Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Nicole Krauss: Great House

Have one. Good evening. Hello my name is Heather again and behalf of Harvard bookstore and Harvard Hillel. I'm thrilled to welcome you to tonight's event with Nicole Krauss. She's here to night discuss her new novel great house. Tonight's event is one of many interesting talks at Harvard bookstores hosting this fall upcoming talks include appearances by graphic novelist Charles Burns. Tomorrow night right here at the Brattle in November novelist Paul Auster will be here as well as New Yorker writer Alex Ross and historian Susan Cheever. I'd also like to highlight an event we're hosting right here at the Brettle next Tuesday series editor Bob. At one eye Robert at one joins us with a panel of great writers discuss the best American Essays 2010 is looks to be an amazing discussion and I hope you join us this event and more or less it online at Harbor dot com the best what you find about all of our events is by signing up for our weekly e-mail newsletter. You can do that by going to Harvard dot com and clicking on subscribe. You can also follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook or you can pick up a paper event flyer back on the table if that suits you better. So tonight after a talk Miss Krauss will have time for questions

from the audience. I encourage everyone to keep her questions briefs when getting as many as possible. At the close the talk we're going have a signing right here at the front of the hall. I would ask every the line up down this aisle to my right to your left and you know purchased copies of great house or the back of the hall. I'm going to ask his forgiveness. Now we'll get to the signing line. And probably be pushing you along faster than I usually would. Miss Krouse would like to get home to her two adorable children tonight so we're going to try to get her on the final shuttle out. So I'm going to be making you guys move through that signing line so apologies. And finally you have my deep thanks for buying your books from bookstores and coming out to talks like tonight's your participation supports not only the existence of this event series but of a landmark an independent bookstore. A quick reminder that right now is a perfect time to switch off your cell phones if you've not done so already. So tonight on behalf of Harvard bookstore and Harvard. Hello. I'm honored to welcome esteemed novelist Nicole Krauss to the Brettle theater for discussion of her new novel great house like Mrs. Krauss and Miss Krause's award winning novel The History of Love. Grindhouse is a gorgeous

and complex story from L.A. to Manhattan to London to Jerusalem. We fall in with four sets of characters around the world and in different times as they battle all the burdens of inheritance of memory and a family. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times Book Review has this to say about the book and elegiac novel achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here Kraus gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high wire performance only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve and you hold your breath. And she does not fall. As you know Nicole Krauss is also the author of the international bestseller The History of Love which won numerous awards and was shortlisted for the orange desists and the mean of prizes. Her first novel man walks into a room was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award for first fiction. In 2007 she was selected as one of grantors best young American novelists and just recently the New Yorker named her was one of the 20 best writers under 40. Her fiction has been

published in The New Yorker Harper's Esquire and Best American Short Stories and her books have been translated into over 35 languages. I'm so thrilled that she is here with us tonight. Without further ado. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Nicole Krauss. I actually hate being on stage but if I have to be on stage and grungy arthouse cinema stage is probably the very best one to be on. So I'm honored to be here. Am I that song. Who can name that song because I can't the one that has the line. I want to see the movies of my dreams. Anyone built to spill something. It's running through my head. So this is I've done a few kind of appearances for this book but they were all on stage conversation so this is the first quote unquote reading that I've done.

And I kind of wanted to try something a little different and see if it works so forgive me in advance if it doesn't this is a book as some of you may already know which is very difficult to describe because it has many parts and it can only really be described by the novel itself. Start to finish but I thought maybe I could introduce you a little bit to some of the characters and read from different parts of the novel. And as I do that like sort of explain to you a little bit about how the book evolved how how it was written. But I only have 20 minutes to do that. So because I really want to hear questions. So I began writing by now this is my third novel so I have some sense of my process I begin without any ideas. And no sense of theme no sense of plot of any kind. And actually no sense of who my characters will be. And this is the sort of important

