Becky Ohlsen

by Becky Ohlsen

Much like Ana, the heroine of her engrossing debut novel, Sara Nović isn’t entirely sure where to call home. “This is what I’m trying to figure out,” the author says, laughing, in a recent interview. “I really don’t know.”

Nović, 28, has lived in Queens for about a year, and in New York City for a few years, but she grew up dividing her time between the U.S. and Croatia, where she has friends and family. The dual perspective informs her powerful story.

Remarkably well-crafted and emotionally mature, Girl at War plunges readers instantly into the world of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in a tiny flat in Zagreb with her parents and baby sister, Rahela. The city seethes in the oppressive summer heat, and Ana hears whispered rumors of “disturbances” in nearby towns, but she’s still relatively carefree, spending her days playing football and riding bicycles with her best pal, Luka.

Then one day the guy at the corner store refuses to sell her the usual pack of cigarettes for her uncle unless she can tell him whether it’s a Serbian or a Croatian brand. War has arrived. In Nović’s skilled hands, it takes the form of such concrete details, interruptions of daily life—small at first, then catastrophic. Ana and her family adjust to the sudden chaos: They forgo their annual trip to the coast, make do with severely restricted food and water and hide in underground shelters during air-raids. But when Rahela falls ill and no local hospital can help, the family is forced to take a huge risk. The consequences of that decision will shape Ana’s entire future. When we see her again 10 years later, in New York City in 2001, Ana is still reeling.

Ana’s difficulty dealing with her past is complicated by the general ignorance of the American public about the Croatian War of Independence, which Nović was awakened to after her first extended trip to the country. “I was shocked that nobody [in the U.S.] had heard about the war. It kind of freaked me out, because it still feels very fresh there.”

In response, she wrote a short story for a creative writing class. In it, the character who would become Ana was “having a meltdown,” as Nović puts it, triggered by news of the death of Slobodan Milošević and the memories it dredged up.

After she’d turned in the story, her professor called her into his office; she assumed she was about to be scolded. Instead, he told her, “You are going to write this novel, and you’re not going to pull any punches.”

“I kind of doubted that I had a novel in me,” she says now. “I was like 18! But eventually I just kind of started writing out in a web from that starting spot.” She kept working at the story, in chunks, for a few years. Getting the structure right was especially tricky.

“I knew I didn’t want it to be chronological,” Nović says. “I wanted readers to have a break after what happens in Part 1. I tried all sorts of weird stuff—I tried starting the book in the present, but that was terrible.” Then, while working on her MFA at Columbia, she had a meeting with writer Sam Lipsyte. He hadn’t read the novel yet, but he said, “Just tell me about it.” That did the trick: “I just spilled my guts, and he drew a picture on an envelope, and that ended up being the order in which things are now.”

As it stands, the narrative structure works beautifully, adding a whole extra layer of tension to the story. Readers slowly discover that there’s a secret buried in Ana’s past, even beyond the dark history she keeps from even her closest friends, but uncovering it is not a simple process.

Ana’s ambivalence about discussing the war might also reflect Nović’s experience. “Some people adapt better than others,” she says. “There are people in Croatia now that just don’t want to talk about it. Then there are other people who want to get it all out, and there’s a lot of cool art coming out of it.” She mentions, for example, a theater group called Heartefact that stages performances in some of the villages that were hit hardest because of their ethnically mixed populations. Still, she says, “It’ll take a long time for things to get better.”

She’s certainly not one to sit around waiting; Nović is busy. In addition to fiction, she writes essays and nonfiction, works as an editor at Blunderbuss magazine, teaches at Columbia and is the founder of the deaf-rights website Redeafined.

Nović, who is deaf, says the site started as “an anger project, but a productive one.” She’d been reading some op-eds about parents of deaf kids advocating for cochlear implant surgery, and she wrote a counterpoint op-ed in response, but no one wanted it. So eventually she decided to publish it herself, and Redeafined was born. To her surprise, “people are reading it!”

The topic is heated, she acknowledges, in part because it’s usually the case that a deaf kid has hearing parents. That means “it’s a weird kind of identity . . . you probably don’t share it with your family.”

She’s working on a story now that’s set at a deaf school, and she’s been trying to figure out a good way to put sign language on paper.

