To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Literature of Memory

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge and chimed Fleming. Where do you draw the line between truth and fiction and where do our memories fit in? Do they reveal what actually happened or are they just another fiction? These are questions that obsess many novelists, like Michael Dandacci. I'm using the devices of memoir. I'm using the devices of nonfiction. There's a great line by Kinky Friedman, I like to quote, which is that there's a very fine line between fiction and nonfiction. And I think I snorted it at 1976. Today, we'll talk with Michael Dandacci, Andrei Asimen and other celebrated writers about the literature of memory. But what about memories so painful that they've been buried for decades? Poetana Rebenowitz tells us what it was like to find a shoebox full of letters written by relatives killed in the Holocaust. I was writing this book for a multitude of voices and they were begging me, begging to be heard, remember me forever. They were in my ears all the time. But first, Julian Barnes, one of

England's most acclaimed novelists and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. Barnes is fascinated by the way our minds play tricks with memory, especially as we get older. His prize -winning novel tells the story of a man in his 60s whose force took in front an episode from his past. It involves an old girlfriend and a close friend who committed suicide. It's a story that raises questions about memory, aging, and moral reckoning. Steve Paulson asked Barnes to read a passage from the novel. Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business. Also when you're young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed. Children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire, and desirability.

But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point, learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration and therefore less certainty as to what you are or have been. This is really a novel about time and memory, isn't it, about how we make sense of a life as we look back on it? Yes, that's right. And it's also about what happens when we discover that something we believe for a long time turns out not to be the case when some piece of evidence comes along which completely overthrows what we have assumed our life and our life's responsibilities to have been. So to some degree it's how we've, at times I suppose, constructed a false history for ourselves. I sort of agree with the narrator Tony Webster when he says, our life is not our life. It's the story we've told ourselves about our life. So do you find yourself

more preoccupied with these questions about time and memory than you were maybe 10 or 20 years ago? Yes, I certainly do. I mean, I was thinking, oh, someone asked me a bit ago, what's your next book going to be about? And without thinking I said, what's going to be a book in which no one gets older? Everyone has a very good memory. No one dies, you know, and I think as you, as you hit your sixties, you are certainly more concerned with what is the truth about your life and whether what you've assumed to be the truth and what you've told yourself is indeed related to what actually happened. I mean, one of the starting points for this book was a curious incident when I was at school. I had a group of close friends. I went to one university. One of them went to another and I lost touch with him. He was called Alex and I continued to imagine he was cleverer than I was. Got a first class degree and all that. And I sort of occasionally would find myself wondering what had happened to him, where he was in the world. Perhaps he was sort of high up in the civil service or maybe in the BBC or

something like that, thought I might run into him. And then when I was in my fifties, I met on the London Underground, another of my group of friends from way back with whom I'd stayed in slightly more contact. And I said, do you see Alex nowadays? And he said, no, Alex killed himself when he was in his mid -twenties. And so I realised that I had been, for 25 years of my life, I'd been imagining this guy as still being alive. This is after I got over the immediate shock of his suicide. Imagine this guy alive for 25 years. And then having to sort of recalibrate all those occasional memories and thoughts I'd had of him. Also recalibrate what sort of a person he was to have killed himself and whether I could work that out in terms of what I'd known. I mean, I've had occasions where I've sort of subsequently rearranged history. Well, tell me about the narrator of your novel, Tony Webster. How would you describe him? I'd describe him as an ordinary sensible chap who's tried to avoid too much difficulty in his life, who's tried to avoid conflict, who's not been as far as he

knows unpleasant or nasty or malicious to anyone. He's now retired. He must be, therefore, in his early 60s, who had a marriage, but it went wrong. His wife left him for someone else, had a child. And he sort of made his accommodation with life, or he thinks he has. And has got through life without too much damage. It's about that as well. It's about someone who lives their life in a not exactly negative or passive, but in a slightly avoiding way. One of my favourite lines is when Tony says, I don't like mess, and I don't even like leaving a mess. I've opted for cremation if you want to know. Yes, yes, yes. Well, that's the sort of guy he is, yes. And then he gets a lawyer's letter out of the blue, which sets him off on the trail, in the course of which much of what he thought was the case turns out not to be so. Well, it seems that there's an underlying, kind of terrifying question here, which is, what if we are not who we think we are?