sense of loss that is both terror causing but also for me I know the only way that I can arrive at the kind of books that I want to write which is to say holding myself to this kind of what I've come to think of is kind of willful uncertainty for a long period of the writing process. Now if a book takes me two and a half years like for a good year and a half sometimes two years I really have no sense of how my books are going to come together how the stories are going to come together it's just a sort of slow surprising and frightening process. But I find that if I put myself in that position which is a passion it's very close to the possibility of failure. There's also this immense opportunity to discover the unknown and to go places that I would never otherwise have gone. So I thought what I would do is sort of read a little bit from various characters and kind of explain to you where I started and then where they kind of took me. Here is number one. So the

very first bit of this book that I wrote was actually a short story called From the Desk of gang of our Askey and it was a short story I published as such I thought it was finished. And then I found a number of things happened. One is that I couldn't stop thinking about that short story plus I couldn't write anything else because it's just one of those dark writing periods. And and third the story was collected in Anthology. And for that anthology I had to describe the inspiration for the story and the story was about this enormous desk. This woman writer Nadia inherits she inherited many years ago from a young Chilean poet who later disappears and is killed. And so all her life she writes she becomes a well-known novelist and she writes this inherited desk. And when I sat down to think about where the word come from I sat down naturally at my own desk which is at the top floor of my house. I live in it in a narrow house with a lot of

steps and it doesn't mean it sounds silly as I tell the story but you have to bear with me. It dawned on me that the desk that I write that which I also inherited not far less romantically not from a Chilean poet but from the former owner of my house. It was very much like the desk in the story enormous with many drawers that sort of had this vertical wall that sort of rises up from the dust up and more than that it's it's sort of it's overbearing dust that I've never liked and it's kind of this inherited thing which is I somehow feel like I can't get rid of because I would have to chop it up to get down the stairs. So I keep writing it and I feel like I have this responsibility somehow to write it. So here's what some of what the desk became and the story and then the novel. So the Chilean poet is called Daniel Birsky and this is about the night that Nadiya when she's young goes to meet Daniel for the first time and pick up this desk by

then Jane over Eskies apartment and gotten dim and aquatic the sun having gone down behind a building and the shadows that had been hiding behind everything began to flood out. I remember there were some very large books on this shelf find books with tall cloth spines. I don't remember any of their titles. Perhaps they were a set but they seem somehow to be inclusion of the darkening hour. It was as if the walls of his apartment were suddenly carpeted like the walls of a movie theater to keep the sound from getting out or other sounds from getting in. And inside that tank. Your Honor. In what light there was. We were both the audience and the picture. Or as if we alone had been cut loose from the island there in Manhattan and we're now drifting in uncharted waters black waters of unknowable death. I was considered attractive in those days some people even called me beautiful though my skin was never good and it was this that I noticed when I looked in the mirror and I faintly perturbed look a slight wrinkling of the forehead that I hadn't known I was

doing. But before I was with are her ex-boyfriend and while I was with him too. There were plenty of men who made it clear that I would have liked to go home with me and I asked Daniel and I got up and moved to the living room. I wondered what he thought of me. It was then that he told me the desk had been used briefly by Lorica. I didn't know if he was joking or not. It seemed highly improbable that this traveler from Chile younger than I could have gotten hold of such a valuable item but I decided to assume that he was serious so as not to risk offending someone who had shown me only kindness. When I asked how he had gotten it he shrugged and said he had bought it but didn't elaborate. I thought he was going to say and now I'm giving it to you but he didn't. He just gave one of the legs a little kick. Not a violent one but a gentle one full of respect and kept walking. Many years have passed since then I was married for a while but now I live alone again though not unhappily. There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you and suddenly you can see

through walls to a dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore. In order to continue living with the various illusions that make life particularly life with other people possible. And that's where I'd arrived at your honor if it weren't for the events I'm about to describe I might have gone on not thinking about Daniel Barsky or very rarely though I still was in possession of his bookshelves his desk and the trunk of a Spanish Gallion or the salvage of an accident on the high seas quaintly used as a coffee table. The sofa began to write. I don't remember exactly when but I had to throw it away. At times I thought of getting rid of the rest too. It reminded me when I was in a certain mood of things I would rather forget. For example sometimes I am asked by the occasional journalist who wishes to interview me why I stopped writing poetry. Either I say that poetry I wrote wasn't any good. Perhaps it was even terrible or I say that a poem has the potential for perfection in this possibility. Finally silence me or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems

I tried to write but just like saying one feels trapped in the universe or trapped by the inevitability of death. But the truth of why I stopped writing poetry is not any of these. Not nearly Not exactly. The truth is that if I could explain why I stopped writing poetry then I might write it again. What I'm saying is that Dana Varsity's Geske which became my desk for more than 25 years reminded me of these things I had always considered myself only a temporary guardian and had assumed a day would come after which although with mixed feelings I would be relieved of my responsibility of living with and watching over the furniture of my friend the dead poet Daniel versey and that from then on I would be free to move as I wished. Possibly even to another country. It isn't exactly that the Internet kept me in New York but if pressed I had to admit that this was the excuse I had to use for not leaving. All these years long after it became clear the city had nothing left for me. And yet when that day came it sent my life. At last solitaria and serene

reeling. So if somebody comes to claim back this desk somebody who claims to be doing over his daughter now as I thought about this desk which I realized was my own desk and I began to think of this idea of this notion of the sort of burden of inheritance you have to notion that I was a new mother at the time so this idea of course had very little to do with actual furniture or physical objects. It had much more to do with the notion of something that became quite an anxious notion for me as what. What do we what is passed down to us emotionally. Through our parents and what do we pass down to our children. I mean sadnesses angles at which we face the world kinds of losses et cetera et cetera et cetera. Sort of an infinite list. And I thought about this quite a lot and I didn't want to write a book I would never have written a book about early parenthood or anything like that. But I think I

did want to write somehow about parenthood and I find it's often easiest for me to write about something by writing about the absence of that thing or coming at it from behind or the reverse. So at the same time as I was expanding the story of Nadia and dying of our skin this desk I started to write a very different voice in a very different voice which was this elderly Israeli father who by his own measure was something of a tyrant who feared he was a tyrant to his son and his wife has now died and his son who has been estranged for many many years returns to their house in Jerusalem and the two of them are kind of existing in this house together having not spoken for many years and the father who has pressed up against death really is is grappling with what kind of father he was and is addressing the son although the Son this is an imaginary address a son at this point is kind of wandering out in the woods somewhere and he takes these long walks. I should say that each of these voices is addressed to somebody there. They're kind

of Confessions of a sort. Water. So this is a father who like me who is at the very beginning of the whole thing and had very happy experiences about being a parent. This is a father who's sort of at the end and has a lot of regret. So he says Where was I. I'm excited. Well yes a proposal. What do you say d'oeuvre or don't say anything at all. I'll take your silence as a yes or reposes Let's talk. To have it out reeling here let me begin. You see my child a little bit every day I find myself contemplating death investigating it dipping my toe as it were not practicing so much as interrogating its conditions while I still possess powers of interrogation and can still fathom oblivion in one of these little excursions into the unknown and coverage something about you that I'd almost forgotten.

For the first three and a half years of your life you knew nothing of death. You thought that it would all go on without and on the first night you left your crib behind you sleep in a bed and I came to say good night to you. Now I'm going to sleep in a big boy bed forever you asked. Yes I said and we sat together. I imagine you on a flight through the halls of eternity clutching your blanky and you imagining whatever a child imagines when he tries to conceive of forever in a few days later you are sitting at the table playing with the food that you refuse to eat. So don't eat I said. But if you don't eat you can't leave the table. It's as simple as that. Your lip began to tremble. Go ahead and sleep there for all I care. I said. This isn't how Mom does it. You whined. I don't care how she does it I spat. This is how I do it. And you're not moving until you eat. You burst into tears protesting and carrying on. I ignored you. After a while silence filled the room punctuated only by your little whimpers. Then out