“When I finished this book I thought, well, that’s it, those are all the thoughts I really had,” she says, which is probably how everyone feels after their first novel. “It’s literally everything you’ve ever thought about. But now I have thoughts again, so that’s encouraging!”

Nović also loves teaching. There’s a character in Girl at War, a professor who acts as a sort of book angel, lending Ana new books each week and guiding her reading. Nović says he was inspired by a professor she had at Emerson as an undergrad, whose office was similarly crammed with piled-up books. “I’ve been really lucky to have a couple of teachers like that who just feed me books,” she says. “I hope to become that person.”

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Girl at War.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Kevin Barry

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

by Becky Ohlsen

“I'm in a swamp in County Sligo,” Kevin Barry tells me over the phone. The Irish author has lived in at least a dozen places, from his childhood home of Limerick to Spain to Santa Barbara, but he’s settled now in an old police station built in the 1840s, known as the Barracks. Sadly, he says, it doesn’t appear to be haunted.

If it were, he’d surely know. Barry, whose first novel, City of Bohane, won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is highly attuned to what he calls the “strange reverberations” that linger in towns and landscapes. His new novel, Beatlebone, navigates a world of ghosts and echoes and spooky floating patches of emotion. It’s a musical fever dream of a book that sounds weirder than it is; Barry’s perfectly honed storytelling voice sweeps readers happily through decades and across rough seas.

The wounded hero of Beatlebone is John Lennon, who, in this version, has fled New York domesticity in 1978 and run away to Ireland to spend three days alone on the island he bought a decade earlier. He hopes to do a bit of scream therapy and maybe try to write again. But he has to dodge the press, and on top of that, he’s not at all sure how to find his island. Enter Cornelius O’Grady, local driver, fixer, mentor—and decidedly more than he seems.

How did Barry happen upon this odd tale? “My bicycle led me directly to this story,” he says.

He’d heard there was an island in Clew Bay that Lennon owned. His favorite Beatle’s connection to Ireland continued to fascinate Barry, even after he’d mentioned it in a story or two.

“It wouldn’t let me be!” he says. “It kept coming back at me.” He was “snoozing on the sofa one day” after a bike ride and, startled awake, suddenly realized he should write a novel around it.

“It’s a very risky thing to take such an iconic figure and set him down in one of your stories. When it came to the Beatles, I was always very much Church of John.”

“I was immediately terrified,” Barry says. “It’s a very risky thing to take such an iconic figure and set him down in one of your stories.” He worked carefully and with devotion. “When it came to the Beatles, I was always very much Church of John, ” he says.

The risk paid off; Lennon is a fully convincing yet still original character, none the worse for having been borrowed from real life. Barry says early readers of the book have told him the first thing they do is start Googling to see how much of what they’re reading really happened.

“I love to work right out on the edge of believability,” he says, “where the reader is going, no way. Come on. Well . . . maybe.”

Some of the wondering is put to rest in a section two-thirds of the way through the book, in which Barry steps forward and tells how he came to write the novel. “I always knew I was going to put an essay bang in the middle of the book,” he says.

At its heart, Beatlebone is about what it takes to make a record, to write a book, to create something. “I wanted to put my own struggle in there as kind of a mirror.”

Naturally, Barry visited Lennon’s island while working on the book, in pursuit of those strange reverberations. He tells me the same thing Lennon’s driver, Cornelius, says in Beatlebone: that stories and feelings linger not in people but in places. You might be out for a walk and “a sense of elation would come over you,” Cornelius says.

That patch of happiness could have been floating around the field for the last 10 years. Or for the last 350 years. Because of love that was felt there or a child playing or an old friend who was found again. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field.

Of course, you could as easily find a floating sadness or fear.

“I hope this is sounding very hippie-ish,” Barry says, laughing.

Beatle Island, properly called Dorinish, is empty now, apart from nesting terns and their massive eggs and the stories that linger. But the barren isle was once home to one of the earliest organized communes. In 1971, Lennon arranged for a group of New Agers to camp out on his island as an experiment; they stayed about a year and a half. They were part of a trend starting in the ’60s of hippies coming to Ireland, partly because it was cheap to get a cottage along the coast. (“It’s not now,” Barry says.)

“I find it a really interesting time,” he says. The “gray, monolithic” country was opening up to new ideas. “It’s weird and lovely to think that John was involved in that.”

Did Barry try some scream therapy while he was on the island?

