Chika Gujarathi

Jung Yun’s debut novel, Shelter, opens with a scene all too familiar in every parent’s life: a child out of bed way too early. We meet main character Kyung Cho, a first-generation Korean American, as he, annoyed and blurry eyed, tries to gratify the demands of his 4-year-old son, Ethan. Through this mundane encounter, the reader gets a sense of Kyung’s unhappy state of mind. The young professor is broke, and things get worse when he learns that his parents have become victims of a violent crime.

With each page, Yun takes us deeper into Kyung’s troubles, caused not only by the criminal acts of strangers but also by his own ineptitude, which he blames on his sadistic and loveless childhood. Gillian, his understanding, supportive, non-Korean wife, and Mae, his traditional, religious and artistic Korean mother, provide a juxtaposition of female influences in Kyung’s life, while his father, the elder Mr. Cho, questions whether Kyung is to blame for his own problems.

As the crime drama unfolds in the background, Yun expertly explores what it means to be an immigrant in America, the true value of tradition, the parent-child bond, what makes a good marriage and the need for forgiveness. Yun introduces us to a man riddled with anger and self-doubt, leaving the reader to judge whether time can truly mend what’s broken. The story of Shelter is more than just about having a home; it is about finding a refuge in one’s own skin.

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

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

The timeless, shared experience of grief

Review by Chika Gujarathi

by Chika Gujarathi

The latest novel from the bestselling author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, is a story told in three parts, featuring three men, each dealing with the loss of a loved one.

We start in the early 1900s in Lisbon, where Tomás grapples with the unexpected loss of his lover and their son by deciding to walk only backwards as a show of contempt for God. Stranger still is his mission to use his rich uncle’s automobile to find a treasure that he believes will forever shake faith in Christianity, furthering his defiance of heaven. These heavy themes of death and religion are lightened by humorous (sometimes laugh out loud) depictions of the results of Tomás’ backward motion, as well as his utter ineptitude with the car.

In the second section, set 35 years later, we meet Dr. Eusebio Lozora, a pathologist. This fan of Agatha Christie murder mysteries finds himself performing an equally riveting medical autopsy that is somehow linked to Tomás’ tragedy. Grief is the main theme here, which Martel skillfully uses to challenge all of the doctor’s scientific knowledge.

In the final section, another 50 years have passed. In Ontario, Canada, we meet Senator Peter Tovy, who is falling to pieces personally and professionally after the loss of his beloved wife. An unusual and unexpected course of action makes him the owner of a chimpanzee, Odo, with whom he decides to live in his ancestral village in the high mountains of Portugal. There, history reveals itself with time, decisively connecting the three parts of the novel.

After such a gripping and detailed narrative, the final conclusion seems a little too sudden and unanticipated. Even so, The High Mountains of Portugal doesn’t disappoint in its twists and turns, which leave the reader working like a detective to connect all the dots. Filled with humor, sadness, love and adventure, it’s a perfect balance for those who want a feel-good book that still provides an insight into the human psyche.

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

The latest novel from the bestselling author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, is a story told in three parts, featuring three men, each dealing with the loss of a loved one.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Sara Baume

Interview by Chika Gujarathi

by Chika Gujarathi

Sara Baume’s first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, the story of a lonely Irishman who takes to the road with his dog, won several awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She follows that stellar debut with A Line Made by Walking, a richly nuanced portrait of a young artist who suffers a breakdown and withdraws to the Irish country home of her late grandmother.

Baume, like her protagonist, studied art and once lived in her grandmother's vacant house. We contacted the author at her home in Cork to ask about the genesis of her novel, the difficulty of functioning in a fractured world and the similarities between her character's retreat and Thoreau's move to Walden Pond.

Can you tell us a little about how you chose the title of your novel, A Line Made by Walking, and why that phrase is central to the story?
The novel is named after an influential and important artwork by Richard Long. "A Line Made by Walking" was an "action" undertaken in 1967 when Long was still a student in St. Martin’s School of Art in London. He caught a train out of the city, and in a field, walked up and down and up and down in a straight line until his footsteps had worn a visible track through the grass, then he documented the site in photographs. This is one of roughly 70 artworks which are described in the novel. Frankie, the narrator, is a young graduate struggling to establish an art practice. At intervals, she impels herself to recall the works she learned about in college, as an attempt to find meaning, and to continue to learn in spite of the fact that her formal education has come to an end. "A Line Made by Walking"—the artwork—has particular resonance because Frankie understands it to be about searching, about repetition, about what we leave behind.