of nowhere you announced when Noella dies we'll get a dog. I was surprised because of the bluntness of the statement and because I had no idea you knew anything of death. Well you'll be sad when she dies. I asked forgetting for a moment the War of the food. And you very practically replied Yes because then you won't have a cat to pet. A moment passed. What does it look like when people die you asked as if they're asleep I said. Only they don't breathe. You thought about this. Did children die. You asked. I felt a pain open in my chest. Sometimes I said perhaps I should have chosen other words. Never. Or simply no. But I didn't lie to you. At least you can say that of me. Then turning your little face to me without flinching you asked will I die. And as you said the words whore filled me as it had never before. Tears burned my eyes and instead of saying what I should have said

not for a long long time or not you my child you alone will live forever. I said simply yes and because no matter how you suffered deep inside you were still an animal like any other. Who wants to live. Feel the sun and be free you said. But I don't want to die. The terrible injustice of it filled you and you looked at me as if I were responsible. You'd be surprised by how often to my little peripatetic wanderings through the valley of death I meet the child you once were. At first it surprised me too. But soon I came to think I look forward to these encounters sorry that's really bright that weird flashy thing. I try to think about what it was that you would appear like when I tried to think about why it was that you would appear like that when the subject had so little to do with you. I came to realize it had to do with certain feelings I felt for the first time when you were a child. I don't know why we didn't and that this is the other son the

older son. I don't know why or we didn't arouse the same feelings before you. Maybe I was caught up in other things when he was an infant. Or maybe I was still too young. There were only three years between you but in those years I grew up my youth officially came to an end and I entered a new stage of life as a father and a man by the time you were born I understood in a way that I could not have with Henri just what the birth of a child means. How he grows and how his innocence is slowly ruined how his features changed forever. The first time he feels shame how he comes to learn the meaning of disappointment of disgust how a whole world is contained inside of him and it was mine to lose. I felt paralysed against these things and of course you were a different kind of child than Henri from the beginning you seemed to know things and to hold them against me as if you somehow understood that built into raising a child there are inevitable acts of violence against him. Looking down the crib of your tiny face contorted by screams of grief there is nothing

else to call it. I never heard any baby cry like you. I was guilty before I even begun. I know how this sounds. After all you were only a baby but something about you attacked the weakest part of me and I backed away. This is a person who like many of the characters in this book I read when I wrote the history of love I wrote characters who I really wanted you to fall in love with and I made them as funny as I could. And they were their charm in their sleeves and I really didn't want to do that. When I wrote this book I was interested in something different which is staying with a character who who when we first meet them we are Miss are revolted by or at least we we don't know whether we like them and that if we stay with them for long enough and begin to understand who they are and what made them that way that we would change our minds about them or at least we would feel maybe even to our own surprise a sense of compassion for them. I mean I wasn't aware of doing that but in retrospect I think that's what I was doing. And with this father

here's a man who really from the beginning and I thought what an asshole. And then with time it seemed to me that no in fact this was a person who wasn't strong enough to be the father he wanted to be who all his life felt that his son had chosen against him and chose the mother instead of him and that he had been somehow rejected. So that was a way of writing about this burden of inheritance about parenthood about a lot of things. And at the same time how much time do I have. Why don't you let me finish. All right. I'll tell you one more little story and then we're going to leave the rest for questions. I guess the last little There are two there are two other voices in the book and I'll read you a little from one of a character called Arthur and this was a character that was born simply out of a desire I had to write about these bathing Pansie swimming

holes in Hampstead Heath in London. Has anyone ever been there. Anyone know them. I lived in London for a while and I lived near the heath and it's this amazing wild tract of land and I used to walk there a lot it was a strange time my life and I would think and walk and there are these swimming ponds and they're very dark and very beautiful and I just found myself wanting to write about them somehow. So for reasons I couldn't explain. I mean I just so I wrote this little opening about this man this sort of retired Oxford professor who everyday would accompany his wife this German-Jewish refugee that called Lady Bergh to the swimming holes and here's how he describes them. This was the very first lines really that I wrote in his voice our lives ran like clockwork Q.C. Every morning we walked on the heath. We took the same path in the same path out I companied lady the swimming hole as we called it where she never missed a day. There are three ponds one for men one for women and one mixed and it was there in the last that

