Claire Messud discusses her writing journey and latest novel
Excerpts from the interview:
Why: Since we’re actually here to discuss ‘this strange eventful history’, why don’t you tell us what it is all about?
A:
This much Novel It’s about three generations of a family, and they’re French Pied-Noirs The family. The Pied-Noirs were French colonists in Algeria, and the novel spans 70 years, from 1940 to 2010. And the three generations are Gaston and Lucien, who were born at the turn of the 20th century. Their children, François and Denise, who were born in the early 1930s, and then François and his wife Barbara’s children, Chloé and Lulu, who were born in the 1960s. And it’s a novel that has multiple perspectives and that travels not only a lot of time, but a certain amount of space, because the family is expatriate after the mid-1950sTravelling, settling in different places around the world and then moving on.
Why: It’s a good thing to grow as a writer and challenge yourself, as you did, right?
A:
yes, author peter carey Someone once said to me, this was 20 years ago, ‘If it doesn’t seem impossible, it’s not worth doing’. And every time I write a book, I try not to do the same thing I did before, but try to push myself in one way or another or in multiple ways so that I can grow and evolve. So, yes, this is my most ambitious novel, I would say.
Why: These are notes written by your grandfather for you and your sister about the family, family history and to some extent fictionalizing it…
A:
My grandfather wanted to be a writer, and he actually, in his youth, wrote a novel and a book of stories that he was unable to publish. And in his retirement, he wrote a really rich document, which is a family memoir for my sister and me. It was not destined to be published. He wrote, it’s entirely addressed to all of us and it’s about family, it covers the years from 1928, when my grandparents married, to 1946, which is the end of the war. And so the first section, the part of the novel that’s set in 1940, is based on that memoir. And then, throughout the novel, there are memories or flashbacks to older times, some of which take information or details from that memoir, but mostly it’s not from that memoir. I wish there was a way I could bring some of the amazing details from that memoir into the world that aren’t there because it was so enlightening for me to read it. He wanted my sister and I to understand the world my grandparents grew up in, which is very far from the world we grew up in. They were staunch French Catholics living in a colony in Algeria, and we were secular American kids.
Why: What I find interesting is that you display a variety of styles in this particular novel of yours, and that you have drawn on a wealth of literary influences over the years.
A:
My father used to say, ‘Culture is what remains when you forget everything else.’ And I think there’s a way that we pick up on things. And I look at it as a kind of assimilation that happens and things become unconscious and they just become part of us. And I think I can feel that way sometimes, because I’ve been teaching creative writing For a long time, I can actually tell who has been a reader since childhood and who hasn’t. You know, these are things you can’t teach in a classroom. You learn them by reading and studying.
Why: Why is it so important to you that history should be shared? This continuity should also be maintained through literature.
A:
I always feel like there’s so much in the world around us that I don’t know about, that I want to know about. And I think it’s very possible to live without knowing and understanding. My belief in that comes from the family you grew up in. That was something that was instilled in me by my father, who wasn’t really around. He wanted to see, learn, read and discover everything. He was really very eager to understand. He traveled to a lot of places and wanted to travel to more places than he was ever able to. But when we were kids, he took us with him and we lived in Australia. And so part of his contract was plane tickets around the world for his family every year. So most of the traveling I’ve done in my life, I’ve done before I was 10. But I think that made me realize how big, complex and interesting the world is.
Why: This book is an example of that, when I hear people say how they struggle with the opening pages and I keep thinking, just wait, the moment you close this book, its beauty will hit you like a tsunami.
A:
You know, when you say that about people, I think I wanted the book to be like different kinds of books. And I think it starts out like a kind of novel in a way. It starts out as a historical novel and by the end, it’s not that. That’s what I hope, anyway. I look at it from a literary point of view, Modernity As a move from the 19th century to the 20th century. I jokingly call it a move towards interiority because that’s what happened in literature. You know, the difference between Balzac or Dickens. And then moving towards Virginia Woolf, it’s a move towards interiority. But I also think, for me, in writing this novel, part of what I was trying to do was that the novel also moves towards interiority over time. In its own way.