Did you draw on your own experience as a fine arts student to portray Frankie's state of mind?
Yes, certainly. Line started several years ago as a short piece of creative nonfiction about a period of my life spent living alone in my dead grandmother’s empty bungalow in rural Ireland. This was during Ireland’s most recent economic depression, about two years after I finished art school; I was unemployed and increasingly disillusioned and Frankie’s voice draws heavily from those feelings of confusion and despair.

Throughout the novel, Frankie lists works of art that reflect her situation as a way to test herself as an artist. How did you go about picking these perfectly fitting works?
I’ve always been as influenced by art and artists as literature and writers. In my late teens, my mother gifted me a book called Art Since 1960 by Michael Archer and ever since then I’ve had a strong interest in conceptual and contemporary art. It was important to me, when picking works, that if I couldn’t call them easily and naturally to mind, then they shouldn’t be there. In the final stages of writing the novel, I cut out a lot of works which I felt I’d tried too hard to find.

Frankie's fascination with animals, dead and alive, is central in the book. What does this obsession say about her state of mind and her way of looking at the world?
The novel begins with Frankie stumbling across a dead robin lying in the ditch outside the bungalow of her dead grandmother, where she is staying. She is—suddenly, deeply, unexpectedly—moved, and decides to take a photograph. As the novel continues, she comes across another dead creature, a rabbit, and then a rat, and so the photos become a series, and each of the 10 chapters are named for the creature discovered, and photographed, therein. Frankie considers them to be both beautiful and strangely prophetic; they make her feel as if she has reached the momentous end of something. "And because my small world is coming apart in tiny increments," she thinks, "it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too."

Sometimes it’s hard to separate Frankie's disappointment in herself from her disappointment in how the world functions. How did you manage to intertwine the two?
I guess in my mind, the two are necessarily, inextricably intertwined. How do we find a way to function, cheerfully, in a world we believe is intrinsically malfunctioning? Frankie is stultified by both the responsibility of her future and the amorphous guilt which comes attached to privilege. "The world is wrong," she thinks, "and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed."

Does Frankie achieve something akin to what Thoreau experienced at Walden Pond? Or is her retreat something entirely different?
Certainly she sets out to escape conventional society and to live "deliberately," but her motives are no way near so noble. Frankie is essentially afraid and seeking to evade responsibility. The natural world as solace is something I also explored in my first novel: I grew up in rural Ireland, but then spent several years studying and working in Dublin city. Returning to live in the countryside again in my mid-20s, I was disappointed to find how much I’d forgotten—the names of birds and trees and flowers I’d known as a child—so many details which had been squeezed out by all the years of academic study. So I set about learning them again, and this soon became a significant part of my writing process. In Line, Frankie is doing something similar, though she is only barely aware of it.

How has being Irish influenced your writing?
That’s so hard to answer! It’s almost the same as asking how being human has influenced my writing . . .

Do you think despair comes with the territory of being an artist?
Yes, certainly. But it’s a great motivator. And there can be a decent share of joy, too.

What new projects can your fans expect in the future?
The next projects will be visual, and there’s a very good chance no one will ever see them.

Author photo © Patrick Bolger

Sara Baume follows her stellar debut novel with A Line Made by Walking, a richly nuanced portrait of a young artist who retreats to the Irish home of her late grandmother.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Edward Carey

Interview by Chika Gujarathi

by Chika Gujarathi

Born in Norfolk, England, Edward Carey is the author of the acclaimed Iremonger Trilogy, Observatory Mansions, Alva & Irva and now Little, a charmingly macabre novel of the girl who would become Madame Tussaud. In addition to being a novelist, Carey is a playwright and an illustrator. He teaches at University of Texas in Austin and is married to author Elizabeth McCracken. We spoke with Carey about the 15-year process of writing Little and what it might be like to be a person made of wax.

What was it like to work at Madame Tussaud’s in London all those years ago? How exactly did it spark your inspiration for this book?
It was certainly a different job. I was employed, alongside 20 or so others, to stop flesh people from disturbing wax people. We were there to protect the wax ones. And that was it as I recall. “Please do not touch.” But the flesh humans really wanted to touch those wax ones. We were generally alone with the waxworks at the beginning and ends of the days, and we inevitably thought about the waxworks and how it was to be waxwork. You expected them to move; you suspected that they could, only that they were incredibly stubborn, that you were playing a game with them. There was a certain melancholy to the wax figures; it seemed rather cruel that they’d come so far to look like humans and yet never achieved actual humanity. After being there a few weeks, it was inevitable that any guard would become so attached to his wax wards that he would pretend to be one. We stood very still, and the public would come up to us and say how lifelike we were; we’d tell them, “Do not touch,” and they’d scream.

