Hole can be read as a masculine novel, about the father-son relationship, but the absence of the mother – I remember that every morning when I sat down to write, first I would read the front pages of two or three online Mexican newspapers and they would be full of bodies and severed heads. which is never explained and which is intentional – is symbolic. I believe that in literature what is not said can acquire a meaning just as important, or more so, than what is said. Of course I know who Tochtli’s mother is and what happened to her, why she doesn’t appear in the story. I was interested in leaving this gap in the book, which we see only through Tochtli’s stomach pains. My new novel, which is also told from within a family, has a mother and sister. I’m only now finishing writing it, so I’m not going to say anything else about it because I’m quite superstitious.

There’s a tradition of Latin American writers moving to Spain to publish their first novels, and you were living in Barcelona when you wrote Down the Rabbit Hole. Was it necessary for you to have this distance in order to write about your own country, and do you think it would have been different had it been written while you were in Mexico?

Of course. As I said before, Down the Rabbit Hole is a reflection on Mexico from outside Mexico. I sincerely believe that I wouldn’t have written this novel if I hadn’t left Mexico. Firstly, because I might not have been interested in dealing with subjects like drugs and violence, being as they are so present in the media and everyday life. And secondly, because the focus would have been very different, perhaps more concerned with what is politically correct. The most important thing about the voice of Tochtli is that it isn’t moralizing, it doesn’t judge, and this is very difficult to achieve when you’re living immersed in that reality. ■

Down the Rabbit Hole is published by And Other Stories.

Photo by Thousandrobots.

Last November marked the publication of Don DeLillo’s first story collection, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. These short fictions range from earthquake-ridden Greece to outer space, a white-collar prison and the streets of the South Bronx. ‘The Starveling’, which appears in Granta’s Horror issue, paints a haunting portrait of obsessive moviegoers in Manhattan. Here, DeLillo answers a few questions about the story and his new book for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi.

YI: The Angel Esmeralda collects your short stories from the 1970s until 2011 and can be seen as a primer into the recurring and evolving themes of your work. Do you think it is representative of your four decades of writing?

DD: The short story and the novel are so different in conception and execution that I don’t think it is possible to consider a writer’s work over four decades by examining the stories alone. The stories are representative of one slice of mind. The novels are mind, body, day and night, and what I ate for lunch.

Your latest story and the last in the book is ‘The Starveling’. It is included in our Horror issue and is about a man who spends all his days at the movies, crisscrossing New York and going from theatre to theatre. The story has a quiet surface but there is an incredible underlying tension and menace in it. Is there horror in this story, or in your other stories?

‘The Starveling’ is about an incomplete man and his acquiescence to a static life. The man’s refuge is the movies and in the minute-by-minute countdown of his days and weeks, there may be an element of horror; to the man himself, however, there is only the day’s schedule, and an abiding sense of being safe.

I read a conversation between you and Bret Easton Ellis in The Believer in which you talked about how you got started as a writer. You said something about quitting your job in advertising because you wanted to go to the movies. Obsessive moviegoers appear in your other work (Point Omega, for example). I couldn’t help wondering if there was an autobiographical element to the character in ‘The Starveling’.

Don’t believe what you read in interviews. (With the exception of this one.) There is no trace of my personal moviegoing experience in ‘The Starveling’.

Your collection often concerns people in trances, in states of repetition or fixation: astronauts orbiting the earth, a guy running laps in the park, a woman visiting and revisiting an art gallery. In ‘The Starveling’ there is this line: ‘There is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation.’ Are these characters meditating? Why are you drawn to write of these trance states?

These characters are not detached from their surroundings; they’re not in a trance, they’re simply complying with the pattern of their lives, which (like all lives) entails frequent repetition with elements, at times, of obsession. The writer wants to find the pattern and transform it into something revealing or enlightening. ■

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories is published by Scribner in the US and Picador in the UK. Click here to listen to Don DeLillo read from his story and discuss his work with Paul Auster and John Freeman.

Photo by Anthony Albright.

Granta Italia has launched its second issue, Sex (Sesso), which includes translated work from Granta 110: Sex, as well as other recent issues. Online editor Ted Hodgkinson spoke to Granta Italia editor Paolo Zaninoni about curating Sex, the persistence of inequality and what Italians make of the purse.

TH: Many of the stories by Italians in the issue focus on the shortcomings or failures of the body: from Matteo B. Bianchi’s story ‘Fragile’ in which the narrator awaits a man missing a leg, to Chiara Valerio’s story which last line is ‘The dogmas of the hand’, to Diego de Silva’s ‘Corpo a Corpo’ to Valeria Parella’s exploration of blindness and sight. Is this theme of bodily failure related to other big shifts that have been occurring in Italy at present?

PZ: I think that the metaphor of bodily failure is a very apt one to reflect 
the feeling of weakness and despondency palpable today within the Italian 
society (and maybe a few more). The body politic is experiencing a lack of
 tension and ambition that is very easy and tempting to portray through
 metaphors centered on the physical body.

The issue features a dark playscript by Emma Dante between an unnamed man and women in a hotel room. Do you think that Italian sexual politics has changed significantly in recent years or does inequality persist, as Berlusconi’s behaviour would have many believe?

Inequality does persist, unfortunately, both in the society and in itself-representation, and it has serious consequences, even economic ones.
 It goes back to the Eighties, even before Berlusconi the politician came
 around - but the TV mogul was active already. I must add that awareness of
 this situation is on the rise within the Italian society, and many men and 
women are starting to say ‘enough’. Perhaps the fact that a number of the
 best contemporary Italian authors are women will help.

The Italian edition of Sex contains an array of pieces that have appeared in several recent issues of Granta, with only two (by Mark Doty and Marie Darrieussecq) from the Sex issue. Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Hot Air Balloons’ and Jeannette Winterson’s ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ both appeared in The F Word, ‘Here Is What I Do’ by Chris Dennis appeared in Aliens and Iris Murdoch’s letters and the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie story ‘Ceiling’ were in Going Back. As editor, is part of the pleasure in creating your own recipe from these previous issues?

It is indeed an immense and always new pleasure - all the more so because 
it is shared with a variety of editors and contributors.

In our edition of Sex we featured a photo essay of vacant porn sets by Jo Broughton which explored the sadness of these spaces and their attempts to manufacture intimacy. Your photo essay reverses this by placing dapper co-workers in erotic positions. Is this just true to life in the offices of Granta Italia or is there a more subtle comment going on here?

Like a lot of people we work in rather drab office spaces, and we
 certainly try to bring some joy to them - though not in the way portrayed 
by the wonderful Jo Broughton.

How have Italian readers responded to the purse cover?



You mean it is a purse?
 ■

Yesterday Nick Dybek was announced as the latest Granta New Voice. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about his forthcoming novel, When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man, finding the ‘right’ location for the story, the writers who have most influenced him and why he has become a fanatical record collector.

TH: One of the things that fascinated me about ‘When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man’ is the slight blurring between the family’s reality on Loyalty Island and the fictions that the son (and our narrator) is captivated by, particularly Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Would you say that his fascination with ‘doomed pirates’ and their fates is his way of making sense of the violence and chaos of his young life?

ND: In children’s books the villains are usually doomed while the heroes make it to the end; in Treasure Island, for example, the reader knows Jim Hawkins will survive because he’s telling the story, but there’s no such guarantee for John Silver. It’s Silver that you need to fear for. Perhaps because of this, I was always more interested in the villains than the heroes when I was a kid.

I imagined Cal, the narrator, to be similarly fascinated by the villains of Treasure Island, by the tension they produce whenever they I was always more interested in the villains than the heroes when I was a kid. step on the page. As your question suggests, anxiety and apprehension are familiar feelings for Cal; his father (and all his male role models) live with constant, excruciating risk, a sword always hanging over their heads. Because of their jobs, they are imperilled – just as a book’s villains are in the mind of a child-reader. It made sense to me, therefore, that Cal would identify his father with the endangered and yet dangerous pirates; at the same time, I thought he would want to see his father as a hero. I think the Captain Flint stories resonate for him in part because they offer a means of reconciling those competing impulses.

