New Fiction: The Lacuna- Barbara Kingsolver (Interview)

Recently Published in the Telegraph

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was a controversial bestseller, says Tom Leonard, and her new novel set in Mexico is just as provocative


By Tom Leonard
Published: 6:30AM GMT 20 Nov 2009
For someone who insists she never tries to write anything nakedly political, Barbara Kingsolver does a good job of stirring up her fellow Americans. During the first Gulf War she was so upset about her country’s jingoism that she moved to the Canary Islands for a year. During the second Gulf War, she was labelled a traitor for suggesting that in the aftermath of September 11, the United States should analyse its behaviour.

Kingsolver, 54, went for two targets – colonialism and evangelism – in her 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible. The book, about an American missionary’s wife struggling to live in the Belgian Congo, became a huge success in Britain and the US, selling more than four million copies.

The Lacuna, her sixth novel and her first since 2000, spans 30 years, two countries and 500 pages, and is once more controversial. Trotsky’s greatness and America’s xenophobia are two of the discussion topics coming soon to a book club near you.

“Every time I start a new book, I go down some crazy, rocky road and think: ‘Oh boy, they’re not going to follow me here’,” she says, laughing. We are sitting with her husband, Steven Hopp, an academic, ordering locally produced food (another Kingsolver passion) at a restaurant near their farm in south-west Virginia. They have some expertise with the menu: two years ago, they co-wrote Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a memoir about the year they spent eating only locally sourced food. Kingsolver, the daughter of a Kentucky doctor and an amateur farmer, toils on their small farm with the enthusiasm that other Americans reserve for the gym. She says it is “the life I grew up with and I like it”.

Chatty and down-to-earth, the former biologist says she has never been particularly interested in finding out what her readers want: “I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.” She is similarly unconcerned about the labels her critics apply. I try a few. As for “women’s writer”, she says that if it mattered to her, she “would probably take it as a compliment” but then observes that Moby-Dick “doesn’t have a single woman in it but it’s not called a man’s book”.

Kingsolver won’t accept she is a polemicist. “I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary,” she says. “And if I worried about controversy in this country I would just shut myself into a room and never come out. Anything one does is likely to be labelled absurdly and that is part of what this book is about.”

The bashing that Kingsolver received for speaking out against American foreign policy clearly influences her latest novel, The Lacuna. Through his journals and letters, we follow the half-American, half-Mexican narrator, Harrison Shepherd, as he grows up in Mexico and falls in with a string of historical figures. He becomes the cook for the communist muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. On cue, Leon Trotsky, on the run from Stalin’s assassins, comes to stay. Shepherd is on hand to witness Trotsky’s affair with Kahlo and, having become the revolutionary’s secretary, is there for his murder with an ice-pick. Moving back to the US, Harrison’s success as a writer of historical adventure novels coincides with post-war McCarthyism. No prizes for guessing what the Feds make of the “previous employers” section on Shepherd’s CV.

Fans and foes alike of The Poisonwood Bible will find plenty that is familiar in The Lacuna, Latin for “gap” – of which there are many in the novel. Kingsolver aficionados will appreciate the same lush writing, vivid imagery and forensic research. She also returns to familiar themes: family, community and the relationship between historical events and ordinary people.

Critics have complained about her slow-paced plots, political tub thumping, indulgent prose and scant interest in her male characters. They could level the same charges to varying degrees at The Lacuna. And while Kingsolver is particularly proud of how she handles the narrator’s gradual metamorphosis from silent observer to self-confident novelist, an unfortunate consequence is that he is such a colourless creature for so long that it’s difficult to care much about him later on.

For The Lacuna, her starting point was to ask why the US has such an uneasy relationship between art and politics. She saw that Mexico celebrated its political artists as heroes. Kingsolver quickly added a corollary – why, she asked, were Americans so uneasy with self-examination?

“Patriotism is tied up here with seeing our country as a perfect, finished product, not a work in progress,” she says. Anyone who questions the status quo in the US is likely to be called treasonous, she argues.

She suggests her own experiences bear comparison to those of the targets of Senator McCarthy. “That terrible time in the Forties and Fifties when people could lose their job for any whiff of questioning of the American way. After 9/11, it felt to me that we had never walked very far from that place.”

American “fearfulness of change” is, she says, evident in the hysteria over health care reform. “People are throwing that word socialism around as though it were synonymous with the anti-Christ.”

Her treatment of Trotsky is so tender and admiring that one has to ask how far down the road to socialism Kingsolver goes herself.

She says she has been “interested” in him for more than 20 years but cuts off further discussion of her own politics. She says everyone knows Lenin and Trotsky weren’t nearly as bad as Stalin. Well, not everyone. Kingsolver’s Trotsky is a fatherly figure – the ruthless architect of the Red Army never happier than when he is out feeding his chickens.