Yes, I mean, I think unless we have a profoundly divided personality where something related to what we think we are. About five years ago, I wrote a book called Nothing to Be frightened of, which was a sort of semi -memoir, and also it was about death. And it featured my brother. And we had a discussion here and I about memory. He's a philosopher. He's been a philosopher all his life. And he said that he regarded all memories as unsound and memory as really being something much closer to the imagination than anything else. And I thought, that's just because he's got a bad memory and I've got a good memory. And that's the line I took in the book. And he also said to me when I was writing it, he said, by the way, if our memory is conflict, choose yours over mine because yours is probably the sounder one, which I thought was extremely generous for someone who was going to appear in his brother's book. But in the sort of five years that have elapsed since I wrote that book, I'm almost coming round to my brother's point of view. And I feel that

memory is not just unreliable and increasingly so through life, but that it is generated as much by the imagination, as by any sort of exact record -keeping machine that we have up in our brain. Where you have another passage in the novel, which gets at this idea exactly, and I'm wondering if you could read that for us. As Tony is recalling a story that he's told himself, but he's wondering whether it's actually true or not. Tony goes to Bristol, which is a university city, and that that's where he meets Veronica, who's a fellow student and they take up together. And he's remembering this when he's about 40 years later. That night a group of us went to Minsterworth in quest of the Seven Ball. Veronica had been alongside me. My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact. She was there with me. We sat on a damp blanket on a damp riverside holding hands. She'd brought a flask of hot chocolate. Innocent days.

Moonlight caught the breaking wave as it approached. The others whooped at its arrival and whooped off after it chasing into the night with a scatter of intersecting torch beams. Alone she and I talked about how impossible things sometimes happened. A mood was thoughtful, somber even, rather than ecstatic. At least that's how I remember it now. Though if you were to put me in a court of law, I doubt I'd stand up to cross examination very well. And yet you claim this memory was suppressed for 40 years? Yes, and only surface just recently. Yes. Are you able to account for why it surfaced? Not really. Then let me put it to you, Mr. Webster, that this supposed incident is an entire figment of your imagination, constructed to justify some romantic attachment which you appear to have been nurturing towards my client, a presumption

which the court should know, my client finds utterly repugnant. Yes, perhaps, but what, Mr. Webster? But we don't love many people in this life. One, two, three. And sometimes we don't recognise the fact until it's too late, except that it isn't necessarily too late. Did you read that story about late flowering love in an old people's home in Barnstable? Oh, please, Mr. Webster, spare us your sentimental lucubrations. This is a court of law which deals with fact. What exactly are the facts in the case? That is wonderful, thank you. Now, you talked about how your last three books have been about death to some degree. And you mentioned your nonfiction book, Nothing to be frightened of. In that book, you said that you think about death every day. And sometimes it terrifies you enough that you wake up in the middle of a night, sort of, in fright.

And I guess I'm wondering if do you think that you were trying to work through this issue as you write these books? No, not at all. I don't believe in the therapeutic use of literature, certainly not for the writer. I mean, sometimes literature can be therapeutic to the reader. If, for example, it's truth telling is such that it makes the reader realize things about his or her life that they hadn't before. But in terms of the writer, I've never, I've never believed that if I was depressed and wrote a novel about someone who was depressed, I would get less depressed. It doesn't work like that for me, and I never expected to work. I just thought that when I wrote Nothing to be frightened of, I thought, actually, that hasn't been enough about death lately. And we don't think about it enough. Well, I'm wondering if there's actually a scarier idea than death. And that is decline as you age. It will happen to everyone if you live long enough, the prospect that you become a lesser version of yourself. Is that something that worries you? Oh, yes, yes. And I think people tend to divide into

one of two categories. They either fear death or they fear dying and the approach to dying are they fear, you know, sinility, impotence of all faculty, and that sort of thing. My position on this is that you can actually feel them both at the same time. I fear not any dying and bits of me falling off and impotility, but also a non -existence. But I think one of the things we've done, we've sort of shifted our fear of death onto our fear of decrepitude. The great early writers of our culture, like Montenua, when they wrote about death, they said, you die twice, you die when you lose your youth. And then you die finally when you lose what it is that has replaced your youth. But I think with better general health, we're pushing off the problem of bits falling off us mentally and physically until a later stage. I think that also means that we're not really very good at being old. We think that the best way to be old is to pretend we're still young. You know, I'm now my 60s. We will say, I don't feel any older than I did when I was in my 20s.

