 |
|
The past few weeks have been extremely hectic at the Open Letter offices, what with Nobody's Home shipping out to stores, Dubravka arriving in the States for her tour, our launch party taking place in NY last week, not to mention all the necessary preparations for the Frankfurt Book Fair . . . Which are all my excuses for not sending this out sooner.
INTERVIEW WITH BRAGI ÓLAFSSON
The next Open Letter title to hit stores is Bragi Ólafsson's The Pets, a typical novel about a boy who wins the lottery, then meets a beautiful woman on a plane, then, while waiting for her to call, ends up hiding under his bed to avoid his old nemesis. And along the way there's a tragic accident involving pet guinea pigs. Oh, and this book has a perfect, unexpected ending.
A couple months ago we interviewed Bragi—who, in addition to being a very successful author was also the bassist in Bjork's first band, The Sugarcubes—and asked him about the book, the way he wrote himself literally under the bed, and about Icelandic book culture. Here are a few bits:
OL: Turning to The Pets—one of the most striking things about the book is the fact that for most of the novel, the main character, and main narrator, Emil is trapped under his bed. Was this a restriction you set out for yourself at the beginning of the novel, or did it occur naturally during the writing process?
BO: After an English friend of mine told me of a rather unfortunate incident he had with a guinea-pig, cement and a water-hose, I wanted to write a story about a person who is assigned to take care of a few pet animals. I had some difficulty in finding the correct form and tone for the story, but one day when I was sitting in my living room, looking at the open window with a steaming hot coffee in front of me, I started to imagine some unwanted person coming through the window and me hiding under the bed, and all of a sudden that very idea and the story about the pets came together. Thus the method of telling the story existed from the start. But that the main character is trapped under his bed is not really a restriction, on the contrary it's very helpful for the imagination of the person writing the story. In fact I would like to write more novels from that point of view, I feel comfortable under a bed, it's probably something from childhood.
OL: A series of "the view from under the bed" books would be fantastic. . . . Personally, as the book went along, I got more and more anxious about how Emil was going to get out and how the situation would be resolved. (Being an ex-smoker, the few references to how long it had been since his last cigarette gave me vicarious nic fits.) I guess that's what I would see as the main constraint—how is this going to end? And without giving much away, I have to admit that I was pleased and shocked by how the story was resolved. When did you know how the novel would end the way that it does?
BO: I've had lots of comments on how the novel ends. While many readers find it very frustrating, even feel betrayed, other readers think it is the proper ending to a story like this. One reader came up to me and told me that the ending of The Pets was the second best ending he had read in a book. I was of course very flattered to hear that, especially because this reader seemed like a "normal" person, not a literature student. And when I asked him what was the best ending he had read, the answer was: For Whom the Bell Tolls! It made my day.
*
OL: Are you working on a new book?
BO: Yes, I'm working on a novel which is related to my last novel, The Ambassador. This one has the working title The Screenplay, and tells the story of two men in their late sixties (a film director, educated in Czechoslovakia, who has never made a film after he finished his studies, and a playwright and a translator who has never actually had a play produced) who suddenly, with the help of an old acquaintance, a rich pharmacist, get the opportunity to write and produce a film of their own. But at the start of the novel one of the two guys, who's called Örn Featherby, gets the news that his recently dead English father, who lived in Hull and whom he hadn't had contact with in thirty years, has left him in his will a great collection of shoes, almost two hundred pairs that should fit his son. Örn decides to collect his inheritance, but because he has a bad fear of flying he has to travel by sea, and he and his friend, whose name is Jón Magnússon, go on a trawler to Hull, with the intention of using the time on board to work on their screenplay. The story is told by Jón Magnússon's ex sister-in-law, who is also indirectly a character in the novel, so we follow the adventures of Jón and Örn Featherby through the eyes of a woman.
(Does this make sense? The novel itself probably doesn't make any sense at all, but the description of it should . . .)
The entire interview can be found on our website. And for the next week or so, we're selling copies of The Pets for $10.55, just visit http://catalog.openletterbooks.org/authors/5 to order a copy, or, as always, you can buy an Open Letter subscription by visiting http://www.openletterbooks.org/subscribe/. (In case you're wondering, we can start the subscription with any book, so if you already have Nobody's Home, don't worry, we'll send you the next six or twelve titles beginning with The Pets. Just e-mail me at chad...@rochester.edu and let me know.)
OCTOBER EVENTS
There are a ton of Open Letter events taking place over the next month—here's a complete list:
Tuesday, September 30th, 6 PM:
Dubravka Ugresic
57th St. Books
1301 E. 57th St
Chicago, IL
Wednesday, October 1st, 7:30 PM:
Dubravka Ugresic with Rolf Potts
Bookslut Reading Series
Hopleaf
Second Floor
5148 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL
Wednesday, October 1st, 5:00 PM:
Translators' Roundtable: Michael Emmerich, Edward Gauvin, Marian Schwartz, and Martha Tennent
Plutzik Library in Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
A Reading the World Conversation Series Event
Thursday, October 2nd, 5:30 PM:
Dubravka Ugresic
Novella Bookstore
5510 S. Kingshighway Blvd
St. Louis, MO
Monday, October 6th, 8 PM:
Bragi Ólafsson
Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum
220 North Street
Buffalo, NY
Tuesday, October 7th, 6 PM:
Bragi Ólafsson with Lytton Smith
Hawkins-Carlson Room, Rush Rhees Library
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
A Reading the World Conversation Series Event
Wednesday, October 8th, 7 PM:
Dubravka Ugresic, Bragi Ólafsson, and Chad W. Post
McNally Jackson
52 Prince St.
New York, NY
Thursday, October 9th, 12:30 PM:
Bragi Ólafsson
Idlewild Books
12 W 19th St. (near 5th Ave.)
New York, NY
Thursday, October 9th, 12:30 PM:
Bragi Ólafsson with Mark Binelli
Book Culture
536 West 112th St.
New York, NY
Saturday, October 11th:
Bragi Ólafsson
Twin Cities Book Festival
Minneapolis Community & Technical College
Minneapolis, MN
Tuesday, October 14th, 7 PM:
Dubravka Ugresic and Brigid Hughes (founder of A Public Space)
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth St.
Brooklyn, NY
Tuesday, October 14th, 7:30 PM:
Bragi Ólafsson
Elliot Bay Book Co.
101 South Main St.
Seattle, WA
OVER AT THREE PERCENT
The past few weeks have been pretty active for Three Percent. We've added a number of reviews, there's a clip of Dubravka on the local TV morning news program, and a number of posts about the future of publishing. I'm always interested in prognostications about book culture, and recently there was an interesting article in New York about "the end" of publishing. It's a pretty bleak piece, but fascinating to me (and to my student interns) because it hits on almost every aspect of the current commercial publishing model, pointing out how each segment of the whole publishing ecosystem is broken in some way. I wrote a long response to this article that can be found here.
Thanks again for supporting Open Letter!
Chad W. Post
|
|
|
|
Forthcoming Books
The Pets by Bragi Ólafsson
On sale: October 15, 2008
Hardcover, $14.95 $10.55
Buy it now!
The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca
On sale: November 11, 2008
Hardcover, $15.95
Buy it now!
|
|
|