“Oh for sure, you’ve got to!” he says. “I was determined to be very method with this book. But,” he adds with a laugh, “there didn’t seem to be very much in there.”

The book took him four years to finish, and you can tell by his tone they were long years.

“The first year,” he says, “there was an awful lot of watching YouTube,” trying to perfect Lennon’s voice from old video clips.

“When the book started to become delightful to me was when I gave John a sidekick,” he says. This would be Cornelius the driver, who has “oodles of roguish charm—we’re never quite sure what he’s up to,” Barry says, adding, after a pause: “He’s kind of me.”

Among the book’s greatest pleasures are the long conversations between Lennon and Cornelius—which Barry admits took a tremendous amount of work to get right. “They have to feel really light and natural on the page,” which meant endless revisions. He acted out the voices, pen in hand, making notes as he read, going over the dialogue hundreds of times.

With Cornelius in place, Barry says, “I started to realize it was the most old-fashioned kind of novel in the world—essentially it’s Don Quixote.” A man goes on a quest, the nature of which is basically irrelevant—it doesn’t really matter if they get to the island. The important stuff is what happens to them along the way.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction

Fiction Science Fiction Debut Fiction

Sylvain Neuvel

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

by Becky Ohlsen

Canadian writer Sylvain Neuvel makes a thrilling debut with Sleeping Giants, a gripping sci-fi adventure that is innovative both in plot and structure. It all begins when a young girl stumbles (literally) into the archaeological find of the century: an enormous robotic hand created by an ancient alien race.

Fast-forward some 25 years, and that girl is now a scientist in charge of a military-run operation to find and retrieve other parts of that robot, which could be the greatest weapon the world has ever seen. Told in journal entries of the various characters as well as their interviews with a mysterious man who works as a go-between for the project and the government higher-ups, Sleeping Giants is an imaginative tour de force that will appeal to science fiction and mystery fans alike.

How did the story first come to you: was it that image of the giant hand, an idea about the plot, a particular character, or something else?
The idea for the book came while watching Japanese anime about a giant robot. I asked my son if he’d like a toy robot but he wanted to know everything about it before I built it. We were watching "Grendizer" together and I started thinking about what it would be like if we found some giant alien artifact in real life. That got me started, but I tend to picture things before I write them. I need a strong visual to get me going. For this book, it was the little girl in the giant metal hand.

How did you arrive at the format for the book (a combination of interview transcripts, news briefs and journal entries)? Did you try other approaches first?
Not really. I knew it was going to be epistolary from the start. That said, I couldn’t find the right way to do it at first. I wanted to switch perspective between chapters, but I thought they would feel somewhat disconnected. I needed something to hold everything together, a common thread. That’s when I got the idea for the interviewer. Once I figured him out, everything else fell into place.

Was it difficult to figure out the structure—which moments to show and what to skip over?
Yes. I wrote the prologue first. Then I structured the whole book. That took a while. I’d picture a scene in my head, then I’d figure out the best way to present it. Do I show it as a future plan, while it’s happening, or do I deal with the consequences before I let the reader know what really happened? Who gets to talk about it? The one who is most affected by the situation or the one with more knowledge about the facts? Can I create more anticipation if I change the time or the point of view? Sometimes, the best thing to do is to skip that moment completely and let the readers figure it out on their own.

Reading the book, it’s hard not to “cast” the characters. For instance, I kept seeing the interviewer as Victor Garber, who plays Sydney Bristow’s dad on “Alias.” The evolution of his sympathies through the book was really interesting. Did you have a particular model or type in mind for that character?
I love the interviewer. I wouldn’t object to your casting, but I couldn’t really see his face when I wrote the book. He was all about the voice for me. Now, if I were making the movie, I’d probably go for Idris Elba, or Ray Stevenson, the way he looked in "Dexter," season 7.

"Would such a discovery bring humanity together, or would we wage wars over it?"

Do you find it scary or comforting to imagine a race of super-advanced aliens out there keeping an eye on us?
I think the most interesting question is how we’d deal with that knowledge. Would such a discovery bring humanity together, or would we wage wars over it? Fear of the other is a frequent theme in the news these days and I think it begs the question as to how we’d deal with a different species. I’m much more scared of us than I am of them.

