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Episode 2: some literary news; backlist spotlight: "Kornwolf" by Tristan Egolf; "All Souls", "Dark Back of Time", and Redonda
130 Plays1 year ago
Welcome back! In this second episode we discuss some literary news, specifically the passing of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe and the US/Canada edition of the Republic of Consciousness Prize (chaired by our Lori Feathers) before moving onto a conversation on Tristan Egolf’s Kornwolf. In the Marías portion we chat some more about Redonda and dive into All Souls and Dark Back of Time. Bonus points if you can guess exactly when we recorded this episode (hint: lime-sized hail in Dallas is a pretty good giveaway).
If you’re interested in giving the Republic of Consciousness longlist event a listen (and we know you are!), here’s a link to a recording of that event.
And if you’re eager to hear more about Redonda and Try Not to be Strange (from one of our favorite presses, Biblioasis), here’s a link to Lori’s other podcast, Across the Pond, and the episode where she and Sam Jordison of Galley Beggar Press chat with Michael Hingston.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan
- The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
- the works of Amelia Gray
- Tristan Egolf’s other novels: Skirt & the Fiddle and Lord of the Barnyard
- Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda by Michael Hingston
- A Companion to Javier Marías by David K. Herzberger
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. How's it going today?
00:00:30
Speaker
That's pretty good. What's going on with you, Tom? Not a lot. Kind of rainy here in Chicago today, but that's rather par for the course for this time of year. Intense cold and rain followed by beautiful days followed by days of rain and cold.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah. I might be able to beat you on the weather today. Oh, yeah. Today in Dallas, they're calling for lime-sized hail. Oh, God. It's the first time that I've ever seen or heard of hail prediction or actual hail that's equated with fruit. It's usually like golf ball. Right. I was just thinking that. I've heard golf ball and baseball-sized hail, but I've never heard of an in-between point being
00:01:13
Speaker
I don't know which is worse, baseball size tail or lime size tail, but I know that I don't want to be out in either. No, neither one is a good thing. That's funny. There are websites that will, or at least there were when we were having kids, but
00:01:31
Speaker
that will tell you what the size of the fetus is as it's developing on a weekly basis. And it always, it starts with like comparisons to food items. Um, but it was this run of like a cherry tomato to an avocado, which became one of the nicknames for my first was we started calling the avocado, but I made the joke to my wife at one point that, um, after about six weeks, we had a really great salsa going from, uh, the kid. So get some cilantro in there. Absolutely. Yeah.
Tristan Egolf's 'Cornwolf' and Literary Themes
00:02:01
Speaker
So I think we talked about kicking off today's episode. In today's episode, we'll be talking about Tristan Egolf's Corn Wolf.
00:02:10
Speaker
And then our Maria's focus will be on the dark back of time, all souls, and a bit more on Redonda. But to start things off today, we're just kind of talking a little bit about some Jerry Leary news. I think we'll do this as it merits as a bit of an introduction. I specifically wanted to just sort of, I don't know if Commandant's the right way of putting it, but the death of Kenzieboro OA.
00:02:39
Speaker
He's a writer. I've read a fair bit of his work, but no means all of it. And it's been some time, actually, since I've really engaged with it. A major Japanese writer, Nobel laureate, wrote quite a bit about his family life through his novels. His first son was born with a brain hematoma with part of the brain on the outside of the skull.
00:03:05
Speaker
And at that time, the hospital staff suggested to he and his wife that they just let the baby die. And they refused to do that. His wife in particular taking a very strong stand on that this was not something that would happen. And the growth of his growth, his development
00:03:26
Speaker
how they navigated Japanese society at that time in the 1960s, 70s, really was a focus of his work as well as always political beliefs. He was a pacifist very much against nuclear disarmament, just a really interesting writer. Yeah, I feel I've read one or two of his novels and the
00:03:54
Speaker
The one that I'm remembering most, and forgive me, I forget the title, but it was about a family growing up with a disabled child. And it was quite moving as you would expect, but I didn't feel like it was sugar-coated. He wasn't romanticizing the suffering or the pain or just the
00:04:22
Speaker
the frustration of that kind of life. And also, I feel like he was, to me, his writing style was quite similar to a lot of Japanese writers that I've read. It's this kind of quiet, non-dramatic kind of prose that seems, that feels very
00:04:52
Speaker
spare, but at the same time is really good. I'm probably not describing this style very well, but I like it very much.
Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Press
00:05:06
Speaker
I come from being a former Russian major in college, you know, this kind of Dostoyevsky, you know, everything is like hair on fire. And the Japanese just like seem for the most part, I don't mean to stereotype, but many of the Japanese writers that I've that I've read just kind of have this this quieter type of prose. Yeah, I mean, there's a certain elegance to it. I would absolutely agree with that. A
00:05:35
Speaker
Pointing is probably the wrong way of putting it, but every word in its place. As you were pointing out, there isn't an excess of bombast or anything. Matter of fact, it's quite a nice way of putting it, but also deeply, I think, introspective. There's a lot of interesting ways of reflecting on what's taking place.
00:05:59
Speaker
The one of his novels that I mean, in many ways sticks out most strongly in my head is A Personal Matter, which very specifically is digging into the around. This is actually an interesting writer to talk about in terms of pulling from their own life into their fictional work, given the Maria's titles we're going to be talking about today. So a little bit of a serendipity here, I guess.
00:06:27
Speaker
Pretty crappy to put serendipity up against the man's death, I suppose. But no, a personal matter is detailing the reaction of a husband and father on the birth of the child who has pretty much the exact condition that his son was born with. And in many ways, the man spirals in fairly dramatic ways.
00:06:50
Speaker
There is that a certain reserve almost in the prose or at least how I remember it. And it's also, I mean, you know, this podcast is a lot about our, not just our, our readings, but our reactions to the readings and kind of the circumstance around it. That's part of why we're doing, you know, backlist that sticks out in our heads and.
00:07:09
Speaker
that title, I was actually, I remember very specifically reading it while waiting to reserve the room that a year hence my then fiance and I would use for our wedding reception. It was just this whole thing where you have to reserve it a year in advance, but first come first serve. So I got to the building at six in the morning and was, you know, it was like, this was like the thing I had to accomplish that month to make sure that everything could proceed and all those things. But I was sitting there reading
00:07:38
Speaker
what's probably a very strange book to be reading while you're waiting to reserve a room for your wedding reception with all of that out in front of us. But yeah, it had a real effect on me. I have a real affection for it. So it was certainly sad to see his passing, but an incredibly rich, incredibly
00:08:00
Speaker
from what I can tell well-lived meaningful life, so. Yes, I don't know what percentage of his works have been translated into English, but I feel like it's quite a few that you can order and probably get at your local bookstore of his titles. Yeah, highly recommend digging into Kenzabura Oe's work.
00:08:28
Speaker
But you also have a bit of news to chat about today. Yeah. Well, this is the inaugural year for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada. And this is something that I spearheaded based very much and with the full cooperation of the Republic of Consciousness Prize in the UK, which has been in existence now for seven or eight years.