The author who never worries about causing controversy has risen to the occasion once again.

The Men Who Stare at Goats- Jon Ronson

For every book written there is either a movie adaptation, one about to be made or a script/movie rights under dispute. Either which way I am introducing this new segment into the blog.

George Clooney is set to dominate this festive season as 'The Men Who Stare at Goats', the second movie in George Clooney's cinematic hat trick, is released this week (last month he lent his voice to Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and on Christmas we see the release of Up In The Air based on the novel by Walter Kirn).

“The Men Who Stare at Goats,” is based on a book by the British journalist Jon Ronson.

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the US Army. Defying all known military practice – and indeed the laws of physics – they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. They were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren’t joking. What’s more, they’re back and fighting the War on Terror. So unbelievable it has to be true – this is the real-life account that inspired the film.

‘Simultaneously frightening and hilarious’ The Times

‘Not only a narcotic road trip through the wackier reaches of Bush’s war effort, but also an unmissable account of the insanity that has lately been done in our names’
Observer

Needless to say I am dying to see the book and read the film..... you know what I mean.

Pieces from Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence

By "pieces" I mean actual objects, not excerpts. Orhan Pamuk's new novel follows Kemal, the book’s dolorous hero and scion of a bourgeois Istanbul family, as he falls for a poorer distant relation, a young, former beauty-pageant contestant named Fusun. This is a portrait of 1970's Istanbul, of obsession, class and, because the author is Orhan Pamuk, ideas about East and West.

Like Kemal, who collects objects linked to Fusun, Orhan shall be opening a real life museum of objects next year, filled with 83 displays for each of the 83 chapters of the novel.
“As I wrote this novel over the past 10 years,” Pamuk told me, “I encountered everyday objects that would make their way into the story. At other times, the story would demand an object to keep it moving, so I would bring one in. When I am stuck, I cast about looking for ideas from objects around me. My perceptions, or you can say my tentacles, are wide open to everything in shop windows, in friends’ homes, in flea markets and antique shops and so on. This is how the Museum of Innocence came about.”

New York Times featured some objects in their magazine, with explanatory captions taken from interviews with the author.

The two main characters in the book are distant cousins, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when they were children, it was customary for wealthier branches of a family to pass on old clothes and toys to less-privileged members of the family. When these two cousins, Kemal and Fusun, meet years later and become lovers, she remembers a tricycle she once received as a gift from his family.
Fusun, the character with whom I strove to identify in this novel, passes time in her marriage by making paintings of birds. As it happens, I was a painter in my youth. In my museum, I will show the popular birds of Istanbul, which Fusun fastidiously paints one by one, but I will paint them myself. This is a stuffed seagull and crow I have in my office that help me as I prepare the paintings for the museum. Once in a while other crows come to my balcony to peer in at this one.

New Fiction:The Museum of Innocence- Orhan Pamuk

Lovely review of Pamuk's new novel featured in Dawn's Books and Authors


A MATTER OF THE HEART AND MIND by Nyla Daud

It is the spring of 1975 in an Istanbul where life is as much a quirk of fate , rather an accident of birth as it would be anywhere in a society divided so markedly between the contemporary and the traditional with a newly emerging market economy directing where you got to live , what you ate and drank and whom you got married to . The people populating this dual carriageway exist in parallel realms with a dividing median that is as opaque as opaque can be, save of course the occasional spurts of unavoidable translucency inserted between the lines. Against such a backdrop we meet Kemal . It is the eve of his engagement to the socially correct Sibel. She ,together with Kemal’s immediate family and party- going, permissive and liberally tuned peers, are all utterly preoccupied with establishing the writ of a modern, secular culture where religion is only for the likes of Cetin Effendi the family chauffer who comes from the other side. Central to this setting of a pseudo westernisation is placed the issue of virginity equated with courage and modernity in a convoluted sort of way.

Meanwhile Kemal’s chance encounter with a poor female relative becomes the take off point for what, in the first few chapters reads like a cheap, sleaze inundated romantic thriller . On the other side is Fusun the eighteen year old subject of his passions who…you just guessed it…comes from the wrong side of the social divide. Just then it dawns that there is more to the story then the shenanigans of a thirty year old playing hide and seek with the sensibilities of the society his parents have worked so hard to become a part of. As Kemal proceeds to discover the many flavours of stolen moments with Fusun, he gradually moves to the sidelines of his own world. Gradually sorrow begins to consume him as he takes in the impossibility of the social chasm that hovers menacingly over the union he would now consummate while at the same time keeping up with the pace of life in Sibel, his betrothed’s universe.