Fatherhood here seems to be presented as an ill-fitting mask. When he returns to his family, after long intervals, the father veers between being heroic and unknowable and even, at times, sinister. His shaving stubble left in the sink is unexpectedly red to his son; a mistake gutting fish produces disappointment and when the son corrects his father’s use of the word ‘mensa’ he loses his temper. Does the son’s fascination with the also shadowy yet paternal figure of Captain Flint have to do with his wanting to understand what makes a hero (or a father figure) fall from grace?

As I wrote, I was definitely interested in exploring the ways we negotiate between our often-idealized images of the people we know or love, and those people as they truly are. This turned out to be an especially complicated negotiation for the people of Loyalty Island, a It is much easier for Cal to think about Captain Flint, to question the motives of a made-up character rather than a real one. community in which a significant part of the population – and nearly all the father figures – are gone for half the year. Their collective absence makes them easy to aggrandize; their continuous absence makes the resulting romantic image slow to dissolve. It also turned out to be a complicated negotiation for Cal, whose adolescence is itself putting pressure on long-held assumptions, hopes, and illusions. It’s his age as much as anything that causes him to test his father by correcting him in conversation, or to search for clues about who he really is in the stubble left in the sink. I think this sort of detective work is something Cal is conscious of only in retrospect; at the time of the action, it is much easier for him to think about Captain Flint, to question the motives of a made-up character rather than a real one.

There’s a nightmarish scene in which the father recounts a story about Sam North, the fisherman he worked alongside who ‘suffered most’, who is caught beneath a crab pot and plunges down to the sea bed. Our narrator tells us that his face returns to him in dreams often. Do dreams and nightmares, I wonder, have as much hold over us as our waking lives?

I think dreams – waking dreams and flights of imagination anyway – probably do, especially for children and adolescents. A child has no choice but to encounter certain things in his mind first, to rely on stories and rumours to substitute for the actual experience – having a job, kissing someone, travelling – that will come later. You mentioned the blurring of reality and fiction in your first question, and I think that blur is as good a definition of childhood as anything else. Maybe it’s what draws so many writers to the adolescent perspective; during that time, imagination and experience are in a death match, one made no less compelling by the expectation that experience will get the pin.

Dreams, nightmares, and imagination absolutely have a hold on Cal, Imagination and experience are in a death match, one made no less compelling by the expectation that experience will get the pin. as they do on many members of his community. In fact, the role imagination might play in such a landscape is part of what drew me to it. So much of life in Loyalty Island is defined by what occurs in a place – Alaska, a harrowing, awesome, extreme place – a thousand miles away, which leaves the town’s inhabitants unusually reliant on their imaginations. The pressure this mystery might put on a community’s dream-life – how its inhabitants might shape that unknown place even as it shapes them – fascinated me.

You write poetically about Loyalty Island and its relationship to the elements, especially the sea. What part does a sense of place and intimate knowledge of local details, such as tides, play in your writing?

I did a lot of research and even moved to Seattle to be closer to what I was trying to write about, but I wouldn’t say that my knowledge of the Northwest, the sea, or any towns on the Olympic Peninsula is close to intimate. I grew up in Michigan. I can barely read a tide chart. That said, getting the sensory and cultural details of the place right, capturing the insular nature of the community as well as its dramatic landscape, was very important to me. But I guess I should back up because ‘right’ is a misleading word in this context – maybe it would be a better to say ‘convincing.’ There is no ‘right,’ because there is no Loyalty Island, WA; the town is based on a few different places, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, and Newport, OR, for example, but I wasn’t necessarily trying for verisimilitude.

It was definitely important to me, however, to write about a setting that fuelled my imagination – maybe because place lends itself to When I had the initial idea for this novel, I had to really look for a setting that I could draw from, one that would inspire invention. physical and sensory description, and such description is the portal to so much else in fiction. A lot of writers find this spark in a setting they do know intimately from childhood or later experience, but, for whatever reason, that hasn’t happened for me. When I had the initial idea for this novel, I had to really look for a setting that I could draw from, one that would inspire invention. It was kind of interesting how it worked out; I was trying to imagine a place, Loyalty Island, and in doing so was living in parallel to the narrator, who is trying to imagine life in Alaska.

Objects such as the son’s toys and the father’s knife seem to play a vital role here, with lives of their own that seem to continue without their owners. As a prose writer are you drawn to write the lives of these inanimate things as you might be to one of your characters?

These objects are important, but mostly as they relate to and illuminate character. As I was writing When Captain Flint . . . I was interested in the way the characters’ relationships to objects might articulate their more inchoate feelings; Cal’s attachment to his Lego ships, for example, might say something about his anxious view of his place in the culture that he can’t say directly. I’m excited that you noted the role of objects in this excerpt because the characters continue to use objects to express, or even to define, themselves later on. For example, Cal’s mother is a serious record collector; she even has a room in their home devoted to her collection. That room and the music within it take up a fair amount of space not only on later pages, but in the minds and emotional lives of the characters who occupy them.

It’s an interesting time to be thinking about the role of objects (in fiction and in life), given that the necessity for books, records, movies, and even the sort of board games Cal and his father play is diminishing with digitization. I went back to a couple of classic memoirs about adolescence, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. I’ve always been a big music fan, and since the rise of mp3s and digital downloads I’ve become nearly as obsessive a record collector as Cal’s mother. Once CDs went obsolete I tried iTunes, but missed the feeling of going to the record store, of flipping through the stacks, of inspecting the shine on the vinyl. Even though the physical properties of records have very little to do with the music they play, their tactility gets me closer to something that I care about – something that has always been a big part of how I think about myself. I think the characters in this novel pay special attention to objects of significance to them for similar reasons; those objects help them realize and express the identities they’ve invented for themselves.

The son poses a question about the ‘larger destiny’ of the men his father works with as if it might be something external, as opposed to coming from character itself. Is this one of the questions that the son is trying to figure out?

Certainly Cal is trying to figure out his own ‘larger destiny’ and the role of his father’s work in it. I think it becomes quickly clear to him that his character doesn’t suit the place and time into which he was born. At the same time, the extreme sacrifices members of this community make for their livelihood drive them to romanticise their work. Even though Cal doubts his own suitability for fishing, he is as susceptible to this pressure to aggrandize it as anyone else (his fondness for adventure stories might even make him more susceptible). This tradition of describing daily life in romantic terms such as ‘destiny’ continues to influence and afflict Cal, even once he’s old enough to reject it.

Robert Louis Stevenson is clearly a writer who means a lot to you. Which other writers have been important touchstones for you?

For this project I went back to a couple of classic memoirs about adolescence, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and Stop-Time by Frank Conroy. The influence of those books on the sensibility and the prose is probably apparent. I’m also a big Graham Greene fan: I love his control of tone, his economical but beautiful prose, his unexpected black humour. I also love that his adventure stories make use of all the expected conventions – romantic settings, betrayal, and intrigue – and yet his grasp of psychology is so acute that the most compelling adventure occurs inside the characters.

Your father, Stuart Dybek, is one of the most celebrated American voices of his generation, particularly known as one of the quintessential Chicagoan writers. To me your voice is entirely distinctive and yet it is striking that you write about patrimony with such insight here. As a father has he been encouraging of your writing and what has your journey been with negotiating his influence (if you have considered it to be one)?