00:08:56
Speaker
And so we looked in this inaugural year at literary fiction published by small presses during the calendar year 2022. And each small press that met the criteria, the qualifications as a small press was invited to submit one literary fiction title for the prize. And we announced our
00:09:23
Speaker
long list in February of 10 titles. We had a virtual Zoom party for the long list winners on March 1st. And I think that you you attended that, Tom. I did. And then on March 14th, we announced the short list of five titles. And this this was just announced earlier this week. So if you'll
00:09:50
Speaker
Allow me, I'm going to just name those books off because they're all incredible books that I highly recommend. They are Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, published by Restless Books. God's Children are Little Broken Things, Stories by Arinze Ifekandu, published by A Public Space Books,
00:10:13
Speaker
A new name, Septology 6-7 by Jan Fassa, translated from the Norwegian by Damien Searls, published by Transit Books. Pollock's Arm by Hans von Trotter, translated from the German by Elisabeth Laufer, published by New Vessel Press. And finally, The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayer.
00:10:36
Speaker
published by Coach House Books in Canada. So it's a great list. I'm proud of the work of the judges and I hope that in whatever little way we can, being shortlisted for this prize gives these books and these publishers a little bit of a bump.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's a fantastic prize. You guys have been doing an amazing job of promoting it. The long list was incredible. This short list is absolutely fantastic. Is there a recording available of the event back in February? You know, that's a good point. We will be making the recording available. I believe that we did record the entire
00:11:22
Speaker
Zoom event. It ran a little long. It was over two hours. But it was difficult to kind of tell all of these great authors and translators and publishers to stop talking about their books. But yes, we will be putting that up on our website for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. And you can also follow the prize on Twitter. It's at U-S-R-O-F-C is the Twitter handle. Cool.
00:11:52
Speaker
And we'll make sure we get that into show notes as well. And yeah, in a future episode, we'll let you know once the recording is up and live. But it was a great event. Two Hours is a long event, but it was fascinating and really interesting and having so many different voices going.
In-Depth Analysis of 'Cornwolf'
00:12:09
Speaker
So many publishers, translators, authors, hearing from the judges. It was a really good, I thought, really, really fun event. So yeah, you guys are doing great.
00:12:22
Speaker
I'm glad you enjoyed it. All right, so we are going to leave that little bit of the podcast there. And when we come back, we will be talking about Tristan Egolf's Cornwolf. Can't wait.
00:12:54
Speaker
All right, and we are back and we are talking about Tristan E. Goff's Cornwolf. This was one of my recommendations. It's a frankly bizarre novel about a lot of things, but in particular, an Amish werewolf. But that's in some ways almost background to a lot of what else happens in the novel.
00:13:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'll kind of leave it there for that brief descriptive part. Laurie, what did you think of this? Do you still want to do this podcast with me after reading this book? I like your taste in books, Tom. And this read has not changed that. This is a very
00:13:45
Speaker
bizarre, quirky book. As I've explained to you in some of our discussion back and forth about it, Tom, this book really hit home with me, not because I'm a werewolf and I don't know any werewolves either, as far as I know. But I grew up in central Pennsylvania in what most people think of as Amish country, but I was actually a little bit
00:14:12
Speaker
a little bit west of Lancaster. So in my community, it was mainly Mennonites. Still is mainly Mennonites. I grew up there and my family still lives there. My family on both sides actually have lived in the same small rural community in Pennsylvania, what's referred to as Pennsylvania in Cornwall. And we still kind of cutely say that around town.
00:14:41
Speaker
And they've been there for over 300 years. In fact, both sides of my family were in the first US census hailing from the same county.
00:14:51
Speaker
So take from that what you may, and maybe I do have werewolves in my family, given that. But it's a very small place. I grew up with Mennonites all around. Some of them went to my elementary school. They only go to school until eighth grade. Most of them went to a regular Mennonites school. But horse and buggies and farm sales and
00:15:16
Speaker
fields and cows. That was all part of what I grew up with. And this was just so reminiscent of that. And I feel that Tristan Egoff just really got the... Not just some of the
00:15:31
Speaker
the contextual details about living in that area, but also the tone, too. There was always a little bit of a friction in my community between the Mennonite community and the non-Mennonites. And that friction is, I think, very much palpable in Cornwall. And so that was just a real thrill to me. A lot of the last names like Crider and
00:15:57
Speaker
Stumpf and Stoltzfus. I mean, those are all names. Yoder that I grew up with in my little community too. But it is a damn outright weirdo
00:16:10
Speaker
book. The book starts out kind of, I think, not so unusual. It's a guy named Owen and he's coming back to the community. He grew up in or around this community and he's kind of a washed up guy by the time he comes back to Amish country.
00:16:35
Speaker
And he gets a job right off the bat as a news reporter for the local news rag. And he's been working, I think he was a journalist at a small town paper in Florida before he came back home.
00:16:52
Speaker
So weird things start happening in the community. People say that they see something, some kind of beast or animal. So he starts investigating these stories. And also he kind of has an agenda insofar as he's always been interested in boxing and has always really secretively wanted to be a
00:17:15
Speaker
Boxing writer a boxing journalist and so he's got a friend that's the local star Roddy at this this boxing club and so Roddy kind of gets him into the club and the coach there.
00:17:33
Speaker
A guy named Jack is kind of a mysterious guy, kind of a bottled up, serious, straight laced, no nonsense coach guy. But there turns out to be a little more to Jack than meets the eye and Owen starts to uncover this. The whole thing becomes kind of a great mystery in terms of what's going on and whether there really is a beast out there.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah. In my little quick synopsis, I didn't really, I didn't touch on those elements, but I think there's, I mean, there's even more in terms of the friction that you're pointing to and speaking to and what E-Golf's doing. I mean, he's really talking about or addressing anyways the
00:18:26
Speaker
not just the friction between different ways of life coexisting in the same space, but even within those different tribes, the various tribalisms that develop. I mean, there is a stunning amount of corruption within the Amish community in this area. Also worth mentioning that the names of the towns are just absolutely wild, Blue Ball, Intercourse, and so on.
00:18:57
Speaker
And these are real names of towns. Well, when you mentioned that to me, I guffawed pretty hard. There's part of me that wishes that was just a stroke of brilliance from egoth. But nope, that was just life being, you can't write it, apparently. Those things just sort of happen and develop. But yeah, I mean, there is an element of corruption, and that's part of an
00:19:25
Speaker
And agendas, I think, are an interesting way of looking at it. There are a lot of different folks with different agendas all intersecting and all kind of competing with one another in different ways, from folks who are taking advantage of the corruption to enrich themselves within these communities to the folks who want to expose it, even though they're no longer a part of the Amish community.
00:19:51
Speaker
the folks in town who see the Amish people just to pick on versus those who respect their way of life. It's a really interesting social, almost a social realist novel, if not for the fact that there is likely a werewolf of some kind ripping around town and tearing apart cornfields and attacking livestock, et cetera. Yeah.