With the preliminaries having been taken care of, Pamuk now comes into his own as he bares the workings of Kemal’s mind and tortured soul wandering in search of happiness . In the ultimate analysis it is the description and analysis of just these emotions that give the novel a unique depth . Pamuk infuses his protagonist with such a profusion of multi-layered sentiments that he becomes a collective of human sensitivity. However it is the manner in which he sustains the delicacy of these emotional swings, doubts and dreams that he emerges the master craftsman. Moving away from the opulence and ease of a west-obsessed Istanbul society, Kemal turns towards the other Istanbul. Here for the next nine years he will find peace in the impoverished backstreets which all lead to the house where Fusun lives with her parents. He will learn to enjoy the consolations of a middle class life whose hallmark is a dinner table in front of the television. He will venture forth to seedy film circles and cheap hotels where he will get to know men with lost dreams . Doing the rounds he begins to feel that his father’s growing business concerns and the attendant obligation to live the “elegant European “ life had deprived him of the simple essences of live that could be found in these poor neighbourhoods .

As the rift with his own home ground grows into a glaring reality , Kemal proceeds to resolve his emotional dilemma by a unique method. He becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his love . There is a memento for every moment lived whether in happiness or hope , in desperation or irresolution, in anger or remorse. Pamuk takes the reader on an exploratory journey, juggling manifestations of the nuances of what would be an ordinary romantic attachment with an obsessive desire to mark life with objects. As Kemal’s collection grows….imagine preserving over four thousand cigarette butts among other things…he is driven by the idea of putting everything in a museum. Why, one would ask? For the answer you have to read the last sentence in the book . A statement of heartfelt fact, it could also be one man’s earnest desire to exonerate himself in the eyes of a society that thinks of little beyond itself and what is deemed socially permissible .

But to merely say that the novel is only an absorbing account of a human relationship would be a misnomer…because at parallels is Pamuk’s absolutely unabridged treatise on the nature of conflicts that throng Turkish society in every sense of the word . All very real and everyday, these conflicts speak of a society that is still thrashing about to discover its place in the new world. This is a Turkey loathe to break off with its traditions and vast cultural history and yet aggressively at war with the same. That Pamuk exposes the dichotomy of this culture in a strain that is at the same time convincingly serious and delightfully humorous, goes far to prove his mastery of the written word. A matter of the mind and the heart indeed.

Moore and The Gorillaz

Anyone who knows of the strange ensemble virtual band The Gorillaz knows that they are anything but ordinary. Firstly, they don’t actually exist – each member of the band is an avatar for personalities created by a Brit pop star and a comic book creator. Damon Albert of the band Blur, and Jamie Hewlett, co-creator of Tank Girl have worked on numerous projects together – award winning songs for The Gorillaz, videos for these songs, virtual holographic stage performances and even a ‘circus opera’ based on the hero’s epic journey called Monkey: Journey to the West. They’re also involved in the pre-production of a film with insane genius iconoclast director Terry Gillaim. Could their work be any quirkier? Once they meet Alan Moore, it just might.

Alan Moore is best known for Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and (as The Guardian puts it) ‘flawed superheroes, melancholy swamp things and a nymphomaniac Alice in Wonderland’ in the odd little (porno!)graphic novel The Lost Girls. While Moore may be a highly acclaimed writer, he is, at best, a very unique individual, and at worst, a complete anarchistic nutter. So the news that he is to write for The Gorillaz’ creators next project is leaving many people guessing as to what he will come up with next. A virtual monkey circus? A collection of virtual superheroes with nihilistic but musical tendencies? Or just another plain old opera? Why yes, that’s be about right.

Mustard Magazine quotes Moore as saying ‘[Damon and Albert] came down to Northampton last week because we're planning for me to do the libretto on their next opera’. Now that’s news to Moore fans, and to The Gorillas fans too – the two have never been mentioned as working together before. The very thought of this project has been enough to send fans into a tizzy – even though nothing much is known about it. Keep in mind that the circus opera Monkey was a giant hit in 2007 and even lead to the lead character being featured in a series of sports for the Beijing Olympics television coverage. Add Alan Moore to an already successful quirky little duo and the result will probably be bizarre and hugely entertaining, not to mention successful.

Meanwhile Moore is busy working on Dodgem Logic, a new bi-monthly journal attempting to ‘resurrect the spirit of 1960s underground papers, but without the look or the ambience or some of the oversights’. The magazine includes articles by various writers Moore admires, his wife (illustrator of The Lost Girls) and even teenage mothers and pensioners, as well as art from people whose minds even Moore fears. He describes this art as ‘bewildering and upsetting but absolutely lovely’. And of course, he’s got The Gorillaz on board to curate a few pages.