And I always say whether it's true or not, I always say, I feel a lot older than when I was 20. And I know a lot more stuff than when I was 20. I can't run as fast, but, you know, I can think faster. That sort of thing. Julian Barnes, talking with Steve Paulson. Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. The time denies, say, Fortis nothing, a 50 or in your prime. Sixth is the new 40 and so on. I know this much that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened, when these new memories suddenly came upon me, it was as if, for that

moment, time had been placed in reverse, as if, for that moment, the river ran upstream. Today, we're talking about the literature of memory. Coming up, a poet remembers family lost during the Holocaust. And S .A .S. Andre Asaman explains how our minds can actually invent new memories. Let's say you were in jail and you don't like the jail. And every day in jail, you kept thinking of places outside the jail that you've never even visited, but you imagined them. Well, guess what? You will have memories of those places that you never visited. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. Support for it to the best of our knowledge comes from the University of Wisconsin

System E Campus, providing access to online -degree programs and certificates offered by the 26 campuses of the UW System. information is at e -campus .wisconsin .edu. The poet Anna Rabinowitz can't stop thinking about memory and forgetting. In fact, she considers it her moral imperative as a writer to remember the names and words of family and friends killed in the Holocaust. People who would otherwise be forgotten. Rabinowitz's book length poem Darkling includes fragments of their voices. Now, her poem has been turned into an opera, also called Darkling, which is just out on CD. She told Anne Strange Shemps that the poem grew out of a cache of old letters and photos. It was a shoebox, actually. It was the contents of a shoebox that I found in my father's closet after he died. And the contents included letters that had been written during

the war years and before by members of the family and a couple of friends, a few friends, and also photographs of many members of the family. The letters, of course, I could not read, I couldn't decipher, even if I knew you had finished well enough, because they were written in this tiny small hand. And I found somebody to translate the letters, and I proceeded for the next several years to be haunted by all that material, and felt that it was my duty, and particularly as a poet, I had no excuse. I needed to do something with all this material, because they were all dead. All these people had been murdered in the Holocaust. And there was nothing left of them but these scraps of information. Did you know any of these people, these relatives, that you grown up knowing any of their stories? No, I had not known any of them, none of them had ever come to the United States. Did it

surprise you that you hadn't even heard any of these stories? Well, yes, it did, and it also made me rather angry as a child, because children don't understand what their parents might, may or may not be going through, and I didn't realize until I was much older, that it was far too painful for them to speak about all these close relatives, people they adored, who had been murdered, and they were the only survivors. There were really no cousins, no aunts, no grandparents, there was nobody at all. I think my parents were suffering tremendously, and once the Nazis came into Poland, that was close to the end of communication, there was hardly anything that came through. This is making me think of one of my favorite, but also one of the most heartbreaking sections in the poem for me, is there these, well you said that the letters are often fragmentary, but there's a section where you quote, just fragments phrases from many different letters and over and over

again they say, remember me, remember us. Yes, yes. Well, that's actually even more, I would say, an homage to the photographs, because that's what's on the photographs, and they didn't sign their names. They just wrote these little notes begging to be remembered. It was so upsetting, and they were yearning so much to be present. I felt that I had to do something, this one endlessly fixed on possibility, a single winglet at her brow, some Abekin Andenkin, remember me forever, and this one no more than 20 perched on a ladder in an orchard pretending to pick apples. I give you my photo, remember me, now in taffeta, turning toward the view, the woods that were made have been, life is a battle, so fight to win. My photo, in remember, for the cousin I loved, and another friend, we give you this photo. Remember us forever, Varshava, 1932, remember me, remember I wished