The first or second day I was in Iowa City, a friend shoved a copy of The Anxiety of Influence into my hands. I appreciated his concern, but I haven’t gotten around to reading the book. My dad gave a toast at the wedding in which he admitted to whispering words like ‘astronomer,’ ‘physicist,’ and ‘marine biologist’ to me in my crib. Certainly I learned to love reading from both of my parents, though I probably came to creative writing a little later than I would have otherwise had my dad not been a writer. It didn’t seem like much of a rebellion. Did he encourage me once I began writing seriously? He’s always happy to offer help when I’ve asked, whether in the form of criticism, advice, or a pep talk. On the other hand, I got married a few months ago, and my dad gave a toast at the wedding in which he admitted to whispering words like ‘astronomer,’ ‘physicist,’ and ‘marine biologist’ to me in my crib.

Can you tell me what you are working on right now?

Struggling through the opening of a novel about the aftermath of World War I. So far it has involved lot of research; there are more great books about the subject than I could ever read. They’re all a little depressing, though. ■

You can read the full extract from When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, here.

From his first story collection, Esther Stories, on to his most recent novel, Love Shame and Love, Peter Orner has established himself as one of the most distinctive American voices of his generation. His work has appeared in Granta 111: Going Back and in the online edition, with ‘At The Kitchen Table’. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about memory, learning to love your characters, the importance of animals in fiction and Chicagoland.

TH: Reading this book got me thinking about the capricious way that memory often works: not necessarily in neat chronological order but associatively, moving outwards in a starburst from one image to the next. Taken together I began to see the novel as a compendium of images that were bursting from the Popper family’s memory banks. There’s actually a scene in the book when Leo Popper eats a cookie as a parody of Proust’s madelene; who is clearly another writer fixated on being truthful about how memory works, or doesn’t. Is there a truthfulness about the function of memory in this lateral structural movement of the book and did you find it a challenge to trace the lines of memory across for generations of a single family?

PO: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I wonder if the word memory itself doesn’t somehow send the wrong message. There’s something about it that suggests truth when it is so often not even close. Scientists and criminal lawyers have been proving this for decades now. Our memories lie like a rug, as my grandmother used to say, and then laugh her head off. Or did she? See, I’m doing it again. My grandmother who we called Sally Grandma and not Grandma Sally used to say, ‘Don’t lie like a rug.’ But when she said it, she was saying don’t be a lazy meshuggener. So she wasn’t talking about memory and lying at all, but only about the fact that I was a slug. I still am a slug. Where was I? Our memories lie. And I’ve come to also believe that our own autobiographies are merely compilations of the greatest hits of our own bullshit. How often to do we actually tell the truth about ourselves? I think in this novel I was trying to trace the strange way memory operates and how it’s so tied up in fiction that it’s almost indistinguishable. It is indistinguishable. The first fiction man ever created was when – for the very fist time – a single hairy cave man began to recount something that happened yesterday. I wanted to build a book around a person that can’t stop doing this, that remembers and lies and remembers and lies . . .

Though the novel certainly has a wholeness it is constructed of lots of small moving parts: fragments of letters, brief vignettes, oblique and not exactly ‘plot driven’ chapters through which a large cast of characters move. Taken individually the sections of the book operate in a similar way to your short stories – capturing a moment or an image and distilling it down to a potent essence. Did writing this novel allow you the possibility of seeing your characters further into their lives and do you think of plot as something you have to resist in order to write fully realized people?

I’m not sure I resist plot as much as feel that the conventional definition of plot is a little cramped. For me the strange moments that make up our lives are plot. I forget but there must be some classical definition of what the word plot actually means. Hang on. I’m going to go look it up. ‘A small area of planted ground’. No. ‘An intrigue, conspiracy, What fascinates me the most about living on earth are the people I will never know. cabal’. I like that but no. Wait, ‘the main story of a literary work’. That’s it but it’s dull as hell. It isn’t that I don’t think something should happen in stories, and I hope things happen in mine, but what fascinates me the most about living on earth are the people I will never know. All the people I walk down the street and see, I will never, ever know what they are thinking, what’s gone on in their lives. So for me, character, the creation of a character on a flat page is the most exciting thing. It’s less the ‘what happened’ and more the memories they lug around, the loves, the regrets.

And as you say, I guess I try and zero in on the quieter moments of their lives in order to give characters life. This morning at the coffee shop down the street I watched a guy reading a little book. He was really into the book and he was holding it really close to his face. I wondered if this was because he was nearsighted or because he was loving the little book so much he wanted to get as close as possible to the words. It may well have been the first reason, something wrong with his eyes, but I like the second one better. And so I imagined (probably wrongly) that I had a small window in this guy’s life. I’ll bet he’s still there, reading that little book.

Some of these characters reappear, albeit in a different incarnation, from your first book of stories. The character of Seymour Popper also appears in your short story, ‘The Raft’, but he seems very different in the novel: he’s much less demonstrative in some ways. Did returning to the character prompt you to see him in a new light?

I’m sure you’re right that he’s different now. To be honest I didn’t go back and re-read the stories about Seymour before writing about him again for the new book. I think I didn’t want to be influenced by my previous imaginations of him. I do know that I missed him, whoever he is. And I wanted to bring him back to life. The difference might be that ‘The Raft’ is almost entirely from the perspective of a little kid, where in Love and Shame and Love I try and take in the totality of his life. And people Our own autobiographies are merely compilations of the greatest hits of our own bullshit. change, of course, or maybe they don’t. But our vision of the people we have loved changes, put it that way. And I love Seymour. I love the fictional guy and the the guy he’s based on too, and both never stay especially consistent in my head. I remember once I was walking to my grandparents’ house, my actual grandparents’ house, and on the way this cat started following me. I must have been ten or so. So the cat follows me to their house. They aren’t home but the back door is always open. I go inside and lock the cat in the bathroom with a little plate of dirt, you know, kind of like my own idea of kitty litter. Then I go and raid the refrigerator. My grandparents come home. By this time I’ve forgotten about the cat. My grandfather goes to the bathroom. He starts screaming. Totally freaking out. This is a guy who captained a ship in World War II. A cat in the bathroom totally unhinges him. So, our real people, as well as our fictional people, are always acting in ways they aren’t supposed to, according to what we understand about their characters. My grandfather weighed something like 265 and he was no match for that cat.

Animals and sometimes insects in the book are often creatures whose plight seems to embody the whole of the human comedy and tragedy that encircles them. The fate of a fly seems poignant and absurd in a way that recalls the Popper family’s struggle as he wanders across a desk lamp and wonders where all the other flies flew. ‘And I alone’ it thinks ‘I alone lived to . . . lived to what?’ The Popper family dog is a central character and at one point is tellingly described as being more affected by silence than by hunger. Do you think that animals, particularly family pets, can be portals into the stormy core of a family and does part of their power in the novel come from the way they seem to be often overlooked by the Poppers?

Totally totally portals, I love this idea. Funny, I was just talking about Max above and I hadn’t even read this question yet . . . I’m sitting here in my garage in San Francisco with my dog. Bud is very bored of watching me type. Her name is Daisy, which embarrasses me when I am at the dog park, so I call her Bud. She feels overlooked most days. But she knows everything about me, all the things I lie about.

The Chicago you describe here has a particular almost mythic quality to it, as if you’re hooking up with an image of the city that belongs to a deeply American, Chicagoan tradition which includes writers like Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek. When you’re writing about the Windy City how often are you conscious of wrestling your image of it away from those writers who have come before, or are you wanting rather to engage with that literary conversation about it?