00:20:19
Speaker
One thing to note is that as Owen is getting more and more kind of tipped off to some weird stuff happening, he actually goes to a library type place that the Amish have set up and he reads about an ancient curse.
00:20:43
Speaker
This book takes place in 1993. It was published, I believe, in 2006. But the story takes place in 1993. And so there's not smartphones. There's not Google. There's not all of those things that we would think, oh, well, you know,
00:21:05
Speaker
this would have been, he could have found out this information so fast. It's all of those things that haven't developed yet that kind of make his role kind of almost like a gumshoe detective trying to figure out like what's going on here. It's interesting that once you
00:21:27
Speaker
Once you pointed that out and made that, I mean, what's also interesting is that when this was published, I mean, there were cell phones, but the iPhone I think had maybe just come out or was, yeah, was just only a couple of years old at that point. I mean, so.
00:21:40
Speaker
This, I mean, what we're even doing now would not have been possible at that time, which is fascinating. But there's a real offbeat X-Files episode vibe to this. There's a specific episode where they were dealing with like vampires in this small town that the tone of that one that was a little bit goofy, a little bit silly, but at the same time, like, you know,
00:22:08
Speaker
a small town rural horror with a comic edge. And that I think is in some ways what E-Golf is doing here. He's using all these elements to kind of pick at and knit at these social constructs and these social constraints and really kind of interrogating it, which, I mean, which fits with what seemed to be his overall project. I mean, very quickly,
00:22:35
Speaker
Tristan Egolf was an American writer. His first novel was picked up by Gallimard in Paris, which would seem bizarre, and is frankly bizarre. But Egolf was living in Paris and had taken up with Patrick Modiano's daughter and eventually showed Modiano the book he'd been working on and Modiano put him in touch. And he'd been rejected by 70 US presses because his first book, and I want to get the name perfectly,
00:23:07
Speaker
was Lord of the Barnyard killing the feta calf and arming the aware in the corn belt, which is about a lot of things, but the back, I don't know, it's like a 500 page novel, I think, and the back half of it, at least, is centers around a garbage strike in a small town or small city. It's weird, very weird like this, but also like you can feel the almost creative
00:23:35
Speaker
juice behind it. His next novel was much shorter called Skir and the Fiddle about a rat catcher. And he's his characters are always sort of existing in these liminal spaces like the just like walking the cracks in different societies, occupying jobs that no one else would care to do and would perhaps look down upon, but are also at the same time essential to the functioning of the society. And in some ways, that's what the Cornwall for, you know, the curse
00:24:04
Speaker
is representing is this explosion and clearing out of a lot of what's built up. You want to say negative psychic energy within a group, bringing to light a lot of the nastiness that happens wherever people gather. And the last thing I want to say is this book came out after his death,
00:24:31
Speaker
Did kill himself. I believe he'd already turned in the the draft or some edits He was politically very active was part of something called the Smokestown six where during a campaign stop he and five other men stripped down and stacked themselves in a pyramid
00:24:55
Speaker
referring to the then Abu Ghraib scandal that was going on as an attack on George W. Bush and the Republican Party. He had some very specific political engagements and some serious mental health issues.
00:25:15
Speaker
I just wanted to make the comment that there is a very palpable tension here between what are referred to as the English and the Orderlies, the English being the regular
00:25:33
Speaker
the regular Caucasians walking around and the orderlies being the Amish. And there are some Mennonites in this book too, I believe, but at all times, Egoff is extremely respectful, I think, of the Amish community. I felt like there was no condescension, there was no judging that these are, you know,
00:25:58
Speaker
benighted people or they're not right in doing or feeling or believing what they do. In fact, there's a couple in the book, a loving couple. I think it's Fanny and Jonathan. And their story is really quite lovely. And there's also lots of
00:26:19
Speaker
lots of talk in the book about the community, members of the Amish community helping each other. And that's very much the same with the Midnight community that I grew up with. It's remarkable. I mean, anything that anyone in that community needs and they always come rushing and there's always more hands than are ever needed to kind of
00:26:48
Speaker
help build someone's house or a barn or childcare or just anything. It's a very close and communal thing. And I think that he represented them quite well in this book. Yeah. And I also feel that some of the folks within that community that are
00:27:09
Speaker
doing not just illegal things, but morally reprehensible things, are put into even starker relief by those descriptions. I mean, he gives the example of the best of this community, what its absolute strengths are, and so the folks who are taking advantage of that for their own gain almost take on an even more sinister aspect to them.
Climax and Character Dynamics in 'Cornwolf'
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, some really, some really disturbingly
00:27:38
Speaker
awful people crop up in this book. And interestingly, I don't really feel like the werewolf is one of them. I mean, there's something else happening there with how that particular character, that creature functions within the community and within the book, though it does do some pretty nasty things.
00:28:03
Speaker
ancient curse that Owen discovers that dates back to Germany and when the groups of people that are now considered Amish and Mennonite were considered heretics in Europe and kind of had to flee for their lives. They were burnt at the stake, just like witches and other types of, I guess, non-conformists in terms of the religion of the day.
00:28:32
Speaker
And so this ancient curse and whether this ancient curse is now
00:28:41
Speaker
is now coming to fruition in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, through these characters is kind of juxtaposed by this kind of concept of intergenerational trauma. And in some ways, Tom, there are some echoes, I feel, of John Crow's Devil, the book that we just talked about in our last episode.
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree with that. You mentioned that in an email as we were getting ready for this and that just kind of hit me like a bolt from the blue. It's the combination of the things that folks don't talk about.
00:29:24
Speaker
that they don't want to speak into existence or acknowledge within their communities. So the various things that people hide, but how nothing really stays hidden to a certain degree. Eventually everything circles back around. You have the character, and I need to just look at it to make sure I pronounce the name properly. The names are phenomenal. Benedictus Bontrager,
00:29:52
Speaker
He is one of the higher ups with the orderlies. He is functionally a minister within the community and he's an absolute bastard. Also a drunk, all sorts of things. Very similar, almost a combination in some respects of
00:30:11
Speaker
the pastor and John Crow's devil and the apostle in terms of like his effect. He's both of them in some very specific ways, but almost in a way the wrong parts. Like he is the corrupting influence of the apostle without any of the true charisma or supernatural power of the apostle combined with Pastor Bly's just sort of
00:30:40
Speaker
brokenness and drunkenness and refusal to do what his flock needs to do without the redemptive arc to some degree that Bly goes on. Yeah, that character specifically has those echoes of it. And again, just we're talking about, in both novels, you're talking about communities that
00:31:08
Speaker
are simultaneously part of this larger world, but in some respects, isolated or cutting themselves off from that larger world. The interactions are, they very much bounce off of each other, exchange of goods, that sort of thing, but that is sort of the end of it to a certain degree. And then these explosions of violence and clearing of the underbrush that seem to almost have to happen.