What books or movies do you see as having influenced Sleeping Giants?
I wanted this story to be about us. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is probably the closest thing to what I was aiming for. Here’s a movie about an alien encounter and we’re watching a guy sculpting mashed potatoes and wrecking his backyard. I loved that. Contact is also similar in spirit to Sleeping Giants. The book is also part political thriller. I see a lot of The Hunt for Red October in there as well.

Did you learn anything while researching the book that surprised you?
I learned a whole lot of interesting things researching that book. The science was all new to me, so was everything military. What surprised me the most was probably how many websites are dedicated to gathering evidence of secret government bases. I was looking for one plausible site to build one. I ended up with dozens to choose from. The time and energy that went into many of these websites is absolutely fascinating.

You have a PhD in linguistics—what originally interested you about that area? What effect do you think this background has had on your writing?
I dropped out of high school when I was 15. When I went back to school for a B.A., linguistics seemed like a good idea, a way to combine my passion for language and science. I’m not sure what kind of influence my linguistics background has on my writing. I understand the mechanics behind some of the humor, for example, but I don’t know if I would have done the same thing without that knowledge. There’s a linguist on the team, though, and chances are he’ll have to work a bit throughout the series.

What do you like to read for fun?
These days, I’m looking for quick reads. I like books with science in them, but I’ll try just about anything if it looks interesting. Favorite one I read lately: The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka. That book is so good. I wish I had more time. I don’t read nearly as much as I’d like to, and I buy books way faster then I go through them. I think it was Stephen King who said: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write.” To that, I’d like to add time to exercise, fix the house, build robots . . .

I’ve read that you like to build toys and small robots for your son—are there any that you’re especially proud of?
I do. I like to make physical objects. I work on a computer all day, then I go home and I write on the computer. I like to build things. I haven’t in the past couple years, but I usually spend six or seven months making my Halloween costume in my spare time. I built a robot from my book for my son. It looks good, but it’s not really playable. The idea was cool: it comes in pieces that are held together with magnets, but it keeps falling apart. I’m shopping for a 3D printer so I can build him a better one. I made him a spaceship bed, inspired by the Raptors in “Battlestar Galactica,” with a cannon, a joystick, some buttons. He really likes it. I do too. [photo at right]

Sleeping Giants is Book 1 of the Themis Files; can you talk a little about what we can look forward to in the sequel(s)? Anything else you’re excited about working on right now?
I don’t want to spoil anything, but I can tell you that the stakes are even higher in book two. There are some questions being answered, some new ones being asked. There will be at least three in the Themis Files. I’m having a blast in that universe, and I love the people who live in it. I can’t wait to share.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Sleeping Giants.

Author photo by James Andrew Rosen.

Canadian writer Sylvain Neuvel makes a thrilling debut with Sleeping Giants, a gripping sci-fi adventure that is innovative both in plot and structure.

Fantasy, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Fantasy

Ransom Riggs

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

by Becky Ohlsen

“I guess I had a lot of peculiar people in my life growing up,” says Ransom Riggs, author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series of novels. “Probably the most influential, and peculiar in her own way, was my grandmother.” A farmer’s daughter who became a farmer’s wife, she also went to university and was a teacher of Latin and French. “She infected me with a love of books.”

Riggs, 37, spoke from his home in Los Angeles about the upcoming Tim Burton film adaptation of his dark YA fantasy debut, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a surprise 2011 hit that spent more than two years on the bestseller list. We also talked about his new collection of short stories set in the same world, Tales of the Peculiar. Readers of the series, which includes two other bestselling novels, Hollow City and Library of Souls, will recognize that title: It’s the name of a book that the peculiar children consult for advice and comfort. Riggs says he wanted the new book to seem like an artifact from the peculiar world, an imaginary object that readers somehow discover in their real-world bookstores.

The design of Tales of the Peculiar helps achieve this effect. Where you’d normally find the copyright details, instead there are instructions on things not to do while reading the book (whatever you do, don’t dog-ear the pages) and some unlikely production notes (“Printed in a nomad’s tent in the desert of Lop”). The foreword maintains this conceit: It’s written by Millard Nullings, the invisible boy at Miss Peregrine’s home. In it, Nullings explains why he decided to edit and annotate this edition of the Tales. The stories are not just folklore, he writes: “They are also the bearers of secret knowledge. Encoded within their pages are the locations of hidden loops, the secret identities of certain important peculiars, and other information that could aid a peculiar’s survival in this hostile world.”