I think maybe all the places we tell ourselves we love are actually myths. Chicago is impossible for any one book or piece or prose or poem or whatever to capture. So is London. So is Cleveland. So is the state of Delaware and the country of India. And Madagascar. And yet I think this is why writers keep trying. And we keep trying in spite of - or maybe because of – the fact that we are conscious of the great writers who have come before. In my case, Bellow, Dybek, Chicago is the mythical place I grew up in. Call it Chicagoland, which is one of my favourite stupid advertising slogans. Aleksandar Hemon. We get a myth in our heads about a place and we try and convey this myth to a reader. So yes, for me, Chicago is the mythical place I grew up in. Call it Chicagoland, which is one of my favourite stupid advertising slogans. But Chicago is also a very real place where young kids are killed at the most alarming rate imaginable. I try and address how hopeless this feels in one scene in the book where Kat reads about a young girl being raped and then can’t figure out what to do about it. She feels so useless all she can do is go sit on the stoop. She’s paralyzed. She wants to act, to do something, but she doesn’t know what to do. She’s twenty-five years old and new to the city. What can she do? Raise her voice? March in the streets? Write a letter to Richie Daley? I relate to Kat’s hopelessness in that scene. You write a story about a myth, your myth, the myth you love, and then you open the Sun-Times and you fall apart. Does this make any sense? Writers, like most everyone else, see what’s wrong, but aren’t sure how to fix things. So we shed a little light maybe. But I reserve my most profound respect for those people who actually make change, and there are people in Chicago who devote their lives, every day, to making it safer place for kids.

The book is very frank and funny about the difficulties of adolescence, particularly the difficulty of talking to girls. Do you recall that period of time fondly or with a grimace?

Fondly, at least concerning those few times things worked out in this particular area. With a cringe concerning the majority of it. I’m only glib in my head, and on email.

The book itself is chock full of books, from Alexander’s reading lists at college to the Rozencrantz’s pointedly impressive library. Is this in some ways the story of how books can shape lives and how have they shaped yours?

Absolutely, Popper is, from the very first scene, obsessed with his own personal library. Or the idea of his library. Another thing we lug around.

Can you tell me what the seed for the story ‘At The Kitchen Table’ was?

In my old aborted life as a law student (I got the degree, my mother remains very proud), I worked down in North Carolina doing investigations on the conditions inside the North Carolina prison system. One huge issue is mental health. One day I got a call from a mother whose son had killed himself. I couldn’t do a thing to help her but listen, since as you can probably imagine, it’s not easy to sue the prison system for creating suicidal conditions. Again, an ineffectual response. I couldn’t help but, years later, write a story about it. ■

Illustration by Owen Freeman for ‘Bonfire’ by David Long from Granta 118: Exit Strategies.

Owen Freeman’s illustrations have appeared in several recent editions of Granta, notably alongside our publication of Robert Bolaño’s stories ( Sex, Aliens and Horror) as well as his collaboration on the HTML5 animation of Bolaño’s story from that issue, ‘The Colonel’s Son’: nothingbutamovie.com. Freeman spoke to Granta assistant designer Daniela Silva about his creative process and imagining horror.

DS: Your style – its controlled use of colour, the shifting perspectives – seems suited to comic books and animation. What has been your relationship with these forms?

OF: Both comics and animation played big roles in my love affair with illustration before I really even knew what illustration was. I became particularly omnivorous about comics, starting with the first X-Men issue I saw in elementary school. They were what first influenced me to start drawing for the sheer hope of making more of the artwork I loved.

How was working on a movie or animation different from working on a still illustration?

Working on the animation was an interesting change since each illustration/shot needed to be created using multiple freestanding layers of artwork that could stay flexible, as opposed to still illustrations where the composition edges are firm very early in the process.

When I first saw your work, I was struck by the subtle way you illustrate dark moments. When you’re working do you think about the way your illustrations might be perceived?

On most narrative assignments I feel like I’m perceiving the moments of the scenes I’m illustrating as I’m working through them, so (fortunately or not) the perceptions people may have usually don’t factor in for me until the very end of the process or until after it’s out in the world — and even then, the reactions can be hard to trace.

Your work often focuses on mysteries and murders, delighting in a macabre aesthetic. Was there a point in time when you began focusing on these themes or have they always held a fascination for you?

If I go back through my work over the years, there does seem to be a consistent melancholy and macabre theme, but what might come across as a fascination with horror and murder is probably my interest in the mood and mystery I’ve found really satisfying in animation and cinema. It’s always been more about the ‘dark, stormy night’ than about the culprit, for me.

What’s been the best and worst reaction you’ve had to your work?

Going back to what I mentioned earlier, I think outside of friends and art directors, I’m not privy to much of the reactions my work might elicit. That being said, one of best reactions happened when I was sketching at the British Museum. I was partway through a drawing of a statue, and a young Spanish girl ran to get her family to bring them back for a photo with her mother and me and the drawing. The worst was probably being asked by an art school instructor if he could show my work as an example of exactly what not to do for the assignment.

Could you give an overview of how you approach each new piece of work?

I try to approach each new piece of work with as much non-visual information as possible, which usually includes reading the article or fiction piece or research on the subject if the aforementioned are not available. During this time, I will do as much quick idea sketching as time allows. Once I feel I’ve connected all the roughly drawn ideas to as much of the text as possible, I will start researching additional visual information on the subject, either online or in books. From there, I choose the ideas that hold the most water, which I work up into tighter, more fully realized sketches that are turned into the art director for review. Once a sketch has been approved, I draw and paint full size artwork on paper with ink and washes, and then scan and digitally colour it for the finished illustration.

You’ve illustrated all the recent Roberto Bolaño stories that have appeared in Granta. After having worked on ‘Redhead’ (Sex), ‘Beach’ (Aliens) and ‘The Colonel’s Son’ (Horror), do you have any insight into his style and his writing? What are the particular challenges — and pleasures — of illustrating Bolaño?

The first piece I did for ‘Redhead’ in the Sex issue was right on the heels of reading a lot of William Burroughs for another assignment, so stylistically I was probably coming back from an odd place when I read it. What I enjoyed about that piece, and have enjoyed about Bolaño’s style since, is how he uses shorthand sequencing of detail mixed with open spaces and shifts in time, all the while carrying and maintaining the tone of the story. This style can sometimes be challenging; I recall reading the ‘Beach’ piece and feeling almost entirely adrift in a fascinating narrative, but with only pinholes of visual detail to guide me.

In our increasingly visual word, images and image-makers are becoming more and more important. But there’s also some resistance to the dominance of images – there’s an idea that great literature should stand on its own. What’s your take on this debate?

My feeling is that literature and imagery have always, and really will always be, different animals. In situations like comics or animation, I understand that the imagery can overwhelm the text, but in the printed realm, I am of the Robert Fawcett school of thought that as illustrators, our first and last service is to bring the readers’ eyes to the author’s work. ‘Our job is to arrest the page flipper and start him reading. The minute he starts reading the first paragraph, our job is done.’ (Quote by Robert Fawcett in The Illustrator’s Illustrator, David Apatoff 2010.) ■

nothingbutamovie.com

Image by Julian Civiero/Millenium Images.

Don DeLillo and Paul Auster have collectively featured in the pages of Granta ten times over a period spanning nearly three decades, including their recent appearences in Horror. Though they are friends, they had not read and discussed their work in public together for over twenty years before taking to the stage this week, at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, New York, for the main event of Granta’s Horror issue.

The below recording includes both Paul Auster’s reading from his piece of memoir ‘Your Birthday Has Come and Gone’, and Don DeLillo’s reading of sections from his story, ‘The Starveling’, followed by their discussion with Granta editor John Freeman, about their work in the issue, ‘impoverished characters’ and living in and writing about New York.

The Granta Podcast Episode 28 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Photo by Graham Plumb.

We The Animals by Justin Torres is a stunning debut novel narrated by the youngest son of a Puerto Rican father and white mother from Brooklyn raising their three young sons in upstate New York. At 128 pages, the book is a treasure chest of unforgettable images and haunting, tender moments. The brothers wrestle, laugh and cry as they try to make sense of their world, urging the reader to do the same. Justin spoke to Jennifer de Leon, a freelance writer and editor, about the line between autobiography and fiction in his work and casting a spell with language.

JD: We The Animals is your first novel. You have said the book is autobiographical and yet Paps isn’t your father and Ma isn’t your mother. Manny and Joel aren’t your brothers. You commit to the belief that ‘something magical happens as you filter personal experience through imagination and language.’ Can you elaborate?