The most impressive waxworks, the oldest and so the most experienced at being a waxwork, were the models made by Tussaud herself. It is an incredible list: Voltaire, Franklin, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette—both full length and severed heads—Napoleon, Marat murdered in his bath, the guillotined tops of Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Herbert. These figures, it always seemed to me, had a greater dignity than the others. They also had a certain advantage: The other, newer figures would, in time, be melted down, but Tussaud’s own works, crop of the original founder, were part of the permanent collection. They represented a certain vital, bloody strand of history. They were also stations of the biography of Tussaud herself. She knew them, she cast them from life.

By far the most impressive was Tussaud’s self-portrait, a tiny, wizened old woman with a little smile—this figure is the boss, there’s no doubt about it. As I worked there, standing beside the waxwork of Tussaud and visiting all the other people of her life, I became deeply fascinated. Here was her life in three dimensions, and what a life. It seems she left a kind of trail of dead behind her, and what dead, she collected them up. She knew everyone. She was even imprisoned alongside Josephine, Napoleon’s future empress. (It’s not entirely clear what is 100 percent true about her life, and what is somewhat embellished—but I love her all the more for that.) It is an incredible survivor’s tale. What a journey this small Swiss woman made, and what an extraordinary body of work to have left behind. When I worked there I made sure to visit the self-portrait every day. I desperately wanted to write about her, but it took me a while to build up to it.

How does it feel to write a novel over 15 years? Is it maddening or rewarding to see the story and characters keep evolving with time?
I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. This novel has been almost every size a novel can be. It hit almost 700 pages at one point, and it also slimmed down to about 250. One of the most helpful ways of knowing what a novel is actually like is reaching a draft and leaving it alone for a very long time and coming back to it with fresh eyes. I’ve done this several times with this book. Once or twice I thought I’d abandoned it forever. But I always came back. Some books behave, and some don’t—this one didn’t especially. I’ve had a different relationship with it than any other book I’ve written. It took me a long time to relax around the fact that some of the characters in the book are very famous, but what took me the most time was getting Marie Tussaud’s character right in my mind. Her spirit, not the history around her, needed to steer the book, and I only truly understood that after many drafts. In a way I suppose I was searching for her all these years.

Marie welcomes her prominent chin and nose as gifts and remembrances from her parents. But it’s clear from others’ points of view that she is very ugly. Why is it that Marie never gives into this view of herself?
I think not only does she not give in, she’s would never think of herself in those terms. She has no self-pity inside her, and an incredible sense of fairness. She sees all bodies as equally fascinating. She is simply captivated by everything she witnesses. Every human life, every object has its own particular worth. Being very small and very vulnerable, she finds nothing to be worthless. This can be something of a problem, too, because she has such hunger for knowledge and such interest in everything that when she is casting severed heads from the guillotine—or even worse, mutilated heads brought in by a Parisian mob—she is as engaged and as enthusiastic as if she were casting healthy, living-and-breathing royalty.

Marie is also an orphan—her nose and her chin are all the inheritance she has, and she is very proud of them. They are proof that she has a past. If she gave in to doubts, even for a moment, she’d drown.

Doctor Curtius at once feels like Marie’s savior and destroyer. How do you see him in the novel?
Curtius teaches her everything: her craft; how the human body works; how to work; how to observe; and even, in a fashion, how to love. But he is a weak man, physically frail and also a coward. I see him as a child and Marie, initially the child, as the grown-up. He is a father to her, but a neglectful one. In the end, because she must, she fights back. But once Curtius has set her on the path of knowledge and learning, she never stops. Unlike Marie, Curtius can be toppled by the personalities of his waxworks; at one point in the novel he is so obsessed by murderers that he’s almost overtaken by their character.

I suppose he’s brilliantly flawed, a genius at wax modeling, but knows about as much as a waxwork on how to be an actual human being. From the outside he’s fairly convincing, but from the inside there’s a lot missing.