On the surface, the stories are moral tales, bedtime stories designed to be read aloud. In most of them, someone behaves cruelly toward a peculiar child because of his or her peculiarity, and that bad behavior is eventually, inventively, punished. In a few, the peculiar child himself is the one acting foolishly and must slowly learn his lesson. In one story, a girl discovers she can take away people’s nightmares; in another, a beautiful princess with scales and a forked tongue spits venom at her enemies. A big-hearted boy turns into a locust. A man may, in fact, be an island.

Riggs wrote Tales of the Peculiar “for fans of the series who want to know more about the world,” he says. “It casts a much wider net narratively.”

“There are some Easter eggs for peculiars hidden throughout,” he adds. “They’re waiting for me in case I need them.” (This is as much as he will say about the possibility of future Miss Peregrine novels.)

The fairy-tale format suits Riggs’ style—each character in these simple tales is richly drawn and memorable. We sympathize with them; even their bad decisions are understandable.

It doesn’t hurt that each tale is illustrated with a gorgeous woodcut by the artist Andrew Davidson. “I knew I wanted a classic, wood-engraving style,” Riggs says. He had admired the covers on the adult hardcover editions of Harry Potter in the U.K.; maybe something like that, he told his publisher. A few weeks later came the reply: How about the guy who did those? “Great!” Riggs said.

Davidson was “amazing to work with,” Riggs says. “His ideas were out of this world—so dynamic and detailed.”

The engravings add to the sense of Tales of the Peculiar as a weighty, otherworldly artifact, something that was important to the author. Even as a kid, Riggs says, “I liked how big, musty old books felt and smelled.” And ever since Quirk Books published his Sherlock Holmes Handbook in 2009—he has considered himself lucky when it comes to his books’ aesthetic: “I’ve been able to make books that look like they belong on my grandmother’s bookshelves!”

Working with an illustrator also affected Riggs’ writing process. The three Miss Peregrine novels are built around old photographs the author had collected over the years. Writing them, he says, “I had a fixed number of pictures and had to find stories that would fit them.” In the new book, though, “I could tell whatever story I wanted.”

The magical world created by Riggs has just been adapted for film by director Tim Burton. “Everything they did services the heart of the story,” Riggs says.

From an early age, Riggs sought out books that opened doors in the imagination, whether that meant fantasy or otherworldly realism. “C.S. Lewis, big-time,” he recalls when asked about his early influences, and “Tolkien of course,” not to mention Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. King’s work, Riggs says, “was never just horror—it was always also about discovering another world.”

He read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a decades-spanning saga about forced-labor prison camps in the Soviet Union, at age 13. (“Intense!” is how he understatedly describes that experience.) At the opposite extreme, Riggs also loved reading James Thurber, a favorite of his grandmother’s.

Was it strange for him to entrust the world he’d created to filmmaker Tim Burton, who has an equally strong aesthetic? Not really, says Riggs: “I knew it was in good hands.” Unusually for Hollywood, the movie has only one screenwriter (Jane Goldman), and Riggs says he’s pleased with how it turned out. “I didn’t feel like they needed my help,” he says.

As always with an adaptation, certain changes were made along the way, but they’re all superficial, Riggs says. “Everything they did services the heart of the story.” He explains that the film adaptation has allowed for some “wonderful visual irony.” For example, the character of Bronwyn, a girl with super-strength, is no longer the bruiser shown in the novel’s antique photograph, but instead a comically tiny girl.

The main challenge in taking the story from book to film, Riggs says, was getting the tone right. The books have a “veneer of gothic horror,” but also bits of Monty Python and other lighter elements. “It’s a very strange balance of tone,” he says. With his penchant for the gothic as well as romantic wistfulness and visual comedy, Burton proved to be the perfect fit.

The film, which stars Asa Butterfield (Hugo) as main protagonist Jacob Portman and “Penny Dreadful” actor Eva Green as Miss Peregrine, arrives in theaters on September 30. As for Tales of the Peculiar, it was published on “Loop Day”—September 3, the same date of the 24-hour time loop in which Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children safely hides. Riggs visited several bookstores on Loop Day, and is currently on tour with his wife, the YA novelist Tahereh Mafi, whose latest book, Furthermore, was published in August.

“It’s an exciting time at our house,” he says. “It’s going to be really peculiar.”

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.