When I started writing I was blissfully ignorant of the obsession with the distinction between fiction and memoir; I honestly, naively, did not realize that this would be the issue I am asked to address more than any other. I felt absolutely free to borrow from personal experience and I felt free to make shit up. I still feel that freedom. Though now when I write from personal experience I do so with a certain obstinate intentionality. I read Baldwin, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, was another huge influence. The stories of Grace Paley, Leonard Michaels, Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle – so much of the work I was drawn to was clearly reflective of the author’s own lived experience. Not that I ever spent much time researching author’s biographies (we’re talking pre-Wikipedia), what I mean by ‘clearly reflective’ is simply an attitude, an authorial stance, an emotional resonance, an emotional truth, that right away signaled to me, as reader, that the story arose in one way or another from lived experience. These folks were writing close to the bone. I didn’t have to look up the details of the author’s life and compare and contrast, nor did I feel any desire to do so. I sensed what was at stake, I appreciated it, and I felt inspired.

But the inspiration did not come simply from borrowing from experience; anyone can do that, and everyone probably does that, to one extent or another. The inspiration came from that aspect you reference in the second part of your question, filtering the personal through imagination and language. Tell Me a Riddle, the first time I could write about men on Mars or about a childhood similar to my own, but my goal would be the same: get the words right, cast a spell. I read that, I tell you, I was left breathless. Olsen just nails the voice, the rhythm, the tone and cadence. I wanted to nail the rhythm of my experience, the rhythm of family, the joyous, tribal language of brotherhood, the cadence of wonder and fear. I love voice; a deeply imagined and inventive voice does more for me than a fantastic plot or vivid setting. For me, the magic of fiction lies in the words chosen and the structure of the sentences. I could write about men on Mars or about a childhood similar to my own, but my goal would be the same: get the words right, cast a spell.

In one particularly horrific scene, Paps attempts to teach the narrator to swim by letting him go in the middle of the lake one night. You skip the violence, initially, and only come back to that moment at the very end of the story when the narrator is safe in his bed. The way in which you slow down time – rather than speed up or skip altogether – reminds me of Isaac Babel’s story, ‘My First Goose,’ in which a young soldier named Liutov brutally kills an old peasant woman’s goose. The moment is heartbreaking, poetic, and as Charles Baxter would refer to it, still. Can you discuss your impulse to play with stillness in your prose?

You’re exactly right that I wanted the moment of him underwater and flailing to be slowed down, still, and that’s why I moved it to the end of the story. I think when readers encounter violence, the suspense and concern for the characters motivates them to read quickly – but if you remove some of the suspense, you can shift the focus from ‘what’ happened, to ‘how’ it happened, how it felt. Violence and stillness are often at odds, I think, in fiction. I’ve read books that move from one violent encounter to the next without pauses, and I find them terribly numbing. I’ve also read books that feel like endless beautiful meditations without any threat of violence, and those books are often so still as to be lifeless. Babel is a great example of a writer who gets it all in there – the grace and poetry and beauty alongside the gruesome.

In ‘Never Never Time’ the three brothers are seated at the kitchen table in their raincoats, smashing tomatoes and lotions with a small rubber mallet. Their mother walks in and notices the tomato and lotion streaking down their faces. You write: ‘She called us to her side and gently ran a finger across each of our cheeks, cutting through the grease and sludge. “That’s what you looked like when you slid out of me,” she whispered.’ I audibly gasped when I read this passage the first time. It is visceral. It is crude. I felt yanked into the kitchen, into the family dynamic where birth and death are looming everywhere. Is mine a reaction you are interested in provoking in the reader?

I could have written, ‘You appeared similarly when, after giving birth, I first held you.’ But it wouldn’t have had the same urgency as, Violence and stillness are often at odds, I think, in fiction. ‘That’s what you look like when you slid out of me.’ Polite conversation is almost never immediate. Luckily, the language I grew up hearing was frank, sometimes raw, and always colourfully immediate. The phrasing in your question is a perfect example, you describe being ‘yanked into that kitchen.’ So the best, most immediate answer to your question is yes, that’s exactly what I’m after; I want to yank everyone into that kitchen.

Yours is a book about family. You have said that in this family, everyone is deeply in love with everyone else. At the same time, they fail each other, they hurt each other. How does this idea relate to the overall dynamic you strive for in your fiction?

Well, that’s what we do, right? We love and we fail and we hurt and we love some more. You know, in my own life, when I would talk to people about my childhood, when I would try and describe my home, I would always try and describe everything, the humour and the pain and the passion; I could go on for an hour. Often, people would listen with well-intentioned interest, and then start giving me back this pop-psychology language, saying I had a dysfunctional family. What a simple, tidy adjective: dysfunctional. I kind of hate that word. I wanted to write a book about a family so complicated, so in love, and so flawed, that folks would resist easy categories. Of course, plenty of the reviews for the book use ‘dysfunctional’ in the first sentence, and I can’t stop that, but some reviewers, some interviewers, some readers at readings, talk about how difficult it is to classify this family. Some folks have come up to me and told me the book made them reconsider hardened resentments they were carrying around toward their own families – and I’ll tell you, I love those moments.

Are we done reading about this family?

I’m interested in writing about adults right now. Beyond that, there is no plan. ■

Binyavanga Wainaina, a founding editor of Kwani? and author of the celebrated essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, reads from his long-awaited memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and talks to Ellah Allfrey about meeting the expectations of an African readership and what to do with a bad review.

The Granta Podcast Episode 27 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Karen Russell’s debut collection of short stories St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves was published to great acclaim in 2006 in the US, introducing readers to a fresh voice that would, in turn, earn her a place in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2, in 2008. The novel that followed, Swamplandia!, grew from one of the stories in this first collection, expanding on the lives of the Bigtree family and their plight to save their business, the eponymously named alligator-wrestling theme park, from being eradicated by a new competitor: The World of Darkness. She talked to Patrick Ryan about the joys and difficulties of writing in the fantastic and what would scare the bejesus out of the Brontës.

PR: Swamplandia! is rich in imaginative detail; it’s fantastical, and yet the story encompasses the very real human dramas of loss and economic hardship. Do you find that the imaginative feeds off the real, or vice-versa? Or both? On a personal note, I ask that because I’ve found in my own writing that one can derail – or take over – the other.

KR: I know exactly what you mean about the tension between the imaginative and the real. I guess the way I try to keep one from overloading the other, is by always trying to write characters who feel true and dimensioned, no matter how weird the world (or body, in the case of the werewolf children in St. Lucy’s) they inhabit. To try and write a story with a genuine emotional core, so that the fantasy feels in the service of something larger than the line-to-line pleasure of ‘hey, isn’t that crazy!’ My favourite writers, like Kelly Link and Italo Calvino and George Saunders, seem to operate from a Wild West that is by no means totally lawless My favourite writers, like Kelly Link and Italo Calvino and George Saunders, seem to operate from a Wild West that is by no means totally lawless – it’s rule-bound, there are consequences – but perhaps they aren’t so rigidly bound to the laws you see represented in so-called ‘realist’ fiction (whatever that is – I find myself getting sweaty palms whenever I’m asked about realist versus speculative fiction. I was about to say you’re more likely to find a Subaru in the former and a dragon in the latter, but then I remembered that alligators are real dragons, and a Subaru, well, that would surely have seemed like a fantastic machine a few centuries ago. It would have scared the bejesus out of the Brontës).

So you don’t lean more toward one or the other?

Well, in daily life, I think it’s impossible to draw a hard and fast line between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy.’ So much of our mental lives are spent in fantasy lands, either in the future or in memory. Kids in particular have this beautiful, terrifying ability to hold many contradictory ideas in their head at once (although I’m not convinced that’s something we necessarily ever outgrow). One reason I think I like to write from adolescent points of view is because of that kid-elasticity – at that age you can really straddle two worlds, a childhood realm that’s coloured by games and fairy tales and an adult reality.