00:31:39
Speaker
as this novel builds to its crescendo, and it's a long crescendo, we can maybe talk a little bit about where the novel doesn't quite work in a second, but as it builds to its crescendo and keeps ramping up, there is almost a feeling of inevitability about it, that as things are, as more of the information is given to you, as more is unveiled, and there's a lot that I don't think we're gonna talk about because it's interesting and fascinating how it's revealed and how it all unravels.
00:32:08
Speaker
At no point did I think that, in my first reading or more recent readings, that it could go any other way, that this is what was going to happen, what had to happen. And I think that's also very much how John Crow's devil played out in the end. But on the point of how the novel does or doesn't work, it's not a perfect novel.
00:32:37
Speaker
John Crow's Devil is, I think, pretty damn close to that. This is not. This is a very, very messy novel. It drops threads. It drops characters. I mean, you brought up Owen, who is really, in many ways, the focus and the driving force of the first half or so of the book. And he's practically gone in the second half, or at least by comparison. He's barely a
00:33:03
Speaker
He's more scenery by the end than he is an actual protagonist within the novel. And I think that's, I think he was, I think Egoff was writing a really big something and it just, and it's, he's a good writer. Like he knows how to write sentences that keep you moving. There's a propulsive quality to this novel. It just wasn't,
00:33:30
Speaker
height in the way that it kind of needs me to really like go to that next step, I think.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. It's not a perfect novel. I think that, you know, there's this everything is kind of culminating to Halloween night where you think that and the community is kind of in a frenzy almost about, you know, what is this beast? Where is this beast? We've got to find this beast and excise it or him or whatever.
00:34:04
Speaker
From our from our community and the community and they kind of turn on each other in a way that I thought was similar to John Crow's devil too I mean they kind of they kind of become a little less human or humane in the way that they they interact because they're all just kind of Whipped up, you know needing to needing to get this
00:34:30
Speaker
this thing out of their community. And I wanted to ask you, Tom, about this element because I feel like maybe I didn't get it very well. But music plays a big role in this Halloween night episode where they're in a barn and they're doing some not very nice things to the police. And it almost feels like, you know,
00:34:58
Speaker
like they have to have blood. They're really kind of seeking for some kind of vengeance. And I wondered, there's the character Ephraim in the book and he seems all through the book to be very
00:35:16
Speaker
moved isn't the right word, agitated almost or invigorated by this really kind of hard metal music. And then that plays again in the barn on Halloween night. And I just would be interested in your thoughts about the role of music. I mean, I think, and this is probably, I mean, this is almost certainly coming from like cultural representations of, you know, this community. But
00:35:46
Speaker
That's not really the kind of music that I would expect to hear played. I don't really expect to, you know, walk by a buggy and hear, you know, Megadeth blasting out of it or anything like that. So I think in some respects it is, it is awesome.
00:36:06
Speaker
the younger folks in the community expressing themselves and expressing some of the emotion and the wildness inside that they're trying to, that frankly is just finding, it's finding any
00:36:21
Speaker
Steam release to get out, but it builds on itself. The more the music is played, the more extreme the actions that are taken. It is a really fascinating and fun image of a Metallica concert being played out at a barn in the middle of Pennsylvania. I think
00:36:49
Speaker
that that's what he, E-Golf was going for. At least that's what I'm taking from it, that the music was a, a manifestation of a lot of what was already building up and about to take place with the emergence of, and I mean, it's stated within the first few pages when Owen first shows up to town, but the, I believe they call it the blue, yes, the blue ball devil who had emerged previously, disappeared, and now seems to be emerging again.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a lot of what I took from it, because that's just, again, you know, cultural representations and all that and not being especially familiar with Amish community. I just don't see that music as being a strong part of of the community. So it in some ways it represents for me, or at least I think it functions with the novel as another one of those breaches in the decorum leading to
00:37:48
Speaker
what you were describing, the lust for blood, the desire for vengeance, the need to exercise this demon from within the community resulting in the people becoming progressively more demonic themselves. There's not a lot of female characters in this book. No. But one female character plays a very prominent and memorable role
00:38:15
Speaker
towards the end, going into Halloween night, Halloween Eve. And it's Griselda. And this is a woman who raised her own child, Fanny, but then also raised her brother's child, who is Benedictus's son, Ephraim.
00:38:42
Speaker
And she she really does like a 180 on us. You're feeling like, oh, this sweet little Amish lady and Benedictus was a horrible father and he abused Ephraim and.
00:38:58
Speaker
And she took him in, and the poor kid didn't have a mother, and he lived with her for three years, and she raised him. And now, some of the closest relations this child has are with Fanny, who's just a sister to him, and Griselda.
00:39:19
Speaker
Ephraim even ends up in jail and Griselda, you know, steps up and says, I'll take custody of him. You know, I'll be responsible for him while he's on parole. And I don't want to give it away too much. But I wondered, do you do you feel like there's anything symbolic or bigger in her role that that E-Golf kind of wants us to see?
00:39:45
Speaker
I'm trying to think of how to address that without going into the big... The big reveal? I mean, literally the big reveal of the novel. I mean, in that respect, I think Griselda is in some ways representing the fullness of the community. I mean, she is, as you brought up earlier,
00:40:08
Speaker
she steps in to support and to raise her nephew and to provide a home for this child and to go as far as needed to make sure he has something akin to a loving home. And when she does the 180 and when she does reveal a completely different aspect to her personality, there's an abandon to it.
00:40:37
Speaker
There's a cruelty in what happens, but it isn't even a cruelty that she's reluctant about. She's giving into it. She's enjoying it.
Recommending 'Cornwolf' to Readers
00:40:47
Speaker
She wants to be cruel. And we've been talking about this as a novel where I keep harping on the idea of this as a novel.
00:40:57
Speaker
social structures and ruptures and all that. I think that is what she is. She is a member of the community that
00:41:09
Speaker
is equally in some regards in both camps. She is a good person who's doing good things, who upholds the values of the community. She also has done and wants to do things that completely violate that entire social order. And I think that is what is taking place with her on top of
00:41:38
Speaker
really just in an almost cinematic way slamming home the idea of what the hell just happened. Like what is going on? And also like the degree to which this curse, this entire happening occurrence is rocking everything about this community and what it is and what it stands for and how it's able to even be those things.
00:42:07
Speaker
Well, that perspective is interesting in terms of her fractured identity because I kind of saw it as something different. I saw it as something that she was pretending to be a good person, but really she's almost the quintessential witch.
00:42:33
Speaker
I can certainly see that. I think though that like, and that's, that could be the complicating thing though, right? That like, you know, I guess, yeah, I am arguing that she's frankly both that, and that oftentimes the witch is even that. Yeah. I mean, that, that would be an interesting thing to know is like, how did, how did, over the process of the book's development
00:42:59
Speaker
What was Griselda over time? Did she start off in one direction and then had to become something else? Or was she the witch? And this is a way for for E-Golf to kind of complicate that to make it a little bit more of a full person who also happens to be that. Yeah. And this is the thing I knew in suggesting it.