Marie lives in a cupboard for all the years she is a tutor to Princess Elizabeth at the palace of Versailles. This is so intriguing and puzzling. Is this a historic detail common at the time, or something created to resonate with the reader that Marie is truly a small and inconsequential person?
Servants were often little more than useful objects, and treated with as much as affection. I wanted to highlight this. Marie becomes a beloved object to Princess Elisabeth, but Elisabeth can never get over the fact that Marie is a commoner, a plaything rather than a true person. I’m not certain that servants were put in drawers and left to live on cupboard shelves—though surely there must have been some that were in the long history of servitude—but it seemed right to me.

You are known for drawing your characters as part of the writing process. Tell us a bit more about the beautiful illustrations in this novel. Was the intent always to include them?
Absolutely. For me, drawing the characters in a book is a way of getting to know them better. I’ve always illustrated my books, whether for children or adults. I try to do something different each time. For Little, very early on I made a wooden mannequin of Marie, four foot and a bit—her height. My wife very kindly had her hair cut so the wooden woman could have some hair. I found clothes for her in a Parisian flea market. This wooden mannequin, like the waxwork self-portrait, takes up the exact amount of space that Tussaud did. The wooden woman lives at home with us; she’s always there in the sitting room. I found it incredibly useful to have this doll around. I also made, quite early on, a death mask in wax of Doctor Curtius. I did this in part so I felt certain of what Curtius looked like (there’s a wax bust that’s perhaps of him in the Musee Carnavalet in Paris, but they’re not sure), but also so that I had a true understanding of how it was working with wax. Also fairly early on, I painted a portrait of Marie in oil paint. I signed it DAVID and state in the book that Jaques Louis David painted Marie whilst he was imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre. (He didn’t, of course. I lied.)

I wanted to have Marie’s own drawings (or what I say are her own drawings) in the book, so that she’s revealing her personality with them. This is the first time I’ve put the illustrations in the book that are (purportedly) by the person writing the book. I hoped it would be another way for the reader to feel closer to Marie, to know her a little better. This had always been my intention and I drew as I wrote.

If Marie were given the choice to pick between Edmond and Princess Elizabeth, who would she pick, and why?
I think, above everything else, she has a great capacity for love. She pours herself into other people; she finds connections. I don’t know that she could make a choice between them—could she ever have such a luxury? I think the act of choosing might make her physically rip in half like Rumplestiltskin.

Does Marie have any regrets?
None! (I wonder if regret is perhaps the luxury of the privileged. Her life is so much about surviving. I’m not sure if she’d understand the concept of regret. Things are to her, and there’s nothing to be done about it.)

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Little.

Author photo by Tom Langdon

Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Fiction Speculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Interview by Chika Gujarathi

by Chika Gujarathi

Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

How would you describe your relationship with social media, and how did it influence your storyline for Followers?
It seems funny now to say that I didn’t think that much about it as I worked on the book. I was convinced that I was fully in the world of these characters and driven only by the way they used technology. But now, when I look back, it’s so clear to me that my relationship with social media really was there in my head, subconsciously setting that skeptical tone.

And the nature of that relationship is . . . exactly what makes sense for a 35-year-old, I think. It’s ambivalent, like really precisely ambivalent, because I lived about half my life without technology and half with it. There’s a lot I love about it, but I can remember how I was before it, too, and sometimes I wish things had never changed. Sharing doesn’t come naturally to me, and I don’t take selfies. I just don’t. I never developed that muscle.

Orla and Floss meet as roommates in New York in 2015 and plot their way to stardom as reality TV stars. Their entire relationship is based on fake substance and a simple goal to become massively popular. That being said, it’s hard not to take sides. Are you Team Floss or Team Orla?
I feel like I should have phone cases printed up! Should I do it? This might seem insane to anyone who’s read the book, but if I had to be on one of these teams, I’d pick Team Floss. As bizarre and ruthless as she is, she also has zero pretense. What annoys me about Orla is that she really wants the same thing as Floss, in many ways, but she can be a real snob. She thinks the version of fame she wants—literary fame—is inherently better and more sophisticated, but I don’t see it that way.

“She thinks the version of fame she wants—literary fame—is inherently better and more sophisticated, but I don’t see it that way.”

One of the best parts of the novel is discovering through Marlow how the world has changed in 2051. What made you decide that 2051 was far enough in the future for this story to work?
Oh, that’s such a good question, and something I haven’t thought about in a long time. I’ve said this often about the book: The kernel that started it all was cursive and thinking about someone discovering something in cursive and genuinely not being able to read it. So I worked out how far in the future, reasonably speaking, that could happen, while someone older would still be writing in it. 2051 felt right to me, and I filled in everything around that small detail.