What experiences did you draw on for this book? Have you ever worked in a terrible theme park like the World of Darkness you describe, or did you draw from what you’d observed as a visitor to such places? Having grown up in Florida in the 60s and 70s, I saw plenty of them myself – and saw them come and go. It was heartbreaking to read the news that GatorLand had burned down.

It makes me so happy to know that you are processing your Floridian childhood through fiction, too. And I love that you were heartbroken about GatorLand – that fire broke out maybe a month after I visited the park with my brother on a ‘research trip’ where we fed frozen drumsticks to the alligators. But like a phoenix from the ashes, GatorLand has risen: they even rebuilt the big concrete gator mouth that you walk through to get to the gift shop. I just read that they have white, leucistic alligators with sapphire eyes on display right now. I never worked at a theme park. But one of the humbling things about growing up in South Florida was that now nothing I can come up with in a story holds a candle to the true weirdness of that place. I never worked at a theme park. But one of the humbling things about growing up in South Florida was that now nothing I can come up with in a story holds a candle to the true weirdness of that place. Fantasy is the big industry, the tourist lure, and I think Swamplandia! grew directly out of the many hours I logged in places like Disney World (the model for the World of Darkness), as well as the mom-and-pop outfits. Like any kid, I enjoyed the Orlando superparks, but I felt an underdog allegiance with the crappier places, the shabby tiki huts. I bet you have vivid memories of the Miami Seaquarium, the Coral Castle, Shark River Valley, Parrot Jungle, Monkey Jungle.

The story of Louis Thanksgiving is a haunting tale that has stood on its own as a short story. It is also embedded in the greater canvas of Swamplandia! Was the novel born of this story, or did you have the greater picture in mind from the get-go?

Louis’ chapter, ‘The Dredgeman’s Revelation’, did get excerpted and tailored a bit, but to be honest it was never intended to live outside of the novel – it grew very organically out of one of Ossie’s paranormal escapades. I’ve always loved stories-within-the-story, and I hoped that the Louis Thanksgiving chapter, which is a radical departure from the material that precedes and follows it, might function as a kind of mirror, a place where readers could see a few things in superimposition – Osceola’s grief and horror at her mother’s abrupt, early death; her hunger, which manifests as a stillborn romance with this dead kid; also the Bigtrees’ connection to early Florida history; and – I hate to mislabel it man vs. nature, but let’s say, the violent collision between human settlers with profit motives and the primordial, inhumanly beautiful swamp.

I think all of the seeds of Swamplandia! are contained in a short story I wrote way back in 2005, ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’, about two sisters on a swamp island mourning the death of their mother. In that story, Ava watches helplessly as her sixteen-year old sister, Osceola, begins to have romances with ghosts. When I started this novel,When I started out, if I tried to picture the book as a whole, I felt like I was flying over the greater story in a plane – I couldn't see grass blades, just blurry green swaths. I did have a Big Picture, but it was an extremely fuzzy one – I felt sort of like Cassandra without her reading glasses. I knew that Hilola Bigtree had died of ovarian cancer, and that Osceola would elope with a ghost. And I was committed to writing as honestly as I could about what happens between Ava and the Bird Man. But when I started out, if I tried to picture the book as a whole, I felt like I was flying over the greater story in a plane – I couldn't see grass blades, just blurry green swaths. All of the fine print of the Bigtrees’ story got worked out during the actual drafting, and that was where I met Louis Thanksgiving.

So Swamplandia! wasn’t born out of the Louis Thanksgiving story?

No, but that chapter came to feel like the novel’s secret heart to me. Louis Thanksgiving showed up when I was doing research for the book, reading these diaries of Florida pioneers in the early twentieth century. I read the word ‘dredgeman’ and got a little chill. Dredges, I discovered, were barges with cranes and dippers used to dig canals and roads through Florida’s impenetrably swampy interior. Land barons like Hamilton Disston purchased millions of acres of Florida swampland, with the goal of draining the entire swamp to expose the arable soil of ‘An American Eden’. Not long after reading this, a haunted dredge barge crashed into the novel.

As for the horror that befalls Louis Thanksgiving and the dredgemen – I came to see that story as silhouetted against a larger narrative, a horror story about delusion, a very American, uncritical faith in an ecologically-devastating idea of ‘progress’, driven by a bottomless hunger for land and profit without any real knowledge of or respect for the lanscape.

Why did you choose to write in the first person, as 13-year-old Ava? One can imagine many different ways in which this novel might be narrated, and you chose to anchor the narrative voice to Ava. Were you comfortable in allowing yourself some liberties along the way? Some of the background knowledge, evocative imagery, and sensibilities seem to come from a more an omniscient perspective than that of a young girl.

I always struggle with the point of view issue. At one point I was switching Ava’s voice from first to third, past to present, etc. until I had just about given myself trichotrillomania. But once I returned to her voice in the first-person, something clicked in and I felt that I couldn’t tell her story any other way – because she is, at core, an unreliable narrator, and all of the novel’s thematic preoccupations, not to mention its plot, really require that the reader be totally merged with Ava. What happens to Ava later in the book is such a shock to her, and I wanted readers to understand the exact nature of that shock, to experience that particular pain with her. Not to sort of pity her from a distance, you know, but to feel it with her. So much of Ava’s journey involves her moving from a deep blind spot into the light, really grappling with some bad truths. I don’t think the novel would have worked if Ava wasn’t recreating, in her own voice, the events of that summer – but that said, I was sure glad to have the Kiwi storyline in there, with a more satiric, distanced viewpoint, in part because I think it can start to feel a little claustrophobic inside of Ava’s head. That’s a danger of the first person, I think. Much less so in a twelve page story than a four-hundred page novel.

As for taking liberties, I never felt like I was doing anything too egregious, I guess because I think Ava really would know quite a bit about the history and ecology of Swamplandia! I always saw the novel as being told retrospectively, by an adult Ava who is time-traveling back into her thirteen-year old body; telling the story with access to some adult vocabulary but really trying to be true to the spirit of that age, her grief and her goofiness, her almost complete ignorance of the mainland.

Rumour has it you’re working on short stories and / or a novel based in the dust bowl drought. How has the experience of writing this novel influenced your approach to your next one?

Right now I’m trying to complete a few stories and revise others for a second story collection, tentatively titled Vampires in the Lemon Grove. And I’m working on my second novel, which is set in an imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought. Every day I’m shocked to rediscover that it’s just as hard, maybe even harder this second time around. I do think that the experience of writing Swamplandia! has changed my approach – it’s made me much more patient, for sure. Every day I’m shocked to rediscover that it’s just as hard, maybe even harder this second time around. I thought it might feel like repeating a grade – like, your reward for being a dunce the first time around is that now you’re the huge hairy savvy kid, smoking in the eighth grade – but so far I’m still the duncey one. It’s an entirely new set of challenges.

The big change is that I think I’m a little more comfortable with uncertainty now. It took so many years and drafts before Swamplandia! came together in its final form that I now have this simpleton’s faith that if I stick with it, more will be revealed. Periodically I’ll feel that the new stuff is doomed, as I did with this novel. But I guess I’m learning to let those emotions bleat in the background, the way you’d ignore a car alarm. ■

You can also read her story, ‘The Barn at the End of Our Term’, which featured in the Best of Young American Novelists, here.

A recording from the London launch of Granta 117: Horror on November 2, featuring readings from contributors Mark Doty and Will Self and their discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction. The recording also features the questions and answers with the audience at Foyles bookshop.

The Granta Podcast Episode 26 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Robert Coover, the celebrated author of classics such as The Public Burning and A Night at the Movies, reads his story ‘Vampire’ and talks to Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson about distilling down an idea, the intersection of myth and the modern world and the quintessential English novel.

The Granta Podcast Episode 25 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Photo by Robert Bessoir.