00:43:23
Speaker
this it's a weird freaking book like it's just it's just bonkers like he's doing some really weird weird things with how what he's writing about how he writes about it but there is just so much creative energy in this novel like there there's something really interesting going on yeah
00:43:46
Speaker
I will I will definitely bring it into the store. I will definitely hand sell it because I can just think of three or four customers off the top of my head that this this they will love this book because it is it is exciting. It, you know, it definitely keeps you turning the pages. It's mysterious. And it's just the
00:44:15
Speaker
The world that he depicts is a real world. And I think you just look at how many people go on vacation to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It's something that people are curious about. Yes. That was actually the question I was about to ask is, would this be a book that would make it onto your stacks, into your shelves, be part of your backlist? But that idea of three or four customers that would absolutely love it,
00:44:43
Speaker
That is 100% how I viewed this book. I would make sure it was around for certain times of year. I would see, you know, I would hand sell a customer a different book and see their reaction and be like, well, you know, this one might actually make sense for you next.
00:44:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that it is for a customer that that enjoys the bizarre and kind of the wildly imaginative and is just like ready to be all in for the ride. And I think that, you know, anyone like that is just going to have a great time with this book.
Exploring Javier Marias' 'All Souls' and Themes
00:45:23
Speaker
To wrap it up, what other titles I mean, so what
00:45:27
Speaker
What title would a customer read and react to that you would then think, oh, this one next? Because I'll tell you, this is always something, while I did do that, it's something I almost struggled with. I almost needed more a constellation of titles to know that a customer was engaging with or interested in to think that this is the one. Because that's the other thing about hand selling, is that you can ruin their trust in you if you hand them too many weird things.
00:45:56
Speaker
Oh, man. I wasn't prepared for that question. I should have been. Can you think of any titles? Well, so this is the only thing is I've been thinking about over the last few days in preparation for this. And I realize I am struggling. I mean, as a cop out, the last werewolf by Glenn Duncan
00:46:16
Speaker
actually does some similar things. And I think it's also interesting how rare, how few werewolf novels there are as compared to like vampire and other monsters. I think that's just, that's a different discussion, but I think it's an interesting one. But that one does kind of dig into, that one has a real sense of humor to it. I mean, it is out and out, a werewolf horror novel in a very different way. But beyond that,
00:46:45
Speaker
I almost think some of the earlier fiction from like an Amelia Gray, I mean, it doesn't really match in terms of pro style or even content, but there's that sort of wild abandon to that idea of storytelling as being a way of pushing boundaries, a way of really kind of shocking the reader that I think works in that connection.
00:47:15
Speaker
That's probably a tenuous comp at best. Yeah. I'm like, I'm wrecking my brain and I can think of some fantastical books, but not really any that are quite like this. Maybe the best comps for this are his previous books. I don't know. Maybe he's sui generis.
00:47:45
Speaker
I mean, that would be like, I mean, the skirt and the fiddle, not so much. I feel like that was one. I mean, it was quite good. It's doing some interesting and similar things, but it's also just very different. It's also so much tighter. But Laura of the Barnyard absolutely is in conversation with this one. And that is amazingly enough an even wilder, less controlled novel than Cornwall.
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so to be generous might be a good way. I mean, that's a pretty good way, I think, of describing this very small but really impressive body of work. It's unique for sure. All right.
00:48:39
Speaker
This episode in our exploration of Javier Marius' work, we're going to be digging into his novel, All Souls, as well as the false novel, as it's sometimes called, Dark Back of Time, and touching a little bit more on Redonda and Marius' relationship to it.
00:49:00
Speaker
So I think I believe I said in the previous episode that All Souls was my first Marius novel. It has a very special place for me as a result. And I don't know that when I first read it, I frankly got everything that he was doing in it. I'm reading it more recently. I'm not a big re-reader. I don't know about you, Laurie. I tend not to go back too often.
00:49:29
Speaker
dig into a full body of work, but I don't often go back and read a book a second time around. But I'm doing that for this because, well, I kind of have to. And it's just, also, I mean, it was literally almost 20 years ago at this point, which is a weird thing to say, that I read All Souls. So I don't know if I picked up on how haunted
00:49:55
Speaker
of a novel it is and how much the ghost story I feel like plays a role in what he's doing in this book.
00:50:10
Speaker
Yeah, I read the book All Souls much more recently than you a year or two ago, and A Backtrack of Time even more recently. And it wasn't my first mores, but I feel like this book
00:50:33
Speaker
It feels, many of his books feel autobiographical, but this one definitely felt autobiographical to me in a way maybe that the others weren't quite as closely on point from what I understand was his actual life. And getting to your point about the ghost story, I would say that there is kind of a
00:51:05
Speaker
a loneliness to this book that I feel. He's at Oxford doing a teaching stint, Spanish guy rambling around Oxford, kind of has a lot of time on his hands.
00:51:25
Speaker
Of course, the parts that I loved are going into the antique bookstores and finding all of these interesting books that he's been trying to hunt down and getting the bookstore owners to kind of help him find the books that he's longing to read. But yeah, the feeling that I remember is loneliness, which maybe goes to the ghostliness that you're talking about.
00:51:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting novel in how he starts it by almost arguing against the relevance of his time spent in Oxford, the narrator. And that's something that we'll touch on in a minute, the separation between Marius the writer and the narrator of the novel.
00:52:27
Speaker
At the outset, he complicates who's actually speaking, that this is not a clear reciting of this person's time teaching in Oxford and living there for a couple of years.
00:52:46
Speaker
But this is the take of the person who is now writing it, which is just a very Marius thing of creating a remove upon a remove upon a remove so that you don't at any moment know exactly who is saying what or why. And I'm sorry, I was incorrect. It's more towards the end of the novel, and I'm not going to pull the page quickly, where the narrator very much thinks of this. This is sort of like a breathing mark in his history.
00:53:16
Speaker
that this was just a moment in time. And yet, if that's the case, why does it necessitate 200 plus pages of writing and recounting and thinking and dwelling and redwelling upon all the circumstances?
Marias' Narrative Techniques and Humor
00:53:30
Speaker
Which, again, I think plays into the loneliness you're speaking of. And one of the strongest images I have of this novel is
00:53:40
Speaker
you know, the end where he's, you know, thinking, where he's comparing his time in Oxford and I mean, clearly comparing it, but setting it up against his life with his wife and child now back in Madrid. So, I mean, it is very much a looking backwards at a particular moment, but clearly a moment that meant more than perhaps he wants to portray it as having meant to him at the time.
00:54:10
Speaker
It's just a very tricky thing that Marius does and how he plays with memory and how he plays with what any of the characters are asserting about themselves at any given time. There's a little bit almost of this self as being such a fluid thing that what you say you are at a given moment can be radically different from what you say you are in the next moment, the multitudes that we contain.
00:54:38
Speaker
I know, I mean, I certainly know that when I first read this, that thought was very attractive and very interesting to me at that moment in my life, in my time. And so how then does all souls relate to the false novel, Dark Back of Time?
