Samuel - I'm writing a bit prematurely since I am about to finish your ambitious, heatbreaking, painful, life-affirming novel. I have not yet read the last 20 pages, but am moved to comment regardless. It has not been an easy read - given the history it recounts, how could it be - but it is brilliantly crafted. I often find historically faithful novels try so hard to exhibit their fidelity to the facts that the human drama and interiority of the characters is crowded out by general expository detail and the novel's individual voices get lost for pages at a time. Your approach succeeded at keeping me in the hearts and minds of the characters even as you detailed the horrible truths of their circumstances. Bravo. I look forward to meeting you in Paris for our tour of the 5th: two authors an ocean apart writing two distinctly different books that both have characters reference Mary Shelley's The Last Man will no doubt find much to talk about.
David, thank you for these words. Writing the book the way I knew I needed to write too me years of grappling with the challenge you mention--fidelity to facts at the expense of feeling. I had to keep reminding myself that even reading primary and secondary sources were the product of a chosen narrative, and that to try and avoid imbuing my own feelings and beliefs about what it could've been like back then would not only be dishonest, but a departure from the very act of writing about history. I think about this often, that once "history" is written on a page, it becomes a narrative in conversation with all of the other ones. That's how I best figured to write it. Looking forward to our chats in Paris, especially to discuss Shelley's lesser-known but equally affecting novel
Samuel - I'm writing a bit prematurely since I am about to finish your ambitious, heatbreaking, painful, life-affirming novel. I have not yet read the last 20 pages, but am moved to comment regardless. It has not been an easy read - given the history it recounts, how could it be - but it is brilliantly crafted. I often find historically faithful novels try so hard to exhibit their fidelity to the facts that the human drama and interiority of the characters is crowded out by general expository detail and the novel's individual voices get lost for pages at a time. Your approach succeeded at keeping me in the hearts and minds of the characters even as you detailed the horrible truths of their circumstances. Bravo. I look forward to meeting you in Paris for our tour of the 5th: two authors an ocean apart writing two distinctly different books that both have characters reference Mary Shelley's The Last Man will no doubt find much to talk about.
David, thank you for these words. Writing the book the way I knew I needed to write too me years of grappling with the challenge you mention--fidelity to facts at the expense of feeling. I had to keep reminding myself that even reading primary and secondary sources were the product of a chosen narrative, and that to try and avoid imbuing my own feelings and beliefs about what it could've been like back then would not only be dishonest, but a departure from the very act of writing about history. I think about this often, that once "history" is written on a page, it becomes a narrative in conversation with all of the other ones. That's how I best figured to write it. Looking forward to our chats in Paris, especially to discuss Shelley's lesser-known but equally affecting novel