Julie Otsuka’s tour de force second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, follows the story of a group of Japanese women coming to America, in the early twentienth century, as mail order brides. It is one of two novels in the history of the magazine, the other being Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, to be excerpted in consecutive issues: Granta 114: Aliens and Granta 115: The F Word and is now a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. Here she discusses with Assistant Editor Patrick Ryan the advantages of writing in the first person plural, what the soundtrack to her novel would be and following her intuition.

PR: Would you say that The Buddha in the Attic has no central main character, or that it has many central main characters?

JO: I’d say it has one central main character, which is everyone: the collective ‘we.’ No one ‘I’ is more important than any other.

What do you think was the benefit of writing in the ‘we’ voice, the first-person plural, as you got into the world of these mail-order brides? It’s a stylistic technique novelists rarely employ.

Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to tell a much larger story than I would have been able to tell otherwise. At first I tried telling Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train... the story from the point of view of a single picture bride, but this approach felt too narrow and confining. In my research, I had run across so many fascinating stories, and I wanted to tell them all. Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to weave them all in. It’s a very capacious and infinitely expandable voice. Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train – and then we move on.

Also, since Japan is a very group-oriented culture (my father, who immigrated from Japan after World War II, once said to me, ‘Japan is the opposite of America’ – meaning, I think, that here in America, the emphasis is on the individual), it made sense to speak of the picture brides as a collective entity.

Given that you resist settling into the head of any one of these women for very long, did you find that one collective personality emerged as you were writing?

At the beginning of the novel, when the women arrive in America, they conform more to the ‘typical’ Japanese personality – quiet, stoic, uncomplaining, obedient, respectful of authority (i.e., the perfect wife or maid). But the longer they stay in America, the more they are able to individuate. And while many of them remained ‘typically’ Japanese till the end of their lives, there were variations on the typical, as well as a few outliers – women who were loud and outspoken, women who left their husbands shortly after arriving in America, women who kept secret bank accounts, women who defied their parents’ wishes by coming to America, etc.

An image that stays in my mind: Japanese women smashing their valuable, much cherished tea sets to the ground rather than selling them to their white neighbours for pennies at the ‘evacuation sales’ that took place before the Japanese left for the camps. Showing your anger in front of someone outside the family: this is not typical Japanese behaviour. In Japan, where much is made of saving face, such behaviour would be considered shameful.

Also, the women who sailed to America tended to be braver, more adventurous souls to start with. So already, just by wanting to leave, they’re a bit atypical.

Can you talk a little about the hope these women start off with, and the deceit they encounter, and how that shapes the course of their lives?

Most started out with very high hopes – they expected to marry handsome, wealthy young men (as ‘advertised’ by their future spouses in their photographs and letters) and live a life of leisure. Or, if they expected to work, then they thought that after several years they’d be able to save up enough money to sail back home to Japan and live out the rest of their days ‘with a cat in their lap and a fan in their hand’.

But life in America was not what they expected. It was one deceit after another. Some of them were deceived by their husbands, who had lied about their age and financial status. Within days of their arrival, many of the women found themselves picking strawberries in the fields, living in migrant labour camps or working as maids for white women in the city.

(On the other hand, a few of the women had deceived their husbands as well. They had ‘pasts’ in Japan – perhaps they’d had an affair, or given birth to an illegitimate child, or maybe they were just widows who stood no chance of remarrying if they remained in their village. Remember, the first line of the book is ‘On the boat we were mostly virgins.’)

And then they were betrayed by America, or the promise of America – they were despised because of their race, suspected of being disloyal and sent away to the camps.

I think that quite early on, these women – most of whom had no idea of the prejudice they would encounter in America – realized that they would only be allowed to accomplish so much in their own lives, and so they put all their hopes onto the lives of their children. Which is a huge burden, if you’re one of the children.

In this and your previous novel, and in some of your shorter pieces, you often write clusters of sentences that begin in a similar, repeated fashion and then go where they need to go. The result of reading your work—for me, and I suspect for many other readers – is a kind of hypnosis or meditation; it’s impossible not to be drawn in, submerged, seduced. Are you conscious of strategically using repetitive sentence structures? Or is maybe that you’re drawn into the rhythm of the words you’re putting down? Or is it something that just . . . happens?

A kind of hypnosis or meditation, I love that. Someone suggested that if there were a soundtrack to my novel, it would be something by Steve Reich, and I immediately thought, yes, Music for 18 Musicians . . . that hypnotic beat that just puts you into a trance.

I was obsessed with the rhythm of the language while writing this novel. I was constantly reading my sentences out loud soIt’s like there’s this underground aural grid that’s secretly holding everything together. I could hear where the accents fell. I could often hear the rhythmic pattern of the next sentence I wanted to write before I knew the exact words to drop into that pattern. And at times I found myself doing things like searching for the right three-syllable town in California where they had Japanese migrant laborers working in the peach orchards . . . A two-syllable town with orange groves just would not do.

Most of my writing is very intuitive and falls under the ‘just happens’ category. I think the best way to put it is this: it’s like there’s this underground aural grid that’s secretly holding everything together.

There’s an obvious bridge between this book and your first novel, When The Emperor Was Divine. The Buddha in the Attic serves as a prequel. Do you have any plans to explore a third book about the lives of these people?

Not in the immediate future. I think my next book will be about dementia and . . . swimming. That’s all I can say about it right now. People have asked me, however, if I’m going to write a book about the post-war experience of the Japanese Americans – their lives after they came back from the camps (and this, in my opinion, is where the real hardship began). Maybe that’ll be book four? ■

Read the first extract from The Buddha in the Attic, which appeared in Aliens, ‘Come, Japanese!’, here.

Photo by Danny Palmerlee.

Patrick deWitt’s second novel, The Sisters Brothers has earned him a place on the Booker Prize shortlist. It’s a beautifully written tale that takes place on a frontier in which family and old-school-feuding clash. He talks to Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson about finding his voice, embracing narrative and not doing your homework.

TH: The Sisters Brothers is a departure from your first novel, Ablutions. I wonder was there a formative experience that led you to write this book?

PdW: It was my harkening back to a formative experience. What happened was that I’d become the sort of reader and writer who essentially shunned the notion of plot or narrative. It had been creeping up over the years, but increasingly, story held no real importance for me – it was voice I was after, and even now I prize voice over all else. That said, I found myself growing bored, which had never happened before, and which was actually frightening in a way: my entire life revolved around books, and if I lost my affection for them, then what? Well, I found myself returning to novels I’d enjoyed when I was younger, and my tastes were less specific. Typically these were story-based tales – not light reading by any means, but more entertaining, let’s say, than what I’d been tackling in recent years. And it was such a relief to be able to relax with a book rather than sit at its feet or else do battle with it, that I began wondering if I had the ability to write something as plain-speaking and unambiguous. This provoked me to attempt a Western, or a variation on the Western.

I’ve since learned to mix up my reading. The moment it begins to feel like homework, I head for something more welcoming. And really, I should have been doing this all along.

Are there any scenes from the book that you found yourself surprised by as you wrote them?

There were a few different scenes that seemed charmed to me in that they felt pre-existing, and it was just a matter of setting down what I already knew was going to happen. But more than any one scene, a constant joy for me was working on the dialogue. The first rough pages were all dialogue, and from the word go the At times I felt I was eavesdropping. Being something of a gossip myself, this made for a good time. discussions these characters were having were really lively and slippery and fun to fool around with. It’s a dialogue-heavy story, and most everything is revealed via conversation. Eli’s narration, too, is a kind of dialogue he has with himself, or with a void – it has that chatty sing-song to it, almost taking on the slant of gossip. That’s what it is: at times I felt I was eavesdropping. Being something of a gossip myself, this made for a good time.

There seems something quintessentially American about this story, particularly the violence of it, would you say? Or is that a product of what we’ve come to associate, through pop culture, with America?