00:54:59
Speaker
So as you pointed to, there are some relatively strong autobiographical components to All Souls. Marius was a lecturer at Oxford for a couple of years. The characters in All Souls are fictional, but they are pulled from people that were in his life. And after All Souls came out,
00:55:24
Speaker
And this, I believe this was his fifth novel, something along those lines. And one of the first ones to really, really starting to take off.
00:55:35
Speaker
And a lot of the reviews referred to also as a Romanocleph. And we're making some very strong assertions that he's really put a very thin coat of paint on top of his life story, which he took Umbridge to as a proud writer. And I don't know how many writers were more proud than Javier Marius, quite frankly.
00:55:58
Speaker
He definitely says some things in interviews that you get a clear sense of his opinion of himself, which is fine. He probably earned it. But also, there's an affair in this novel.
00:56:19
Speaker
in folks making the assumption that this is just Marius's life, they actually made the assumption that he was having an affair with one of his colleagues who's married with kids, who he says he had a perfectly fine relationship with, but at no time were they ever lovers. So dark back of time, it's reductive to say it's a response to all that. I mean, it is partially that, but
00:56:46
Speaker
I think it's almost as much a novel as All Souls is, even with the claim, the authorial voice that he places at the outset that there's fact and there's fiction. All Souls is fiction. What I'm about to tell you is fact. And there are a number of reasons I think that's the case. But I do want to just quickly read the opening line
00:57:16
Speaker
in Esther Allen's translation of Dark Back of Time because it might be my absolute favorite line by Marius. I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I've mixed them together more than once, as everyone does. Not only novelists or writers, but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell or prepare and ponder a tale or plot one.
00:57:44
Speaker
Okay, you're going to tell us that this is true, but you're recounting something at the same time. So you also know in the same moment that you're creating a fiction. And not only is he creating a fiction and retelling it, he also starts to not exactly fictionalize, but dramatize the lives of different people within this book. I mean, he may have all the facts, but he's filling in emotional moments. He's filling in the weight of a person's life.
00:58:14
Speaker
That, I mean, I guess you can say that's biography, but I don't know. I think in the way that he writes and what he's doing, this, you can call it a false novel if you want. I think the emphasis really should be on novel. I think this dark back of time still functions maybe as a bit of a corrective on all souls in some respects, but I think it's still largely a fiction and would fit better. Definitely deserves more to be
00:58:40
Speaker
in the fiction section than in a memoir section, say. Yeah. One of my favorite parts of Dark Back of Time is he goes back to Oxford and goes into this antiquarian bookstore that's run by this couple. And now he's kind of a famous guy. So they kind of recognize him and they want to make it known that
00:59:08
Speaker
you know, that All Souls was largely their bookstore in terms of his shopping and going to the bookstore. But it really wasn't. And they just kind of, they also want to kind of perpetuate this myth or this kind of
00:59:29
Speaker
unrealness to kind of the past, which is just kind of another way of looking, I think, at this theme about what's true and what's not. And I guess everyone has their own interpretation of the same past.
00:59:47
Speaker
Yeah. I will also say that the scene in the bookstore, he comes across a journal history of the Pirates by Daniel Defoe, which you can still get. Dover has published it. Did you get it? Oh, yes. I got it not. I special ordered it after I read this one and took it with me on my honeymoon. We went to
01:00:14
Speaker
the Caribbean for what was actually a pretty disastrous vacation. I got horrific, horrific sunburn and just, you know, a really, really not great experience. But we were married and that was the important part. But yes, I drew history. The Pirates came with me. And I don't know if I should having made this claim that this is a fiction. I don't know if I can say Maria's at the well.
01:00:39
Speaker
Marius makes the statement that it's a great book just to have out and to leaf through every so often, not one to really read through. And he's absolutely right. It's very funny. It's very gross at gruesome at times. It's a good book. I recommend it. It's definitely one that could go into any history section for some fun, for something a little bit different.
01:01:02
Speaker
Well, no, I'm just going to say that in addition to pirate books, though, All Souls is very much the characters
01:01:16
Speaker
quest to find some books about or by John Galsworthy and some of these other people that that kind of formed and were kind of the creators of the legend of the Kingdom of Redonda. And I just wanted I know you'll talk about that in a little bit, but how many of those writers books did you purchase based upon your read of All Souls?
01:01:45
Speaker
Um, I looked into it a little bit, um, and a lot of them are, or at least at the time were not super readily available. Um, I did pick up one by, um, Arthur Mackin at one point, and I do think I have one, um, when Gauseworth was upstairs. Um, I'll poke around. I'll report back next time. I definitely, I definitely have a couple, um, but I did not go completely nuts on that. Um, I don't know. Yeah. I was.
01:02:15
Speaker
I was a bookseller, obviously just about to get married.
01:02:19
Speaker
I didn't have unlimited disposable income to feed this particular bibliomania. I do want to point out, though, that the couple who own the antiquarian store that think that they are the couple in the novel in All Souls, according to Dark Back of Time, their last name is Stone. And in the novel, they're alabaster. So I think Marias could forgive them for perhaps thinking that there's
01:02:47
Speaker
a little bit of a closer association then. And that's one of the fun, I mean that's frankly one of the fun things about Dark Back of Time and in some ways this, I mean he is funny in his novels but I think the humor sometimes takes a backseat to some of his other considerations. I think in his work that's either like outright non-fiction essays or veering more towards it like Dark Back of Time, his sense of humor shows up a little bit more. He knows that he's playing with the reader a bit. He knows that he's
01:03:18
Speaker
He's having some fun with some of his prose pyrotechnics, and I enjoy seeing that element of his writing quite a bit. Yeah, I mean, frankly, he could do anything he wanted in his work.
01:03:37
Speaker
I just don't feel like I saw the humorous side show up quite... Although All Souls does have an absolutely hysterical dining room scene with one of the dons getting progressively more and more excited staring at the woman that would eventually become his lover, pounding the table with a hammer and just...
01:04:02
Speaker
When you step back and think about what that scene actually would have looked like if you staged it out properly or if it had truly occurred, it would look absolutely insane. What is happening at this table? What is this man doing as he's staring at this woman's chest, pounding the table over and over?
01:04:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's very funny. It's a great scene. The dining room, I don't know. I've not been to Oxford and I certainly haven't been to campus dining room at Oxford or the dining room, I guess, that they reserve for the faculty.
01:04:41
Speaker
It seems like a totally preposterous, tradition-bound place, a little stuffy, I think, and that is a very funny scene. I wanted to ask you, though, too, when we were
01:04:56
Speaker
When we were talking about engaging on this project of examining Marius's work, one of the things that you said to me was that in the earlier novels, you thought that the kind of the spy theme
01:05:14
Speaker
wasn't really as prominent perhaps as it becomes later on. There is an intimation of it though in All Souls where he talks early on in the novel about that Oxford just seems to be this breeding ground for MI6 because of, you know, and it just seems to be the right atmosphere because it's all bound in secrecy and rumors about people and who knows what and who's working for whom.