she swam when I was with her so that I could sit on the beach nearby in the winter the men came to smash a hole in the ice. They must have worked in the dark because by the time we arrived the ice was already broken. Lottie would peel off her clothes first her coat and then her pull over her boots and trousers the heavy will one she favored and then her body would at last appear pale and shot through with blue veins. I knew every inch of her body but the sight of it in the morning against the wet black trees almost always aroused me. She'd approach the water's edge for a moment she would stand completely still. God knows what she thought about up until the last she was a mystery to me. At times the snow would fall around her the snow or the leaves. Most often it was the rain. Sometimes I wanted to cry out to disturb the stillness that in that moment seemed to be hers alone. And then in a flash she disappear into the blackness. There would be a small splash of the sound of a splash followed by silence. How terrible

those seconds were and how they seemed to last forever as if she would never come up again. How deep does it go. I once asked her but she claimed not to know. On many occasions I would even leap up off the bench ready to dive in after her despite my fear of the water. But just then her head would break the surface like the smooth smooth head of a seal or otter and she would swim to the ladder where I'd be waiting to fling the towel over her. So I wrote this bit and then I began to know a lot of things characters that I start reading eventually sort of don't go anywhere. They never come fully alive to me. I sort of started to think about this is the Pinocchio element that they know they never have the chance of becoming real some quote unquote real. But he did. Arthur did and the more I wrote him the more I began to realize that the story I was trying to tell was about a man who all his life feels he's been married to a mystery who feels that he could never fully know his

wife and the more that he talks the more that unravels out of him and he know he's speaking to you after his wife has died and he uncovers at the end of her life a secret that she kept from him all their lives and carry a tremendous secret. You you realize when she begins to realize that perhaps that he collaborated and in keeping her a mystery that it was a kind of collaboration between them. So these swimming holes are these abuses that I of this abyss that I wanted to just write about of course became this abyss in which she disappeared. And these are biases ended up all over the book and I have so much more to tell you but I really want to hear your questions so all finished within this bit is to say that the the pleasure the real joy for me of writing one of the many joys is the sense of discovering as the book begins to unfold these sort of symmetries and echoes and these sort of lines of thought which begin to kind of rhyme with each other and it's out of that really

that I feel like I build the sort of structure that becomes the novel and it's always so much more surprising and intricate than it ever could have been had I known from the beginning what I wanted to do. So thank you. OK that was the rehearsal. So next time I get it done right. So any questions from you guys. I would love to answer all of them. Yes. OK. How did I get into writing. Pardon him. You repeat the question. Yeah. How did I get into writing. I am I was a reader. I mean you know most like most writers I was a really obsessive reader as a kid and it seemed to me that reading was this

way of arriving at all kinds of experience that I was way too young to arrive at. And it also was like the first book I felt accompanied when I read it was really like the first time in my life where I felt really deeply accompanied and perhaps even understood in some way that I hadn't until then. And that becomes an addictive feeling. And I mean this evolved over many years but now I can say that to me now I like writing and reading also like books simply literature affords me all of us like this completely unique possibility in our lives which is to like fully and vividly and wholly inhabit another's existence. Like to just step fully into the stream of others in her life. And I'm just like I've never found that feeling or possibility anywhere else. And then of course now that I'm on the other end I mean not just being a reader or being a writer but also gives me this opportunity this

tremendous freedom to not only enter another's life but of course to make something of my own experience to to ascribe meaning. I suppose where otherwise there isn't. Yes. Next. Yes. Well one of the things that I liked or I think I must do with my novels is try to create a sense of home. I mean it dawns on me that it is not an accident that this book is called great house because it's a sense for me of building a house I mean I was going to explain our talk about the idea of like building a door before you build a room in a room before you build a house. But that is really the sense for me of building this structure. And so in the places the

geography that I choose are really the places of my life. I mean England and Israel and New York and all those places that I am from and those are the places my parents are from and my grandparents are from four places in Europe. There's no there's never been any real sense of like a certain home in my family. And I think I've always felt us on an emotional level somehow like that the sense of being like a wonder exile in some way. So she lay in my last book became like the Force geography like the geography of the imagination. So here are these other places that I knew very well and then there was going to be this imagined place and it is the most fantastical place to someone who only looks at a map. You know at the end of the world really and it's this long skinny that Kissinger called a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica. It's this amazing place to think about. And so that's what it was in History of Love and then between the two books