What inspired the extremely futuristic community of Constellation in California, where government-appointed reality stars are filmed 24/7 for the rest of the country to watch?
The vision was an Instagram filter come to life—I wanted the town to have saturated colors and totally managed fake trees and flowers, and I wanted it to be filled with people who were just walking brands, whose every sneaker and braid and coffee and whatever would be designed to appeal to their audience. All the time, always, like an Instagram picture where nothing’s ever off-frame. Everything’s just like this, composed and pretty and targeted.

There’s a lot about privacy in the book, and to me, this is another layer. I mean, I always assume that influencers have one beautiful, clean corner of a room where they shoot their books and smoothies next to like, a big frond in a mason jar, and that the rest of their house is a mess, like us. But in Constellation, almost every square inch and every waking second is on camera, so there’s no room for clothes on the floor or an off-day outfit, the old Uggs and the stained sweatshirt. It’s rigorous, mandatory, constant perfection.

A lot has changed from 2015 to 2051, including how babies are designed in labs. However, Orla, Floss and Marlow all struggle with their choices around motherhood and the limitations and opportunities those choices impose. Is this to say that some things will always be the same?
If anything’s always going to be the same, I think, it’s probably that. I also just felt like I hadn’t read a ton of stories about the future that go deep into motherhood, and the ones that I have read—like Red Clocks by Leni Zumas or Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich—really affected me. This book spans 35 years, and if time is passing in big chunks like that, you’re obviously going to have some women somewhere making choices about whether or not to procreate. Technology doesn’t necessarily make those choices easier. I liked the idea of taking something kind of sci-fi—the way babies are composed, gene-by-gene, in the book—and boiling it down to the human implications of like, the family brawl it could cause if you decided, hmm, maybe not Aunt Cindy’s genes for my baby.

How challenging was it to keep race, religion and politics from taking over the story?
There were early drafts of the book that went really deep into all of those things, so I wouldn’t say I met that challenge, originally. I mean, there were drafts that were just out of control, with big sprawling cross-country trips and other characters dealing with the fallout of how those things were dealt with in the future. And like—I think the book you have in your hands now definitely has enough stuff in it. So it’s good that those things fell out. But it was almost like I had to get those ideas out of my system so I knew what the country looked like, even if I couldn’t pass along every detail.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Followers.

On that note, I couldn’t help but wonder what you think the rest of the world looks like in 2051. Has the entire human race given up on the internet as we know it today?
My brain just isn’t big enough to take on the whole world, but I pictured a really fragmented America, when it came to the internet and everything else. The new internet I describe in the book, to me, never reaches the all-powerful status our current internet does. Some people remain kind of permanently disenchanted with technology. I don’t want to spoil things for people who haven’t read the book, but obviously we see some communities in 2051 that are founded on sharing a specific belief, and in my mind, those are everywhere across America in 2051. Separate communities for liberals and conservatives and religious people and atheists and people who love guns and people who don’t like drinking, and even people who have more sinister, damaging beliefs. Bubbles that are openly marketed this way, that sort of replace varied towns or call the naturally unvaried ones what they are.

While I can’t wait for self-driving cars and robot butlers to be a common reality, I do get nostalgic about things that we are losing to technical advancements. Which three things (beside cursive writing, of course) do you wish we carry forth as humans in this increasingly tech-savvy world?
It’s obviously very cheap of me to say books and independent bookstores, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I don’t think I’m going to win this one, and it’s really sentimental, but I can’t fully let go of linear TV. I like streaming and all that stuff, but I still love event television. I miss the feeling of certain shows being for a certain night, like when “Community” and “The Office” and “Parks and Rec” and “30 Rock” were all stacked on a Thursday—heaven. I still like some immediacy with certain TV. I will not watch a debate or an awards show on buffer, and don’t even get me started on sports. People who can record a basketball game and watch it two days later, when everyone knows what happened and the players have already like, showered and moved on with their lives—this is deeply strange to me. So, yeah. I hope we bring a little event TV.

And here’s another one I’m not going to win! I’d like to officially make the case for reviving landlines. It never bothered me not to have one until I had kids, but now there are so many reasons I want one back. You can’t teach kids to dial 911 on your phone without also giving them to code to your phone, and I . . . don’t want to do that. Also, since there’s no “home phone,” my cell phone—and email—just becomes a little tech extension of my emotional labor as a parent. Now I’m the keeper of all the info. You know? So, yeah, you heard it here first: The landline deserves a comeback. First I convince my husband, then the world!

Author photo by Alison Conklin