01:05:44
Speaker
and kind of secret identities. And so where am I going with this? I guess that I wanted to know whether in your opinion you thought that he was kind of like just starting to get interested in that thread here and explores it much more later on or I don't know. What are your thoughts? I mean, I think there's a lot and this is kind of what I was trying to get at with
01:06:12
Speaker
what I said earlier about, like the removes upon removes upon removes that he creates that he seems very interested throughout his writing and the lies that people tell the lies they don't tell and how they tell them, whether they write them down, whether they see them allowed. Um, and so I mean, I think as like an explicit, um,
01:06:38
Speaker
consideration of a novel. I think the spy theme builds, becomes even more woven in as a narrative element as you go along, as you read subsequent works. And I certainly think that that peaks in some respects in your face tomorrow, though it doesn't go away entirely. It's not like he exercised it from his system. But I do think it's much more of a consideration of
01:07:04
Speaker
how people, the faces that people are presenting to the world and what those things mean. I mean, there is a way to read this a little bit in some of the, you know, the illicit love affair, although I mean, they call it a love affair, the illicit affair.
Marias' Introspective Style and Redonda's Myth
01:07:19
Speaker
I'm not sure how much love they're actually, I mean, certainly there wasn't very much love coming from the lover's end, whereas the narrator seemed to be trying to tell himself that he didn't love her on some level.
01:07:31
Speaker
But yeah, some of those elements I think are definitely playing into it and cut back to this idea of espionage in a certain level. I said to you in some of the prep for today that I almost want to
01:07:50
Speaker
start referring to a lot of what he does as hauntings, that it isn't even like that calling it a ghost story might be too far. It doesn't really have all the DNA or the structure of a proper ghost story, but that the narrator is certainly haunted by this space, by this place, by this time. And in a lot of his work, it's reflecting back on a certain period or a certain occurrence. And even the explorations of
01:08:20
Speaker
memory or why people do the things they do in the hundreds of pages that a second will take in the narrative time. Is that as well? Is this archaeology of a person? There's a ghostliness, but I think haunting might work better. And even the
01:08:46
Speaker
the doorman that he describes Will at the very beginning of All Souls. Will is a 90 year old man. He clearly has, I don't even know if you want to call it dementia per se, but he's unstuck. He's functional, but he doesn't always, he always knows what day it is. It just doesn't usually correspond to the actual day or year that it is. So you're watching this man
01:09:16
Speaker
relive his life out of order. And there's a gentleness to how he describes it. And I think that it's at the very beginning of the novel kind of gives a sense of where he thinks memory, where he thinks experience ends up, what it plays in a person's life, or at least what he's trying to get across through these characters.
01:09:43
Speaker
Which also, again though, ties back into Dark Back of Time and him insisting that he has some claim to ownership over this. All Souls is a novel that has been put out into the world. It does share some autobiographical data with his own.
01:10:07
Speaker
And so if what folks read into that, I think is more than a little bit out of his control. And I think he knows that. And I think he's having a bit of fun in some ways. I mean, I think he's very serious about being like certain things did not happen. I did not have an affair, et cetera. But I think he also recognizes an opportunity there to really kind of mess with, well,
01:10:32
Speaker
Am I in charge here? You read the novel. Are you in charge? Who actually gets to say what is taking place here? Which has always been something I'm fascinated with when it comes to writing and writers, especially the ones that pay some mind to that. Does authorial intent really matter at the end of the day? I find myself more coming down on the Umberto Eco side of things that it's the
01:11:00
Speaker
intent to the text that probably matters more, more than the rest. And I like that because that's much more the nexus of the reader and the author and what they, what they are both bringing to the table in this moment and creating in the reading. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I've had different authors tell me that they don't really
01:11:28
Speaker
Oftentimes, they're not really thinking about an intention that they want a reader to take from the book. They just want to surprise or thrill the reader. And in whatever way that happens, that's fine. But yeah, there is this just kind of
01:11:53
Speaker
storytelling and story making that is just kind of a theme in all of his books, I think, in terms of the stories we tell ourselves and then the stories that are told about us or that involve us and kind of how they refract differently depending on what perspective you're looking at them from.
01:12:24
Speaker
Right. And I think that's probably a good segue into talking a bit more about Redonda and what happens there. So in All Souls, Marius does play with, I mean, it's going to talk about fiction again, but I'm not going to go down that road.
01:12:46
Speaker
There is a connection between Terence Armstrong, whose pen name of Gosworth was a king of Redonda. And Terence Armstrong is also the name of the lover of
01:13:07
Speaker
the mother of the narrator's lover and all souls. So Maria starts to kind of create this sort of weird relationship, this potential that maybe it was the same person and maybe it led to X, Y, and Z. But he also does spend, as you said, he's looking for more books and more of the work of these folks associated with this strange, strange story.
01:13:34
Speaker
His writing about that is what led to his being made literary executor and the new king of Redonda. Yeah, just so that it's clear for our listeners, it is the case, right, Tom, that
01:13:51
Speaker
Before this description of the kingdom of Redonda and the legacy and who started it and how it got passed down, there's really no rule for Javier Marais as being a king of Redonda or in the kingdom. It was based on his interest in it. I don't know how often it was talked about in other books by other authors, this literary kingdom, which is actually a
01:14:21
Speaker
A place, a rock, but also a literary kingdom. And that was just kind of what led to him kind of being asked to take on this role, correct? Correct. Or at least that's how I understand it. As with many things when it comes to Redonda, it is very
01:14:42
Speaker
confused and all over the place. I will say a great book to dig into if some of this is of interest. Be with Oasis books just brought out this past September, Try Not to Be Strange, The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda by Michael Hingston. It's fun. It does touch on Marius, but it mostly is, in many ways, the writer's exploration of this fascination that he had with this whole story.
01:15:11
Speaker
Exploration, literal and actual. Yes. He goes to Redonda. He goes to the rock. Yep. And in so doing, happens upon one of the other contested kingships of Redonda, which again is one of the fun things that Redonda is that there are multiple kingships claimed. So we touched on this last time. M.P. Shield says that he was proclaimed King of Redonda by his father.
01:15:41
Speaker
while they were in the Caribbean. Redonda is this little spit of island very near to Montserrat, visible from Montserrat. Sheil was a writer, mostly fantasy fiction. He eventually passed on the kingship and his literary legacy to John Gosworth, also known as Terrence Armstrong.
01:16:12
Speaker
Yeah. And so Godsworth has it. He eventually passes it along as well to John Wynn Tyson.
01:16:24
Speaker
Um, uh, Godsworth dies in 1970. I, I should make this a little bit clear. Maybe she'll becomes the king of Redonda in the late 19th century. Um, he, as one of those British writers, I don't know how it is that so many English writers end up living into their nineties, but it seems like an awful lot of them do. Cause she was born in 1865 and lived in 1947. Um, and that's.