I began for various reasons to become really truly obsessed with the period with the real chili the period following Pinochet's coup and with what happened to all the disappeared. And I I read like every book on the subject. I mean it was really kind of a dark obsession. And again while I was pregnant and it seems clear to me in retrospect that I was trying to touch something that was very hard to touch which had to do with this vulnerability of bringing this child into the world that I knew his well-being and my entire happiness was going to depend on his safety and well-being and so it was like facing that through this much to this distant place. And I thought it was going to read a whole novel about that but instead all of that became absorbed into this sort of blotter of this ghostly figure who never speaks in the book but who haunts the book. Daniel Barsky And I also was invited to Chile and then I went there and I mean I love I love the country

I love the right writers who come from there and now it's a very real place to me. But I don't know if I'll keep writing about it or not. Yes. Thank you. I

I always think so only time in life when you can say to someone that you're glad that you made them cry. So it sort of two questions one about the subject of loss and how do you get into the character. Right. I'm not sure i a good answer to that. Really I mean I feel when I'm writing my characters that they are I mean I put all of myself into them. It's not that they are me any kind of autobiographical sense. And in fact the idea of writing on a biograph just like makes my hair stand on. And it's I have no interest in doing that. And the idea of being able to imagine to have to invent to sort of fantasize is critical to my freedom as a writer to what I love about it. But I've discovered that that it can exist without the balance of writing in a deeply personal way and that can be an emotional and intellectual way

philosophical whatever but it has to be personal. So when I find the right balance between the personal and the imagined. I know that my characters really come alive. I feel I feel like I'm running something authentic for lack of a better word. And I write a lot of things that don't feel that way that that end up going in the trash with Leo. I mean I always say this about writing him. I mean he simply felt like me. He's not my grandfather or anything like that which is a question I have and he's felt like me at the time and I can explain to you know various detail why that was the case. But the briefest way of sort of explain use is say that you know I just published my first book which I had written when I was 25 27 when I wrote this story of love and I felt like all my life had wanted to be a writer and now it had happened. And in a way so what. Nothing changed. I wanted to be a writer because I wanted somehow to like

to have this like the complete the circle of like expressing oneself and to have the replies somehow and didn't seem to me that there was any reply or it didn't matter somehow. There was no reply and so this idea of the desire to be seen and the idea of being a failure in some way I'm not saying that the experience was a failure but I felt that it gave me an opportunity to think about those things or what failure is or what is in and how many books does one have to write in order to justify what otherwise might be an indulgence sitting in a room and writing all those questions were critical and then as for death that's obviously always on my mind. So that was a natural fit. Yes. Well I can't give that away. If anyone hasn't read the history of love and I want to say too much about that but I will say that

he was a surprise to me and that was a complete surprise to me. Deep into the writing We're talking about Bruno now. For those who you have read it and you know there's something I really don't believe that writing is any way magical or like mystical. I really don't. It's really hard work and it's a very conscious effort. But what does happen as I was trying to explain about this like this uncertainty which I hold myself to is it allows me to follow instincts that do have coherence. It's just I don't recognize the coherence at the outset. As the book gets written I begin to understand what I'm thinking about really. Like one writes to find out what one thinks. And it's a little bit like I'm going to look a grave robbing or something like that like you so you don't know it's there and then you start to read and kind of the thing comes up and so in that case the case of Bruno once I realized what had to happen with him I went back

and it was I did have to change certain scenes a little bit but I was surprised to find how much of that was already obvious as if somehow I understood that that LEO's solitude had to be really much meant to be complete and very down but there was this line about Bruno brushing crumbs that weren't there from the table which when I wrote it I meant like that nervous gesture that one does. But in fact you can read it in a different way of there than you do. Crumbs aren't there either that you're brushing. So there's that. Yes. Yeah. That's a good question that I've never been asked and I'll probably never be asked again. So thank you. I like that. And the question is about an early scene in great house where Nadia is talking about when she was left by

her boyfriend when she's in her early 20s and he takes all the furniture with him and she's traditional. It's a stormy night and she has these windows that have these kind of screws and she has a special wrench that she is a Titan and they keep on sort of getting loose and then the wind shrieks through them and that was from an apartment that I lived in. Obviously you can't really you can invent a lab and some things you can invent but that I lived in this when I wrote my first novel. I lived in this sort of borrowed apartment that was huge and it was right on the East River and it had. These windows were from the 50s they were just these enormous pieces of glass and they opened like this you know like you know and they had these screws and there's this wrench in like god forbid you lost the wrench then the wind would just scream through the windows because it was on this corner on the East River. And so I spent just like endless years running around tightening those windows. Yes.

Yeah. So the question is about why I chose an object as this metaphor for memory and what is a parallel with books themselves. I guess the first thing I should say is that I really don't there's as I said in the beginning it's very hard to describe this book which is why on the jacket we kind of compromise with this idea of saying well these stories are connected by this desk. The truth is that that's not really how I conceived of the novel. Not all the stories are connected by the desk and the desk is one of many joints as I was describing how I must think of the book is like this sort of galaxy of moving parts that are held together by these emotional and intellectual forces almost in the book. But they keep moving and keep putting off each other in different ways and there's no center. So it

seems I can't help feeling the regret of like the reductive ness of describing the desk in this kind of central way but there was no other way to really do it in a few brief lines. But the desk I mean the desk became this accident. I would never thought in advance. I like it. Let me think of an object to that conclusion. Well this idea that became that accidentally and then once I recognized where it had perhaps coming came from it began to make sense to me and it naturally fit into. I mean the other stories evolved with sort of this desk as well. But I think it becomes many things in the book it's not only it's draws up draws are not only filled with sort of people's memories or their burdens. For example in the case of Arthur who I told you a little bit about the Oxford retired Oxford don for him the desk which for some brief time belongs to his wife Lady and which he understand was given to her before they met

by probably a former lover although she never talks about it. The dust becomes this incredible source of anxiety because it comes is representative of all he can know about her. And it kind of hovers over their lives and lives until one day she quite surprisingly just sort of gives it away and he has to uncover the story of why and so I liked the idea that it could become many things to many different characters. And I also don't put too much store in these things like metaphors and symbols yes but they shouldn't be too heavy. They should change and they shouldn't ever be one thing again there should be this sense of movable parts so big as that desk is it. I didn't want it to overburden the novel the structure of the novel itself. Yeah there was somebody over here who had raised her hand so that I get that and then I'll come. OK. I think I think also you or something or somebody else. No but boy I'm getting so many questions from women but no men. Are there any men here who have any questions. OK. Let's get him over there.

Yes yes yes. I'm not sure I understand the question. Yeah. No I'm not. Right. No. I mean what would I do. So work on scenes are hard. I mean the thing the most important thing to me is like the realness they live in is the authenticity of the book. And I'm not interested in like writing an essay and sort of essay as I wrote when I was in grad school about her feelings and those things should be incredibly lie and supple and flexible and light and they find they find their way

themselves. I find like for example I had this idea early on in writing that book I was going to tell you about this but there was no time of this. This idea of this transplanted room I can't think of Francis Bacon studio you painted there for 30 years and then he died and it was taken apart and like 10000 pieces and then resurrected in Dublin and then I was thinking of Freud's room the same thing happened the last year of his life when he left Vienna and then his wife and daughter liked reassemble his room down to the last detail in London where you can still visit it. And then as you get obsessed with this idea of transplanted rooms like rooms or disassembled in one place and then assembled in another and this character was born who sort of does who does that. Who wants to who does that with his father's study that all that's missing is this desk center and center. But I thought I kept thinking about this idea of a stone going through that study. So that study exists in 1944 in Budapest and then the Gestapo come and arrest this family this father