you the best for me, Yitzhak, from me, Helena, Pregina, Franek, from me, and me, Ostromenka, 1936, and me. One of the wonderful things about hearing, darkling, the opera is it's so wonderful to hear all those different voices, which sometimes are practically layered on top of each other. Is that how you heard the poem originally in your head? Yes, I was writing this book for a multitude of voices, and they were begging me, begging to be heard, remember me forever. They were in my ears all the time. Were there times when you felt like a medium or a channel? Oh, I certainly did, very much so. Especially when I decided that since I was very interested in forms, and I had been working with the cross sticks, that the feeling I had an affinity to the darkling thrush Thomas Hardy's poem, I felt that he and I had something in common since he was looking back at the 19th century, which he thought was a

fairly heinous century, and I was looking back at the 20th century, which could beat the 19th century by many miles. So I said to myself, well, maybe I want to take the armature of this poem, and I had also done a little research about a cross sticks, and it seems that in the middle ages and in the Renaissance, the across it was thought to be useful, not only as an amonic device, but also as a way to generate meaning. And here I am working with so little material that the poem really spoke to me, his poem, and that we were in the same place, and that the cross stick might somehow rather be my vehicle, my armature. So this is such a fascinating thing that you did, especially considering that the poem began with kind of a box of family secrets, and it's as though you wrote a kind of secret code into the poem too in the form of this across stick. And we should explain what is an across stick. And across sticks spells something

out. If you look down left hand margin of every page, in this case, you will be reading from first line to last line, you will be reading Thomas Hardy's poem, The Darkling Thresh. Can you recite any of the Darkling Thresh? Well, it starts out, I lean upon a copus gate, and that was another affinity that I felt my Darkling had, or I had with Hardy, because looking through a copus, a copus is a gnarled area where there are lots of trees growing very, very close together, and they cut them back and try to generate new growth. So it's a really gnarled, difficult place to navigate. So what could be more true? I was looking over a copus gate, just as Hardy was looking over a copus gate, and it starts out, I leaned upon a copus gate when frost was specter gray, and winter's dregs made desolate, the weakening eye of day.

The tangled bindstem scored the sky like strings of broken liars, and all mankind that haunted nigh had sought their household fires, and then the beauty of this poem is at the end, The Darkling Thresh appears, and this is a weary, skinny little, not very healthy looking bird, but he sings out with this beautiful, good night's song, and Hardy says, his happy good night air, some blessed hope, whereof he knew, and I was unaware, and that couldn't have echoed my own feelings more. In what sense, because you're writing a poem about people who all perished in the Holocaust, and you've layered their voices, there's such grief and such, but the same is, yes exactly, but they're here, they're alive for a moment, they're being celebrated, even the broken and destroyed earth needs to be celebrated, even destroyed

life needs to be remembered and honored and valorized, because what is most important is our lives, that's our gift, our lives. Inside the story, inventories, incidents pleading to be flossed from the teeth of silence, leaching congealed vowels lately are longing for words, this is this, that is that, as in first enunciations, as in debuts, for old roles, as if to atone. Yes, I love you, and your poem, Darkling, yes it's about the people whose whose lives you're trying to kind of rescue from the abyss a little bit, but it also strikes me just as much about grief and about memory and about the way memory works. Am I right? Absolutely, the thing about memory and history is that there's the inevitable distance

that time imposes upon it, there's nothing we can do about it, but little by little time is going to make it recede and recede and recede, and we believe need to navigate that distance as best we can, and for me, navigating that distance without trivializing it and without sentimentalizing it, and also without commenting on it, I tried hard not to do that, I didn't want it to be centered on the anecdotal, I wanted it to be more centered on emotion and feeling. I guess one of the questions about the Holocaust is, how do you mourn something that's almost too big to comprehend? There's this grief that kind of echoes down through the generations, and what I hear you saying is that to a certain extent, every generation has to figure out their

own form of mourning. Exactly, I think that the mourning ultimately, in many, many, many, many cases, it becomes a very ritualistic mourning, and it becomes largely devoid of its emotional content. That's something that in a way you have to struggle against. So is this a new place you're wanting to take poetry and opera? I think it would be absolutely extraordinary if more poetry could come off the page. Poetry in its own way is feltified. Most poets today speak to one another. They don't get out to a larger audience. I think it's a very, very sad development in our culture. The problem really is that too many poets don't care about that. They're perfectly happy to speak to each other, to teach in their writing programs, and they're not sufficiently engaged with the larger world. And I