01:16:50
Speaker
That's a pretty tumultuous period of history to live through in advanced years. That's a long time. And I think, and I'm mistaken, but he himself was primarily a writer of ghost stories. Is that right? Yep. So, you know. More ghostliness. I don't think I'm entirely grasping at straws at times. So, Gosworth,
01:17:21
Speaker
in his life also, well, some folks claim that he passed on the kingship to them, which is what's created some of these rival lines. John Wynn Tyson, however, did take over the literary executorship of Gosworth, along with other writer named Ian Fletcher.
01:17:45
Speaker
Eventually, and I'm just double checking my notes to make sure I've got this completely right, when Tyson passed it on, abdicated actually, and passed it on to Marius, which also transferred the literary executorship of Gosworth and Scheele because of how Marius wrote about Redonda and Terry Armstrong in All Souls.
01:18:14
Speaker
I've also been using a companion to Javier Marias by David K. Hertzberger, which has been helpful in eliciting a few things. Marias wrote an essay about Redonda before All Souls is published. Really? The essay is in Spanish, so I've not been able to dig into it. I might ask a friend to do me a solid and give it a look, or I'll finally go in Spanish and do it myself.
01:18:39
Speaker
So he was aware of it. Um, and I mean, he had to be in order to write about it. Um, so this is obviously a fascination of his, uh, of Maria says, um, but in all souls, obviously he talks about Terrence Armstrong. He's, you know, explores Redonda a bit in dark back of time. He goes into it further.
01:18:58
Speaker
And so there's, I mean, obviously there's a lot of factual, like historical information around this. There's also competing claims to how the kingship passed on, which I think is where it gets fun, at least where it gets fun for me. I think the mythology of Redonda, even with all the sort of competing claims to kingship, I just think this idea of a literary kingship, this island that
01:19:29
Speaker
in any real way, showing up so often in this major author's work is a really fascinating, really interesting thing. It's the kind of thing that fires up the imagination, but again, plays into sort of the haunting, the ghostliness of it. You can't really nail down
01:19:54
Speaker
You can't really kneel down what Redonda is at the end of the day. Is it a make believe kingdom? Yes, but it's also an actual physical island. Does the physical island really matter? I really count for much in the world. It's just covered in guano. Well, so no, it doesn't. But without it, you don't have this kingdom.
01:20:12
Speaker
who actually is the king of Redonda at any given moment. It's fascinating and fun. And I think it also, I mentioned earlier about Maria's humor, I think in some ways this is a bit of whimsy for him too. And I appreciate seeing that side of a writer whose work I respect so much.
Concluding Thoughts on Marias' Works
01:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, the kind of more recent claims to kingship of Redonda is really dealt with quite well in Michael Hingston's Try Not to Be Strange, and maybe we can put this in the show notes, Tom, but we had Michael on my other podcast Across the Pawn, and we interviewed him for that podcast, and I'd be happy to kind of
01:21:04
Speaker
reference the episode number, which I don't know off the top of my head, but in case anyone wants to dig into that a little bit further and listen to our interview of Michael. Yeah, we'll drop a link into the notes, but if you're not already listening to Across the Pond, you really should. It's very fun. I've enjoyed it greatly. It's fun when it drops into the feed, and I don't know. You've definitely
01:21:31
Speaker
You guys have definitely brought on some writers that I wouldn't have come across otherwise, or I would have come across in a different circumstance. I'll say like the Patrick McCabe episode might be my favorite in no small part because his novel, which I'm making an attempt to pronounce the title of, also from Vibilisis, which is kind of a fun coincidence just now.
01:21:52
Speaker
It's wild, but it's also very intimidating read on the page, but when he reads it, you hear the music of what he's doing and it becomes so much easier to actually just read on the page having heard him say it out loud.
01:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, the novel is called by Patrick McCabe is Pogue Mahone. And yeah, it's well worth the time to just listen to the excerpt that he reads from the book because his accent is just so perfect. Mm-hmm. So I'm always happy to shamelessly plug your other podcasts, Lori. Thanks, Tom. No problem.
01:22:31
Speaker
Yeah. Is there anything else you want to dig into on these two? I mean, I will say that I think that this is. We're going to talk about some of his other works, The Man of Feeling, The Man of Feeling will be one of the next ones we talk about, and that came out before All Souls. I do think that this marked this All Souls specifically and in its response, Dark Back of Time,
01:22:59
Speaker
kind of mark a bit of a change in what Maria's project was. He becomes much more, the voice of the novel becomes even more introspective isn't quite right, but maybe reflexively introspective.
01:23:17
Speaker
some of the themes of espionage telling what you don't tell that the haunting quality to it I think really starts to kick into gear at this point and I really do think it's it kind of culminates in your face tomorrow which we're building up to over the next few episodes so there is something if you're looking at his career as a whole um all souls definitely it's a bit of a
01:23:41
Speaker
It's an evolutionary moment for how he's writing, what he's trying to do, I think, and where, yeah, where his work is going, ultimately. So you would say that you think that that Marais had a project, a comprehensive project that he was working towards. It wasn't just iterative one book after the next.
01:24:07
Speaker
I don't think that in no small part because I think a lot of his books, I mean, you could, you could ultimately, I mean, you could, it probably wouldn't work, but you could make the argument that his novels are, you could probably pop the narrator in and out of each novel and it would be clean. It would work. You could see, especially from All Souls on, you could see that as the like history of a person over time.
01:24:32
Speaker
getting up to what takes place in your face tomorrow. But I do think, I mean, I do think he had a project. I think he was really trying to dig into what people, why people say,
01:24:54
Speaker
they are who they are, why they represent themselves as the way they do in the world. What does that mean if it means anything? I mean, I think he was really trying to investigate something about people maybe by himself, but that's kind of a provocative statement.
01:25:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think he was working on something. I think he was exploring something. And fiction writing, writing in general, but fiction writing in particular, was the avenue in which he chose to really kind of dig into it and go after it.
01:25:35
Speaker
And yeah, I think certainly his family's history and relationship to the civil war in Spain plays a huge role in that, especially when it comes to what you say out loud, how simply saying something can become an accusation, can become a denunciation, can put someone's life in danger. So yeah, maybe the best way to put it,
01:26:00
Speaker
This is someone off the cuff, so it might not work. But his project was exploring language, but the effect of language, what we say and what it does and how powerful that is.
01:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, maybe it'll be interesting at the end of our project of looking at his works to kind of contemplate whether we think his project had culminated at the point that he died or whether there were, I mean, as we both love his work, I know that we both very much wish that he was still around to keep writing and keep giving us things.
01:26:44
Speaker
It'll be interesting to see once we talk about the yet to be published in English last book, Thomas Nevinson, whether or not that kind of feels like, yeah, he kind of hit the mark on what he was trying to do.
01:27:03
Speaker
I might change my mind by the end. I might decide there was no project. I don't think that'll be the case, but I'm going to keep an open mind to it, and please feel free to tell me at the end if you're like, you know what? There was no project. This is just how he wrote, and that's totally cool, too. He was just having fun, novel by novel. I don't know. We'll see. But a good kind of thing for us to think about over the next episodes. Yeah.
01:27:33
Speaker
Alright, thanks Tom. Thanks Lori.