Critic At Large Faiza S. Khan- The Devil Wore Purdah

This is the first of what I hope to be many articles written by Faiza S. Khan featured on this blog. This is the column she maintains in the weekly magazine Open:

Fashion shows are just that, not some great act of defiance, even in a country admittedly going to hell.

While Pakistan goes directly to hell, being a fashion designer remains one of the few professions by which one can still make an honest living. Even in these dark days, good designers—and several of Pakistan’s are exceptionally talented—are still in high demand. There is a school of thought that rather drearily considers aesthetic refinement a somewhat frivolous distraction and bangs on about fiddlers and Rome—“How can you think of a clutch bag at a time like this?” I’d agree, if the option, on an average evening, was popping out for a bite to eat and perhaps saving the country on the way home. The wedding season is an especially lucrative time. Brides-to-be order lavish, often outrageously expensive, joras because, after all, it’s still their special day; also because it’s considered bad taste to simply paste your bank statement to your forehead.

Whether or not “Who are you wearing?” is, in fact, the most fatuous question in the English language, the fashion industry generates jobs and does its bit to keep enterprise afloat, with textiles claiming a significant percentage of Pakistani exports. With this in mind, Karachi Fashion Week was held recently, showcasing the work of 32 Pakistani designers, the largest, but by no means only, event of its kind in the country. Occurring amid postponements and last minute changes of venue due to security concerns, for reasons that surely don’t require stating, it was eventually held at Karachi’s Marriott hotel, the Islamabad branch of which was brought crashing down last year, killing over 50 people. Every night for four nights, eight designers sent models down a blazing white runway in everything from shalwar kameez and gharara to skirts, jeans, shorts and, in one instance, something that looked suspiciously like my bedroom curtains, only worn with a belt, baring more or less the same amount of flesh one might expect to see at an opulent private party.

While the extent to which the exercise stimulated the economy remains to be seen, its effect on international media was instantaneous, with the event resulting in writers going head to head to claim the journalistic equivalent of the Golden Raspberry Award. It was with some bewilderment that one read in the papers the next day of the display of a bare back and some thigh hailed as “snubbing the Taliban”, regardless of the fact that it was done in a private, carefully contained environment filled with people who were not remotely like the Taliban, i.e. socialites, designers, buyers and the inevitable twerp in gigantic sunglasses in the dead of night. There was the de rigueur cliché of how daring it was to see skimpily dressed models in a society where women generally cover up, entirely omitting to mention that distinctions exist between those people who cover up and those who don’t, and fashion models fall quite clearly into the latter category. One scribe wrote of how heroic it was to show exposed navels while war is simultaneously waged in Waziristan, as if these two are somehow connected, as if, perhaps, the navels were being bared in Waziristan or that the war would be won should the military choose to spend its budget on tank-tops rather than tanks.

The executive at the helm of the event joined the dots in a rational manner, saying, “The more jobs you generate, the fewer suicide bombers there are likely to be,” but not everyone quoted from the fashion industry came off so well. One designer lamentably laid claim to being “a very brave woman” for displaying her clothes on a catwalk at a five-star hotel in a country where women have been known to be murdered, maimed, mutilated and on occasion buried alive, where girls’ schools are routinely attacked and where, even at the best of times, women’s rights, outside of a tiny income bracket, are limited at best. Another designer called it an act of defiance in the face of the Taliban, glossing over the fact that fashion shows do in fact take place with some regularity in Pakistan, and if one must intellectualise this, then it could more honestly be described as a display of affluence in the face of a nation torn apart by the gaping chasm between rich and poor. Why the foreign media can’t ask Pakistani designers questions about their work and why they, in turn, yield to the temptation, like Miss Universe, of providing a sound bite on world peace is beyond me.

Reading of Hoshruba at LUMS

I am very, very happy to inform you that LUMS will be holding a reading of Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism at Auditorium A-14 on Friday 13th November at 7pm.


Musharraf Ali Farooqi the author of The Story of The Widow (the novel was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2010) and also the translator behind the hugely successful The Advertures of Amir Hamza, will be reading from his new book, Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism.
Hoshruba is the world’s first and longest magical fantasy. Although the stories were originally passed on orally in Urdu, 125 years ago Muhammad Husain Jah composed them into a twenty-four volume epic which reached the summits of popularity and acclaim never attained by any other epic in the history of Urdu literature. The series follows the adventures of a wizard ruler fighting alongside a giant. Those who have read the epic will tell you how the stories are far more enjoyable than anything written by J.K. Rowling.


Undeterred by the magnitude of the task, Musharraf Ali Farooqi has embarked on a translation of all 8,000 pages of the original epic of which Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism represents the first volume.