think theater, opera is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful way, obviously, to engage with the larger world. So there you have the problem with poets. They're too conservative and too in bread. And I think there's a similar problem in the world of opera. The opera companies are afraid of trying something new. They're worried about their audiences. They have to sell tickets. Maybe they won't sell out the house. I mean, these are all their concerns. And I'm convinced that if they took the risk, they might be very pleasantly surprised. So little cause and illusions of meaning with draw. Oh little cause of time torn, torn, time moats in time. Little can they know trapped in that time, in that abyss of history, when word claws tear at their throats. Little causes, skull caps, sideburns, leaning cottages on

chicken legs. If we forget, last we forget, last we forget. Oh scattered sheets exiled to lost roads, nuggets of piety, clung to their coats on their brows they grow. On the floor, a child rides, a child rises in a stone, a rumble, lawns like doves, lawns like leaves this drone. This winter dark of tricks. An excerpt from the opera Darkling, which has just been released on CD. It's based on the poem of the same name by Anna Rabinowitz and Strangehamp spoke with her. Do you ever ache for a piece of your past, maybe a

younger version of yourself that feels long gone, novelist and essayist Andre Asaman knows all about longing, even if the past he remembers never really existed, except in his imagination. I was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but I am not Egypt. I was born into a Turkish family, but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt, but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens, and I learned to speak Italian, but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child, I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. Back to France was already paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French, or had ever set foot in France. But France and Paris was my soul home, my imaginary home, and will remain so all my life, even if after three days in France I cannot wait to get out, not a single ounce of me is French.

Andre Asaman now lives in New York City, but he still considers himself an exile without a country that's really his own. In his new collection of essays called Alibis, Asaman reflects on his memories of various places he's loved. He recently stopped by our studio to talk with Steve Paulson. One theme that comes up over and over in your essays is memory, but it's a very complicated notion of memory, not just remembering what happened, but it might be the memory of longing or a disappointment, or as you put it of imagined happiness. Why is memory so central to your writing? I think there are many answers one could give to that. One of them is because when you've lost something that you believe is important, you always revisit that loss. You tend to look back more than you look forward because you're always trying to recreate the narrative that brought you here. You're trying to understand, what is this trajectory? What is the itinerary that brought you to where

you are today? Not to have that is to feel completely lost. Is there always an element of longing then in the memories? Yes. Again, it's a complicated question. You long for something that was in the past, that was very important, and then you spend your whole life trying to recover it. Most people have that when it comes to their childhood. Even if it was a bad childhood, they long to recover those footsteps. In my case, I long to recover something that I never loved, so that puts me to totally paradoxical position. In my case, the big mysterious place is Alexandria. Alexandria Egypt. Right. That's where I come from. That's where I was born, and that's where I was kicked out of as a Jew who had to leave Egypt. But I never liked Alexandria. Who am I kidding? I've never kidded myself. I wanted to get out of Alexandria. But nevertheless, this is the place that I go back to when I try to understand what happened to me, who I am. Where am I going? How can you know where you're going if you don't know where you've come from? So this is not

nostalgia. Then this is something different. Oh, yes. Many people confuse it with nostalgia because that's the easy name for it. It is not because you cannot be nostalgic for something that you couldn't wait to get out of. There's also another component. It's the idea that most of our memories are made up of things we wished we had and never got. And so those become memories, too, by the way. To in other words, a memory is not always an accurate recreation of what actually happened. It might be quite fictional. Totally. In other words, if you are in a place, let's say you are in jail and you don't like the jail and every day in jail, you kept thinking of places outside the jail that you've never even visited, but you imagine them. Well, guess what? You will have memories of those places that you never visited and wishes. So wishes have a long history and most people cannot tell a wish from an actual event in the past because they got conflated. Well, this raises all kinds of interesting questions for

a memoir writer because, ostensibly, you were telling the truth. You were rendering on the page what actually happened. But of course, we know that anyone who's looking back decades to try to recall those details, embroiderers, perhaps, lies. I don't know. You could do that the way I call it to put a nicer spin on it is to say that I switched the furniture around. The furniture is all there, but you need to create a narrative and sometimes very faithful narratives are extremely boring. You need to skip details or you need to make adjustments so that detail A and detail G follow each other right away as if they were A and B. So you skip steps, but the furniture is all there. So my life in Egypt happened exactly as I tell it and my family, including those people that lived 50 years before I was born and whose dialogues I couldn't have heard because I wasn't even in my mom's tummy. Okay. Nevertheless, I think that I captured their voices and their feelings as accurately as

Gossip reported it to me and Gossip is for me a font of information superior to history. Do you have any qualms about recreating conversations and actually putting those conversations within quotes? I mean, things that happened a decade ago? Not a single one. And I will tell you ultimately why because the people who were there and who said those things said, you captured X and Y's voice perfectly. You capture their personality. This is exactly what I said. No, you couldn't have said that because I invented it, but I got you well enough so that you yourself persuaded I was writing about you and that for a writer as the ultimate sort of accolade. Well, it raises fast and in questions about what truth is. You're suggesting that there can be greater truth in a certain degree of fiction. Well, that goes back to Aristotle who said, you know, history tells it as it is, you know, literature as it could might should have been. And I find that the could might

should far more accurate when it comes to people. Now, if there's one writer who seems to hover over your own writing, it would be Proust. I would think sort of this whole question of memory and, you know, how you create a narrative arc out of memory. How formative in influence, was he? Well, Proust is someone I knew when I was a kid. I was 14 years old. My father spoke to me about Proust. It was my father who introduced me to Proust and said, you would like Proust. And, of course, right away, as soon as he said that the first impulse was, I'm going to hate Proust, okay? I'm not sure I like you. So how can I like Proust? But he told me a couple of things about Proust, about memory, smell, and long sentences. And guess what? All three I knew I was fascinated by before reading Proust. So I deferred reading Proust as far as I could, or at least reading the whole book. But once I got into it, it is the most eye -opening experience that I've had intellectually in my whole life because you are finding on paper somebody

who is you. And I think that's the ultimate trick of literature is to tell your story that you never had, but is your story. I've never experienced intimacy with the writer at that level. And yes, the whole idea of smell, which I've always been particularly affected by, since I was a child, I recovered in him. So, oh God, he's done that too now. What else is left? Oh, and he's got the bungling stupid narrator. I've got that too. So what, why smell? Why is that such a primal sense? I don't know. Somebody explained it to me by saying that it ties right into the directly to the limbic system. So what does that say about me? I have no idea. But I know that when I was a child, and I'm saying this about very, very, I'm two or three years old, I lost my grandfather, and I remember him, even though I was two when he died, and you're not supposed to. But I remember the smell of the house after he died. And the smell was so

powerful because I thought he was still there, but didn't want to be seen. That sense of smell, I recovered that order time and time again. And it must have taught me that in smell, you recover something very powerful that is lost. And since I've lost many, many things since I left Egypt, the sense of smell is basically the permanent address. That's where you go to recover who you are. You know, I was just writing about this the other day. The smell of a pencil shaving in an afternoon in September brings back to me horrible school days. When I was a great school kid, I hate that smell of pencil shaders. Okay, I want to run away from it, but I'll test it again and again to say, is it really that horrible? Yes, it is. But of course, part of me says, you know, in that smell, there is a part of me. You mentioned another way that Proust influenced you was long sentences. Why are you attracted to using long sentences? Oh, because I hate endings. Basically, Proust's sentences

are long because he's exploring. He's not trying to state something. He's just opening up a widening the net as far as he can in order to capture something that is fundamentally uncatchable, intractable, but it's also a way of becoming extremely effusive with your thoughts, not just your feelings, and trying to allow the thought to dilate so much so that it has the space it needs to speak itself. Whereas short clip sentences, which we're all encouraged to do, especially if you want to be published, and strunken white will certainly support that, a short clip sentence is an information bringer. It tells you, you know, how was the postman dressed when the dog bit him, period? It's not interested in the more intangible aspects of life, and I am interested in the intangible aspects of it. So a long sentence creates a particular mood, a particular cadence, rhythms are in place so that you can actually trap those things that

might otherwise escape the short sentence writer. Andrei Asaman talking with Steve Paulson, his book is called Alibis, essays on elsewhere. Next, Michael Ondacci, on the murky line between fiction and memoir, and Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Canadian novelist Michael Ondacci has quite a collection of international literary prizes

for his novels The English Patient and Annals Ghost. Both of his books dealt with the psychological trauma of past wars. Ondacci's latest novel The Cat's Table is also set in the past, but this time the entire story takes place on a ship crossing the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The cat's table of the book's title refers to a place where the ship's ragdag outsiders sit at mealtimes across the dining hall from the captain's table. This is where the story's narrator, 11 -year -old Michael, meets two other boys. Together they go off to explore the mysteries of the adult world. Later at night, after the specially invited first -class passengers had left the captain's table, and after the dancing had ended with couples, their masks removed, barely stirring in each other's arms, they brought out the prisoner. It was usually before midnight the deck shone because of a cloudless moon. He appeared with guards, one chain to him, one walking behind him with a baton. We did not know what his crime was. We assumed he could only

have been a murder. The concept of anything more intricate such as a crime of passion or a political betrayal did not exist in us then. He looked powerful, self -contained, and he was barefoot. Casuals had discovered the slate -night schedule for the prisoner's walk, so the three of us were often there at that hour, he could be thought among ourselves a leap over the railing along with the guard who was chain to him into the dark sea. We thought of him running and leaping this way to his death. We thought this, I suppose, because we were young. For the very idea of a chain of being contained was like suffocation. At our age, we could not endure the idea of it. We could hardly stand to wear sandals when we went for meals, and every night as we eat at our table in the dining room, we imagined the prisoner eating scraps from a metal tray barefoot in his cell. Michael Andache says the inspiration for this novel came from his own

childhood when he took a long ocean voyage to England. But he dismisses the idea that it's a veiled autobiography. When I was 11 years old, I did take a trip from Sri Lanka to England, and quite honestly, I remember very, very little of this journey, but the idea of that journey kind of got me into thinking of how I would imagine I could have taken that trip. So the book is really a novel, and a fictional version of that journey I took. As a young boy, I was 11 years old, and I had no parent or official guardian looking over me. So it became a story about a young 11 -year -old boy, not even realizing what was happening, and he makes friends with two other boys, and they kind of causes much havoc as they can on this ship. You're very clear that this is not a memoir. It's not a autobiography, and yet it's clear also the way you talk about it, that in some ways it's an exploration for yourself of who you were when you were 11 years old. Very much so. But in some ways, at the same time, when I wrote a book on a bit of the kid, or when I wrote a book about

Buddy Bolden, I steeped myself into that possibility of those characters. And in a way, I did the same thing with this one. So probably the most intimate scenes in this book are the most fictional. So it's very difficult to tell where fiction begins, where fiction ends. I'm sure I brought up all kinds of stuff that I may have felt emotionally, but at the same time I did put myself in situations which were completely fictional. It had to feel like it was memoir or truth. And in the story, Michael exists both as this 11 -year -old boy and as someone closer, I assume, to your age, no, who is looking back at this voyage in search of his own identity. So anything you do to flush that out informs both the fictional Michael and you, Michael and Archie. Well, I was interested when I actually called the boy Michael at one point about page 30 or 40 or something like that. I was sort of surprised at

myself for doing that. And then at the same time, it allowed me to kind of distance myself from the boy by giving him a name. Any name, you know, I was able to kind of separate myself from the career. I mean, the boy becomes a writer, as I have. But at the same time, he felt very different from my kind of character. It's not quite the real Michael talking here. I think what's fascinating from the outside, at least in part, is that every writer will say that they have to write from what they know or what they can learn about the world. And you've done that. But you're kind of keeping a foot in both camps here, aren't you? And you're determinedly not saying that none of this happened to you when you were on board that ship. You even used the same name, didn't you? The Oran say? Right, right. The thing is, any book you write you want it to make is as intimate as possible to the reader. I'm using the devices of memoir. I'm using the devices of nonfiction. But you know, nonfiction is a very devious thing.

You know, there's a great line by Kinky Friedman, I like to quote, which is that, you know, there's a very fine line between fiction and nonfiction. And I think I snorted it at 1976. So I just, I just love that remark because I think, you know, it's such a kind of, yet we worry when we start talking about nonfiction. Well, I'd like to talk about some of the characters, at least, that you've created. But I think even before we do that in some ways, we have to talk about the character, the real character, who is in both stories, both yours and the novels. And that's the ship itself because these boys, these three boys, they examine every square inch of it, don't they? Well, as I said, you know, it's a kind of journey I would love to have made with all the knowledge I have is an adult now, you know, that the idea of stalking the ship trying to find how the engine room works, where how the poultry is brought from the cold rooms into the kitchens at a certain hour of the morning, the very idea of how the process, the craft of a ship, you know, I mean, when I write my books, whether it's

the craft of being a bomb disposal expert or a bridge builder, I just get totally involved with my curiosity about those, how those things work. So, to have a ship and I kind of, one of the things I did do was study all those diagrams of ships and know where certain rooms were, where the jail was, if there was a jail, where the two different pools were. So, it allowed me a kind of fabulous blueprint and map of a landscape. And having such a limited landscape was great for me. I mean, some of my books kind of roam around the world, you know, but this one I was limited to this one ship, so everything was about the ship. It was like a stage where people could come in and leave, it was almost like a French faus. We should talk then about some of these people who are at the cat's table. The boy, as I guess, are the first to talk about. We know Michael, he is your stand -in in a way. He's the narrator. Tell me about Cassius. What Cassius is the bad friend, Dramadon is the good friend, and it was kind of funny about writing

the Cassius character. He had another name at some point. I just didn't feel the name was right, so I decided to call him Cassius. And the man I called him Cassius, he became much worse. He behaved even more badly. Well, in the beginning of the introduction to him, I think you say, who would name their child Cassius? You must have asked yourself that question. But the thing is, you know, what's wonderful in Sri Lanka is you do have a lot of these classical names joined the hip to a name like Summer Asacre, as Cassius from Summer Asacre, or Octavia, so and so. I mean, there's a nice mongrel mixture of names in Sri Lanka. Anyway, he becomes the kind of the instigator that he can become the troublemaker on the ship, and the Michael character is kind of led by him into very dramatic scene where they are tied during a storm to the deck, so they can watch the storm and apparently and nearly die as a result of this. And then there's Ramana, who's a very sweet, asthmatic boy, who's also the third character in that

clan. And he's a bit more of a tragic character, and so we follow these boys on the ship for the first half of the book, and then at various times we jump to the future to see what happens to them. Do each of us, do you think, need this kind of detail to begin to understand who we are as adults, because that's what your story is about. It's who Michael becomes, who Cassius becomes, and what happens to Ramana. Well, you know, I think one of the things that's interesting is I mean, in retrospect, it really was a book about an education, and near the end, someone says it's time to go to school, and you know, that's very ironic, because in fact, during these 21 days on the ship, these boys have been to school. They've learned from all kinds of people, and they've got a guy called Mr. Hasty, who's Michael's roommate, who has very strange theories about men and women. But then Mr. Mazarpa says, keep your eyes and ears open, this could be a great education. And so in a way, it is a kind of education for all these boys, and it's damaging as well as thrilling and good, so there's an odd mix. So that's why you sort

of need all these various characters. Now, understand it's not fair to ask you whether this is your story over and over again, but it's always kind of hanging there, isn't it? I mean, you've a lifetime full of experience that shaped who you are. Clearly, though, the enjoyment that you took in telling this story suggests that that trip, when you were 11 years old, was a seminal moment for you, that at least in terms of opportunity. I think so, but you know, that what was important about that trip was that a fact that I changed countries. I went from Sri Lanka or Salon as it was called then to England. And when I landed in England, I suddenly had to become an English schoolboy, and I think the drama of that really was a very, very real thing for me for the next few years. You know, I had where long trousers, ties, shoes, socks, you know, and stuff like that, and a different set of customs. So that was the huge change for me. So in the end, do you think in examining this Michael's life you learned anything about your journey when you were 11?

Well, you know, what happens with fiction sometimes is when you write something that seems to be a very specific place that very specific place becomes real. I mean, when I wrote an earlier book called Running in the Family about my super family in Sri Lanka, I was told stories by uncles and aunts, and some of them were probably quite false. And I just accepted them all and wrote them down in the book. But in a way, I looked back on my childhood as in Sri Lanka as something that was revealed by those stories, by those people, whether they were true or not. And in some odd way, now I have a ship journey that I took that I can sort of not quite identify with, but it's there as part of my life. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks a lot. That's Michael Ondar Singh. Talking about his novel, The Cat's Table. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. If you'd like

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