and all the furniture is like scattered all over the world. Do you think that this idea of like a stone just going through the window and then this idea of like what is this moment this people's lives if their lives and they're basically their lives as they knew it. And. Where does the stone land extends to. Throws a strand through the window there but where is this town Lenna this idea and just stay and try to do anything with it I knew somehow or other it was going to find its way in the book. It found its way and like the very last pages of the book. But then one day just almost by accident called one of Lottie's books this writer in broken windows. And I think more about that and the idea of where the stone landed began became interesting I hadn't even thrown the stone yet in the book for the stolen land. So then it it there was a scene where it just naturally the stone gets sort of hits its windshield that the father who I read to you from and the Son are driving to the hospital hits their windshield and they get to the car and then there's another scene where it does go through Arthur's window but his nose thrown in. So this whole idea of like the

reverberations of a tragedy or a historical moment. Well now I can say that's what it was but it wasn't. I mean I wrote I just simply like the idea of this word this riddle like where does this stone land. So I had it land in all these places like that but I didn't go back and sort of underline that and say that would have just you know destroyed everything. You had a crush. Right. Yeah. Well what happens with the novel is that with each decision you make you cancel out

a thousand other decisions that you could have had the opportunity of making sure that as the book goes on your arms your decisions to make. So there does come a point when you know the idea of failure becomes more and more horrible and you start to become more and more serious about making the things you stand up. But in the beginning failure is still somewhat of a romantic idea and if it doesn't work out now it doesn't work out. But also the characters do begin to dictate themselves again returned the answer to some question you know they don't. I really don't think that the work is like magical It's not like my characters. Like I've heard writers tell their captors come alive and suddenly their character having tea with them and making comments in the shower and things like that and my characters don't accompany me and follow me around all day. But they they do become real in the sense that their psychologies speak. Once I understand them well enough their psychologies have a certain sense to them and they could they would only do a certain number of things and they begin it makes it begins to

make sense to me that this character came to exist to in some way Echo with this story or this character and then I begin to try to sort of build on that. And it's very subtle and I have a very hard time really describing it so when I've been asked this I'll often like how do you know and then if you write like this how do you know in the novels. And I often think of like writing a little bit like like writing a musical score or composing and that it's almost something sort of rhythmic and once you have a certain rhythm you understand like okay this particular line comes to a resolution but this one doesn't but this one rhymes off with isn't it really is almost like doing that. And I don't feel that I need to like come on it. I don't feel any need to answer every question I need to pose the questions and the questions need to be clear and there needs to be some kind of we need to have some kind of revelation. I mean I think that like what makes literature work is like the moment that we recognize ourselves like this startled way. Oh of

course like that's exactly who I am or how I feel. I never been now to put it that way but also to deliver in the same moment a kind of revelation. So once those things happen then I know I might not feel after all. So yes. OK. Thank you. One maybe too late but it begins. Although in the back in them I come to you. Of course I mean more often than not really and I find then the period between books can be incredibly hard. And because really frankly my sole sense of myself my sense of like my place in the world at this point I've been writing for more than half my life. It has to do you know.

And it's a process that needs to exist for me to feel and balance with the world. And when it's not happening it's very difficult. But I really put so much into my books. Again this idea of like this ever expanding house or rooms that nest within rooms I really want a place for everything in my novels so whatever's happening in my mind in my life and the emotional landscape at that moment I want to find a place for the novel that the novel is finished. I really am emptied out. There's kind of like nothing left and it takes a while to for the reserves to kind of fill back up. So I'm trying to learn not to sort of rush that or else it does get really difficult but there is a point at which you really just have to start writing no matter what. And it's like pushing your head against the wall and like nothing comes nothing comes in it. But at some point something in my experience does come. Yeah. So I was going to do your question

a lighthearted question I haven't had any of this. Oh that's a nice question. What kind of stories. I read to my children. Well this summer read 600 pages of The Odyssey which was fun. My older son is four and a half and then he wrote his own version. So that was really cool by them. We were I mean we really we didn't have any TV or anything like that in our house. And obviously there are a lot of books in our house. And really one of the great pleasures of my days is coming into a room and seeing both my kids the other one is a year and a half. Like with their noses buried in books and they're very Catholic readers they read everything really. And yeah we we read a lot of Greek myths until my older son started having nightmares about

Medusa and then I came to an end. OK thank you for having me