The question of whether or not I’m addressing America in my writing only comes up with people outside of America. When my first book came out in translation, several overseas journalists wanted my confirmation that I was spotlighting the decline of American society, which in writing the book never once crossed my mind. I can’t imagine ever addressing a society, any society, intentionally. I’m writing a book now about a corrupt investment advisor who grows up in a Manhattan slum and rises through the ranks to the level of multimillionaire, only to be undone by his own ambition – a thoroughly American story, in other words, but I’m not thinking about ‘America’ in the slightest. My thoughts are with the characters only. And perhaps they are a reflection of this or that society, but that’s not for me to consider.

Isn’t part of the appeal of writing about a frontier society (space or the West or the future) that morality is still in flux and often tangled up with violence?

Well, of course, to write a book is to address a frontier. That sounds contrived or precious but I don’t care, because it’s true. There was an early point in The Sisters Brothers where the Well, of course, to write a book is to address a frontier. That sounds contrived or precious but I don’t care, because it’s true. story was unwritten but the characters were in place, as was the setting, and the general tone had gelled, and it was just wide open, you know. I could go wherever I wanted and do whatever I wanted. I had total freedom, and all the time in the world. Once I was immersed myself in the landscape it became bloodier and less romantic, but those contemplative moments before pushing ahead were significant for me.

Can you tell me what you’ve been reading recently?

The last few books I’ve read are: Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter, a fairly heartbreaking story of youthful criminality in 1950s Oregon; Loving from Henry Green, an account of the servant-master dynamic in an Irish castle during the Second World War; Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman, a shimmering story collection by one of my favourite writers; and Stone Arabia, by Dana Spiotta, which spotlights the life of a brilliant, hermetic musician. ■

The Granta Fornightly Podcast: This week Lavinia Greenlaw reads several poems from her latest collection, The Casual Perfect and talks to Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson about her involvement in a new sound work, Audio Obscura.

The Granta Podcast Episode 24 by Ted Hodgkinson

You can also read, ‘Saturday Night’ from her new collection, here.

David Guterson is the author of five novels, including Snow Falling on Cedars, The Other and most recently, Ed King – a modern retelling of the Oedpius Rex myth, in which the orphaned child of an extramarital affair grows up to become Seattle’s biggest internet multi-billionaire, the self-proclaimed ‘King of Search’. David talked to Granta editor John Freeman about his new novel and the intersection of myth and the modern world.

JF: Do you believe in character or destiny, and do you think Americans have any particular hang-ups when it comes to these notions?

‘Character’ has a solid ring to it, whereas my impression is of constant flux, endless permutation, more desisting and more arising. Mostly what’s perpetual isn’t character but illusions. This is reflected, I think, in Ed King, wherein illusions bind people to the wheel.
The conventions about Americans – manifest destiny, and that we’re self-made (or humbled) in the context of being set loose on a new continent – sound antiquated, shop-worn, and Eurocentric at this point. It’s not accurate to say that, pervasively, we view success as a birthright, or as the natural fruit of our steadfast laboUr. We’re apprehensive instead, and feel our moment has passed, which is why our politicians are forever insisting otherwise. We suspect, now, that everything is relative. In short, we’ve gone post-modern; we’re wandering. But in the realm of the algorithm, which is the terrain of Ed King – and where Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook appear ascendant – Americans can, and do, take heart. The new frontier, ironically, is our last bastion, and Page, Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg, god-like, man the barricades, mostly by virtue of their out-sized hubris and out-sized brains. Ed King, founder of a search company called Pythia, is in this category.

Ed King is, let’s not be coy about it, a rewriting of the Oedipus Rex story, which means a certain number of readers know the outcome before the tale begins. And yet there’s a dark centripetal force to this book. Why do you think this is? Do we really just love a good train wreck or do you believe some sort of moral instinct is activated by witnessing someone self-destruct?

We love a good train wreck and like to watch the cars pile up repeatedly, in slow motion and with commentary, on YouTube. Not a day passes now without yet another video, gone viral, depicting little more than a foregone conclusion – and, as this question suggests, all the better, or more propulsive, when the scene unfolds within a moral frame.
The fall from grace, too, is perennial fodder for our gaze. There was something Greek and classical about Tiger Woods, for example, facing the camera in tormented apologia after treatment for sex addiction in Mississippi. As each dressed-downed and shamed American politician denies and then admits to his fallen nature, we have a new opportunity to confront our own interest not just in the details but in the spectacle. Hubris, power, sex, ambition, frailty, pathos, descent, castigation: there but for the grace of gods go I, and as long as it isn’t me, great!
It’s much the same in Ed King. Certainly we know, from the outset – given the flap copy and summaries – where it must be headed. We’re familiar with the conventions of the oedipal story – kill your father, marry your mother, live large, suffer the consequences – but most of us can still use at least a modicum of catharsis and are happy for fresh invitations to distance.

As in The Other, the characters in this novel measure their self-worth comparatively, and the novel allows us to watch many different decisions play out. Is it fair to say it’s what leads many of them astray?

Ed King, Diane Burroughs and Walter Cousins – the major presences in Ed King – are all desperate in pursuit of happiness. Goaded and derided by impulse and ambition, they each try to press the right button – or snip the right wire – before a bomb goes off. What leads them astray is not comparison but blindness, of the sort that’s a staple of clinical disorders. The narcissist, the histrionic, the paranoid, the schizoid – they’re always the last to see themselves, and that, of course, is if they’re lucky.
Blindness is of course fundamental in Oedipus Rex. Tiresias is a blind seer; Oedipus doesn’t see until he’s gouged his own eyes out. Lack of eyesight yields inward vision. The rest of us stumble on, victimized by self-delusion and weighed down by certainties. We’re led astray by our truths, which turn out to be false. We think we know ourselves, and therein lies the problem.

Your novels are slowly making a kind of survey of post-war Pacific Northwest. Aside from the fact that you live there, what compels you about this period to continue coming back to it?

Since 1994 I’ve published five novels, including Ed King, set in the post-war Pacific Northwest, with but minor excursions elsewhere. I have been and remain interested in the tenor and meaning of a place so recently over-run, sawed down to surfaces, and re-made with no vision beyond present considerations. With little in the way of history to impede or direct, we’re a bit of an experiment – what happens to a colonial outpost, established in the name of resource extraction, freshly slapped up, raw, even wild, when it butts against modernity and, shortly thereafter, against post-modernity? In this context, both grunge and Microsoft make sense as expressions of loss in concert with freedom. Unmoored from history, tradition, institutions, we’re free to mourn ourselves and to love abstraction.
Jonathan Raban, who moved here from England in 1990, gets all of this better than just about anybody. He has the distance.

This is your first novel to actively explore the culture of Seattle’s tech boom. Obviously it’s had some obvious positive effects, but here it’s employed as a kind of example of hubris. Not so much the wealth amassed, but the idea that we can know the entire world through an algorithm. Given that your last few novels invoked faith, I wondered if this story became any kind of parable about a world without faith as you wrote it?

Faith was at the center of my 2003 novel Our Lady of the Forest, which is about a girl claiming apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the woods near a dying logging town. In 2008, I published The Other, whose central character has a fixation on gnosticism, one less spiritual than psychological. My prior two novels, Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains – written in my twenties and thirties – lack the spiritual impetus but are surely coloured by a moral vision of experience. There’s a distinct line of demarcation after East of the Mountains, a shift in my approach and world-view, if you will, which reaches a current culmination in Ed King, an urban tale with meta-fictional elements – a post-modern re-telling of the oedipal fable.
In Ed King, the constituents of the Oedipal plot are a screen onto which I’ve projected questions about fate and reality. As 21st century post-modernists, we no longer traffic much with fate, but writers of fiction have always trafficked in it, with themselves, naturally, as its omnipotent purveyors. It may be that no one pulls the strings in this world, but in that world, of course, there’s always an author, and for characters that’s Author with a capital A, please, otherwise – if it suits our designs – we’ll just show you the door. ■

David Guterson’s novel Ed King is available from Random House in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK.