Maitresse

Made In Britain

I recently interviewed the English writer Gavin James Bower for Her Royal Majesty, and asked him about his new book, Made in Britain, as well as the study of Claude Cahun he's working on for Zero Books.

An excerpt:

Can you tell me about your affinity for writing in the first person? What does it do for your work that the third person doesn’t?
There’s an obvious immediacy to it that appeals to me, because I want urgency and prejudice and paranoia and alienation to infuse the writing – and the character’s narrative to be taken as is. I don’t feel comfortable writing from the perspective of an omniscient character that’s only partially revealed to the reader, even though there are clear opportunities for landscaping denied, on one level, to a first person narrative. With the latter there’s a vulnerability available, but also the chance to get under the skin of characters – to become them. It’s draining and demanding, but rewarding too. Which is why I write that way.

Read the rest here.

Anne Marsella at Her Royal Majesty

Her Royal Majesty has just published a wonderful interview with the Paris-based writer Anne Marsella, author of Remedy and The Baby of Belleville.  An excerpt:

Both of your novels are set in Paris. What about Paris interests you as a writer? Is your Paris different from the “written Paris” you have inherited?
Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Baby of Belleville comprise my Parisian trilogy with Remedy and Patsy Boone working as mirror narratives, the first written in English, the latter in French. All three novels depict Paris as a city of overlapping, multiple worlds where Muslim matriarchs, French aristocrats, immigrant plumbers, Catholic nuns, American expats and a host of others entwine destinies in unexpected ways, and this fictive world, as strange and “whimsical” as it may seem to some, does in fact reflect the “real” Paris where I’ve resided for many years.  In Remedy I play with stereotypes of the American in Paris and displace them, so that they are no longer quite recognizable. The romanticized Paris played up in books like Adam Gopnik’s beautifully penned Paris to the Moon, simply does not seem real to me. I often think the myth of Paris is held too dear and to the detriment of seeing what is really going on here. I wonder how one can write a book about Paris and France in general without exploring its colonial past or lending an ear to its immigrant populations which have largely brought the country to its current prosperity. My imagination has been naturally drawn to these immigrant communities in the north-east of Paris, perhaps because I am an immigrant as well, and the question of exile and how it places one at the crux of myriad contradictions interest me: how can one make a home where one is not at home (and constantly harassed as with the sans papiers)?; what does it mean to be oneself, when one is perceived as other, particularly as an unwanted Other?; but also because in a city so groomed and polished, it is through the cracks and fissures of these more neglected neighbourhoods that my imagination has been able to make its entry. Right now France struggles to uphold its ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité against the winds of a growing xenophobia. My novels are not political in any obvious way, but they touch upon these current realities of French life.

This, to me, is the kind of writing about Paris that I can get behind. Read the full interview here. And you can read my 2008 interview with Anne here.

Charlotte Mandell on Zone

You'll want to read this interview with Charlotte Mandell, over at Conversational Reading.

And then you'll want to read Charlotte's translation of Mathias Enard's novel Zone, just published by Open Letter.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

SE: Obviously, taking the period out of the equation forces a significant shift in punctuation in this book. Did you more or less follow Mathias Enard’s lead on the punctuation, or did you make any significant shifts from what he did in the French? And how did the punctuation come into play as you attempted to recreate in English the frequent shifts in mood and register that the book’s narrator goes through?

CM: Funnily enough, I don’t think I made many changes in the punctuation. Somehow the run-on sentence moved very easily, almost effortlessly, into English–is it because the narrator admires William Burroughs and Ezra Pound, I wonder? Zone was one of the most effortless books I’ve ever translated, once I got into it and began to inhabit the voice of the narrator. I make it a policy never to read too far ahead in a book, so that I feel I’m part of the creative process as I’m translating the book–I figure the author didn’t have the luxury of reading his book ahead of time, so why should I? I also like not knowing what’s going to happen next, so that my translation can feel as fresh as the original. Of course once I’m done with the rough draft I go over and revise and revise–I usually end up with three or four drafts of a book before I’m happy with the final version. But that policy of not reading ahead helped me in the case of Zone, I think, since there is such an interesting progression in the narrator’s voice as the book goes on.

I sent the final draft to Mathias Enard when I was done, and he made surprisingly few changes. He seemed happy with how it sounded in English, which of course was a huge relief to me.

Actually one of the things Enard wanted to change was my translation of the very first–well, I can’t say sentence, but the first line of the book: “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme,” which I had initially translated as “everything is more difficult when you’re an adult.” Enard pointed out that “l’âge d’homme” is more fraught in French, and it conjures up Dante’s “midway through life’s journey”–he wanted it to bring Dante to mind, but also that midlife crisis moment that the narrator is experiencing. So Robert (my husband, the poet Robert Kelly) remembered the Fool’s song in “Twelfth Night”:

When that I was and a little tiny boy
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

and Mathias and I agreed that that “man’s estate” was a good phrase, and more resonant than just “adulthood” or “manhood.”

More here.

That is all.

Interview: Donna George Storey

In Donna George Storey's first novel, Amorous Woman, the reader is taken on an erotic journey into Japan, as seen through the eyes of a young American woman. Storey, who has a PhD in Japanese literature from Stanford, has adapted many of her own adventures into her novel, from back when she was a recent college graduate teaching English in Kyoto. Although readers who are (like me) unaccustomed to the conventions of erotica may be shocked by what they find there, Storey's novel opens into a world running parallel to the one the tourists see, and allows us to experience vicariously what we know is beyond our reach.

Storey has published over ninety stories and essays in such places as Prairie Schooner (the story received special mention in Pushcart Prize Stories 2004), Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Best American Erotica 2006, and the past five volumes of Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica and Best Women’s Erotica. Amorous Woman (Orion/Neon) is her first novel. She is also the author of Child of Darkness: Yôko and Other Stories by Furui Yoshikichi, a translation with critical commentaries.

Maîtresse: Your novel is based on the classic 17th century novel of the pleasure quarters, Ihara Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman. I haven't read it-- and haven't had time to get a copy delivered-- so I'd like to know, How do you see your novel in dialogue with that one? How did that book inspire you? (Did you decide it needed to be updated, or was still relevant, etc.) Why use the vantage point of a gaijin to tell the story?

Donna George Storey: I first read The Life of an Amorous Woman in preparation for my comprehensive exams for my Ph.D in Japanese literature.  Although I’d guess the book isn’t really all that viscerally arousing to a contemporary American reader (or a Japanese one for that matter), I was immediately impressed by the protagonist, Oharu, who enjoyed sex and had an adventurous spirit that led her to experience nearly every role open to women of her time—unheard of under the repressive Tokugawa regime.  Even then I wondered what it would be like to write the story of an American woman who experienced every role open to a gaijin in Japan during the time I stayed there in the 1980s and early 1990s.  I was definitely drawn to the idea of exploring that same panoramic view of gender roles and sexual mores with a cross-cultural twist.

I let that idea simmer for a decade or so, and when I was approached to write a novel for Orion’s Neon series, I thought of my modern-day remake of Saikaku and wrote up a proposal.  I borrowed many aspects of the original, such as the framing device of the protagonist telling her story to two young men who want different things from her—in my case a young businessman who is enchanted with Japan and another who is rather cynical.  I also used the episodic structure of the original.  In each chapter, my heroine, Lydia, throws herself into a new role whole-heartedly—wife, mistress, hostess, prostitute--almost forgetting she was ever anything else.  Saikaku’s famous jealousy meeting and his live sex show make an appearance in modern translation as well.  And his theme of worldly illusion and enlightenment was a touchstone for me.  At the end of both novels, Oharu and Lydia hallucinate a parade of lover’s faces that leads to their final epiphanies.

There are plenty of differences in my retelling, however.  Oharu’s motivation tends to be general restlessness and boredom with one lover.  In short, she’s a nymphomaniac.  I tried to make Lydia a bit more psychologically complex with her Freudian father complex and her search for a spiritual home.  I identify her as a “Kyoto gaijin,” the type who longs to read the Tale of Genji in the original and is convinced she is a reincarnated Japanese.  I’ve moved beyond that phase, but yes, I was pretty thrilled when I did manage to read a chapter of Genji in the original!  There is a lot of autobiography in my book as well.

M: How did you decide to start writing erotica?

DGS: When I first started writing seriously about twelve years ago, I merely wanted to write good stories.  But whenever I sat down at my computer, my fiction seemed to take a sexual turn, perhaps because I’ve always been fascinated by the mystery of the erotic life.  I resisted at first, and tried to be a good girl, but I finally realized I had to follow my passion.

Only later did I formulate a philosophy of sorts to support the natural leanings of my muse.  Our society still tends to separate the physical and intellectual, sex and scholarship.  My goal is to blend erotica’s focus on the characters’ sexuality, and their enjoyment of it, with the literary aim of getting at the truth of the complexity of human experience.  One of the greatest compliments I’ve heard from readers of Amorous Woman is that it provokes thought as well as physical arousal, that is “it’s a real novel and not just a stroke book.”

M: The recent "glitch" over at Amazon resulted in your novel being de-ranked. Did you manage to get in touch with them to find out why? what did they tell you? Do you accept the explanation that it was a "glitch"? Do you think America is still too much of a Puritanical society to enjoy erotic literature? What about in Japan-- all that manga [comic book] porn.  Is that a society that is more open to reading erotica?

DGS: Amorous Woman was one of the earlier books to be affected.  Suddenly, as of the morning of April 9, my novel no longer appeared on general searches and the next day it was deranked.  This is not good for sales because many customers just assume the book isn’t available and don’t take the necessary steps to track it down.  I queried Amazon and initially got a clueless reply suggesting I try to tag my book to make it more visible.  I challenged that answer and was told they’d passed on my request to their technical staff.  A few days later, 50,000 books with tags on sexuality or gay/lesbian themes suffered the same fate.  On Monday, April 13, I got two replies from them, one was the standard press release, the other a personal reply saying my book had been reinstated, but with no further explanation.

I was certainly outraged along with everyone else on Easter weekend with what looked like an ideological attack on books that dealt with sexuality in a progressive way (for example, books on “curing” homosexuality were never deranked).  Now I believe it could have been a glitch, either the work of an intentional hacker or insider who mistakenly catalogued all such books as “adult.”  But it is a lesson to everyone about the arbitrary and dangerous nature of any kind of censorship.  Under the standards of the “glitch,” Anais Nin was relegated to the back room as smut and Henry Miller stayed right up front with the literature.  James Baldwin was too dirty for primetime, Hugh Hefner’s centerfolds were fine.  It also points out how vulnerable authors who dare to push conservation boundaries of sexual expression still are.  In my efforts to market my book, I’ve faced a lot of prejudice from independent booksellers who refuse to sell any erotica at all, although I would argue passionately that my book has as much literary value, and a more nuanced view of sexuality, than many placed cover out on their shelves.  America is definitely still quite Puritanical, although I suspect our capitalist system likes it that way.  You can use sex to titillate and ultimately sell products more effectively if it is forbidden and repressed in the society at large.

The Japanese government on the other hand has traditionally seen sex as a way to channel rebellious energies that otherwise might be expressed in far more dangerous political ways—thus their support of licensed brothels, comfort women, and nowadays, ubiquitous manga porn as a change of pace, or “kibun tenkan,” for harried salarymen.

M: Lydia speaks Japanese very well, and manages to penetrate (excuse the expression) Japanese society more deeply than any of us visiting the country could ever hope to.  How can someone traveling to that country get past the surface and have a more "authentic" Japanese experience? Do you have any favorite places to recommend?

DGS: The “real Japan” has two faces:  an up-to-the-minute trendy side and a timeless traditional side.  To experience the latest fad, you’d have to ask your concierge or Japanese friend what’s the coolest happening thing that week, because it surely won’t be the same as last week. 

However, the traditional side is easier to track and I have a long list of recommendations from my stays in Kyoto and Tokyo over the years.  The best way for a traveler to experience old Japan is to stay in a ryokan or minshuku rather than a Western hotel.  Laying out your bedding each night, taking a Japanese bath and best of all waking up to a Japanese breakfast of rice, miso soup, grilled fish and side dishes will get you in touch with Japanese cultural on a visceral level.   Yoshimizu Inn in Ginza is a favorite place and their organic, healthy breakfasts are fantastic. 

A visit to a hot spring is an even better route to the sensual side of Japan.  Chojukan, a lovely nineteenth-century inn at Hoshi Onsen in Gunma has made an appearance in my novel and many of my stories.  The traditional wooden bathhouse is as awe-inspiring as a cathedral, and they allow mixed bathing, one of the few places in Japan that still does.

Other suggestions would be an overnight trip to Tsumago and Magome, two historic towns in the Nagano mountains.  Make sure to tour Tsumago at night by lantern light.  On my last trip to Kyoto, I loved the Sumiya Pleasure House, the last remaining tea house in the former pleasure quarters of Shimabara.  It really is a trip back to the elegant side of the seventeenth century.

M: You don't have to answer this question if you don't want to-- I feel funny asking it on this blog, as it's always been mostly PG-13!-- but what's the biggest difference between Japanese and American sexual mores?

DGS: I could write a book about this topic—and I guess I did!—but in summary, I’d say the fundamental difference is the locus of society’s control of the universal sexual urge.  In mostly Judeo-Christian America, God is always watching you, so any sort of activity outside of procreative marital duty is always tinged with delicious guilt.  In Japan, anything goes in private as long as you keep up the proper façade.  Affairs are fine as long as they don’t jeopardize the marriage.  Commercial sex is fine, as long as it stays within the bounds of the law, although it’s fascinating to see how creative the sex industry can be in an effort to test legal boundaries.  As in many Japanese arts, restriction and restraint really does inspire artistry.

M: What are you working on now?

DGS: I’m currently plotting out my second novel, an “intellectual erotic mystery,” which is a peek through the bedroom keyhole of American history in the 20^th century. The protagonist, a history professor, is fascinated by cultural expressions of erotic desire including Sally Rand, the famous 1930s burlesque dancer, Bettie Page and camera clubs in the 1950s, John Updike’s spouse-swapping suburbia, and the secret (or not so secret) lives of our presidents.  As her research proceeds, she finds her own life in the bedroom becoming more and more complex. I’ve been doing my own research on this project for a while--all my life, really--and I’ve assembled a lot of provocative material.   Hopefully my passion will come through to my readers!

Illustration:Utagawa Kunisada II, 1823-1880

Interview: Tobias Hill

Tobias Hill is the author of three previous novels, Underground (1999), The Love of Stones (2001) and The Cryptographer (2003), as well as three award-winning collections of poetry and Skin, a collection of short stories, which won the 1998 PEN/Macmillan Award for Fiction.  His latest novel, The Hidden, was published in the UK by Faber earlier this year, and will appear in the US in October from Harper Perennial.

The Hidden begins with an epigraph by Anthony Thwaite, and the scene is set:

I have hidden something in the inner chamber
And sealed the lid of the sarcophagus
And levered a granite boulder against the door
And the debris has covered it so perfectly
That though you walk over it daily you never suspect.

The muscular language, the heavy stone closing over whatever is hidden, and its perfect concealment, all find their echoes in Hill's novel, the story of a recently-divorced young graduate student, Ben Mercer, who finds himself on an archaeological dig in Sparta with a group of mesmerizing and vaguely threatening people.  

Hill was kind enough to answer some questions we had about the novel, his research and writing process, and writing after 9/11.

Maîtresse: The Hidden is set in modern-day Sparta, where a group of archaeologists are on a dig, and the narrative is interspersed with the dissertation notes of a young academic who has recently joined the others in Sparta.  What kind of research did you do in preparation for writing about ancient and contemporary Sparta?

Tobias Hill: The novel took five years, of which a year was taken up with research. Much of that took place in libraries and archives, but I spent a while in Sparta. The sense of a place matters to me. And Sparta was more than a setting for me - it’s a metaphor, a wide-angled thematic image - so it mattered more than a setting normally would. The books don’t tell you how beautiful the mountains are, or how sleepy and nondescript the town has become. I needed to get the feel of it. It does have an odd feel: to look at it now you wouldn’t guess it ever harboured power. The quietness gives a sense of innocence. Even the teenagers in their Marilyn Manson T-shirts, racing dirt bikes around the old acropolis, are muffled by the olive and orange groves. You could pass through and think it was just a wide spot in the road, not the home of one of the most famous and potent extremist philosophies in human history.

There are writers who favour invention almost to the exclusion of research. I’m not one of them, and I do envy them. The opening scene of Jim Crace’s ‘Being Dead’ is an example of how good that kind of writing can be: it precisely details the physical decomposition of the protagonists, and is absolutely convincing, yet Crace didn’t bone up on the scientific facts of decay to write the passage. Ian McEwan’s ‘Enduring Love’ contains a similar example of the power of invention, a fictional psychological paper on erotomania which purports to be genuine - and might as well be, since reviewers and even psychiatrists believed it to be so. The best writing doesn’t need to be factual to be true.

Maîtresse: How did you find the right balance between Ben's research and the story itself?  

Tobias Hill:  Rewriting. In early drafts Ben’s journals were more prominent, and were braided into the narrative at earlier points.  

The journals are important for the reader, mainly because they allow the reader to deduce the way Sparta works as a parallel for various elements of modern societies: to understand the image, and get at the larger theme, the reader needs to understand Sparta (and what I have to say about Sparta). Less important, but still useful, is the way the journals enrich the reader’s understanding of what Ben is doing - where he is washing up, when he washes up in Sparta, and what exactly he is digging for.

Because of that importance it was tempting to use the journals often. But the novel begins slowly, and gathers pace only towards its conclusion. In the early drafts, the greater prominence of the journals played havoc with that pacing. Umberto Eco demands that his readers work through the heavy inertia of his openings, and readers of The Hidden need to have a degree of patience with its early stages...but I wanted there always to be a sense of forward motion - faint at first, but gathering: the protagonist moving towards his fate.   

Maîtresse: Laura Kroetsch, in her review of the novel, calls it a post-9/11 novel, even though this is never made explicit, because the novel deals so much with the idea of "terror and retribution."  Is this something that you had in mind? What do you make of this idea?  

Tobias Hill: I think any decent novel covers a lot of ground, but yes, extremism is what I set out to write about. Sparta is an example of a state that rules through terror; in the modern world it is echoed by both Fascism and the dire extremes of Communism (‘All extremisms are alike,’ Ben writes, ‘And in Sparta all are prefigured.’). As the novel unfolds it examines the way such a society can echo other forms of terrorism, too. I suppose one of the questions I want people to ask, as they read, is ‘What is hidden?’ And there are several answers, but one of them is, ‘Terror’.  

This is the novel’s impersonal theme. If that was all it was about, I don’t think it could work as a human story. On a personal level it’s also the story of an outsider, someone with a grasping need to belong (that is really Ben’s flaw). And it’s about secrets - their toxicity; the way their toxins stain and spread. The relationships and politics of the group at the dig are governed by this. There’s a line from Henry Ward Beecher prefacing the novel: ‘The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection’.

Maîtresse: And if we say "this is a post 9/11 novel" do we mean because it is thematically related to the events of 9/11, or because this is the kind of novel that is needed after 9/11? What I'm trying to get at here is the distance of the novel from the event; does the novel belong to the event or is this just what the novel looks like after the event?  

Tobias Hill: That’s a fine point. Um. Well, it’s a novel that examines extremism. I was trying to get at the roots of that. 9/11 is a symptom: I wanted to look at the cause.  

But of course it is a post 9/11 novel. I wouldn’t have written it if we didn’t live in the world we now live in, which is a post 9/11 world.  

Is such a novel needed? Yes. We’ll always need social novels. But you mention distance, and actually I think the distance from the event is important. 9/11 has changed the world. I think artists have needed time to come to terms with that, to see what it has meant and what it might mean for the future.

I remember clearly where I was when the planes hit (and we all do, don’t we? It’s more of a Kennedy Moment than the grassy knoll itself): I was at my writing desk, and I was halfway through my second novel, The Love of Stones. The Hidden is my fourth. I couldn’t have written it any sooner. It was years before I even began to understand what I felt and thought about 9/11 and everything after it. And one of the reasons The Hidden took so long, too, it because I found it very difficult to make some sense out of the age we have entered, and where we stand now, and to write about these things without writing over-emotionally, or emotionlessly, or saying nothing, or saying nothing worth saying. I needed Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’

Maîtresse: You are a poet as well as a novelist.  How do these two genres relate to each other, for you? Are they two different activities/parts of the brain, or is it more fluid?

Tobias Hill: They’re different countries, for me. Most of my life I’ve felt more at home with poetry, but that’s changing. It might have something to do with getting older. I feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand what the novel is capable of. I also think, myself, that many poets produce their best work when they’re young (not all, but most), whereas the very best novels are often written when authors are older (not always, but often). The lyric impulse is youthful, but the novel benefits from patience, knowledge and - old-fashioned thought - wisdom. There’s also a gender issue here: many female novelists only have a chance to hit their stride after they have had children. Although that may be changing. Very slightly.

In a day to day way, poetry and the novel are also different for me. When I write poetry I walk - walk all day, given the chance. I listen to people, watch people, talk to people, and it all goes in, as does the rhythm of walking. The novels are...less wholesome. I sit at home, in raggedy house clothes, surrounded by accretions of books and half-eaten food, and write for as long as I can bear to do so. Sometimes it’s not a burden - there are days when I surf along for ten hours, and that’s a joy. But it can’t all be surfing, or there’d be nothing but surface. The hard days are the ones that matter.

Maîtresse: What would you be doing tonight if you were in Paris?

Tobias Hill: Eating well, with good friends, after a day in La Sainte-Chapelle.

Q&A with Anne Marsella

Native Californian Anne Marsella's debut novel Remedy (Portobello Books) is set in a Pariscape peopled by odd, intriguing, and enthusiastic characters. The resulting novel is more than the sum of its eccentricities: it is a joyous romp, and an endearing read.

At the center of this very funny and highly original work is a young lady called Remedy O'Riley de Valdez, originally of Florida, USA and lately of Paris, France.  The chapters mirror the Calendar of Saints, and Remedy, a "devout, if unorthodox" Catholic, lets the saint-of-the-day's hagiography infuse her esprit du jour.  Remedy spends her weekdays as an assistant at a fashion website, and her weekends learning to belly dance; nights she entertains (acrobats and cowboys, mostly) and dreams of meeting her "man o' the moon," "one with some free time but not too much. Preferable one who dances the cha-cha and who can recite Emily Dickinson's poems on command."

Marsella was kind enough to answer some questions for us about life in Paris, the role of Catholicism in the novel, her love of language, and writing in general.

1. Many of the stories in your collection, The Lost and Found, as well as your first novel, Remedy, have been set in Paris. What is it about Paris that has made it your setting of choice? Will you continue to set your stories here?

Yes, most of my writing thus far has been set in Paris.  Clearly it is a city that has captured me – I’ve been here for twenty years! – and my imagination.  When I first arrived as a student, I wandered a great deal, gazed at the faces in the metro, made encounters – gallant and other -  in the Luxembourg gardens.  Paris seemed to be teeming with possibilities and oddities beckoning to be explored through narrative; it was a playground of the unexpected and I remember feeling both exhilarated and lonely, though the loneliness was a catalyst for writing, a fertile ground for planting my little seeds.  At the time I was reading a great deal of Rilke, held The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as my spiritual guide to Paris and saw the city through his melancholic yet romantic lens.   I also remember reading Djuna Barnes and loving her peculiar and incantatory use of language, her manner of peopling Paris with such singularly mad characters. 

I still marvel at the fabric of this city, its weave of multiple worlds that convergence in surprising ways.  I like to spend the morning working in my local Belleville café before skipping down to the very bourgeois  7^th arrondissement to teach at The American University.  The differences between these two neighborhoods are significant but not extreme – this is France after all – and both are equally fascinating for me to explore.  My writing is so much about sensibility, about expressing a particular and singular way of being in the world. And Paris has been a city that lends itself to this kind of exploration.  Why?  Perhaps because it is slow to move, more concerned with how it feels and looks than how rapidly it can thrust itself into action.   It is not bold like New York or London but  intimate, human, more feminine. I probably will continue setting my stories and novels in Paris, though I do hope to write about America one day.  I’ve been here so long,  I now find the United States rather exotic and thoroughly bizarre even if familiar; perhaps I will eventually feel impelled to write about the greed and collective insouciance that has turned the San Joaquin valley where I am from into a unsustainable sprawl of strip malls and housing developments.  Now that would be an American story!

What do you make of the particular linguistic situation of the expatriate writer: how does writing in English and living in French affect what you produce?

I find this linguistic situation particularly propitious.  To have two or more languages at one’s disposal can only enrich one’s writing; it is like experiencing several consciousnesses, several points of view and writers often try to create this level of complexity in their work.  Speaking French has made me all the more aware of the English language, of is pliancy, it syntactic musculature and formidable concision, its ability to accommodate and absorb otherness without feeling threatened by it (so unlike the French language with its gun-pointing Académie!).   The experience of living here has also made me aware of how indebted the English language is to the French.  English is teeming, of course, with French and Latinate words and if you go back to Shakespeare you find that his syntax often perfectly mirrors French syntax.  Instances of this in English literature are too numerous to enumerate here.  To some extent I think the English language considers itself married to the French, even if it does, after years of conjugality, take its spouse for granted.  But it is strange to assume one is married to a woman – I assume French plays the bride -  who has never officially given her hand.  This is the way it is between English and French, the former being almost childlike in its absorbency, the latter, resistant and a tad scornful.  However, it is because the French resists that playing on its Latiny register in English creates a kind of shock, much like an unexpected encounter.  I love shifting from the Latin to the Saxon just for the surprise of it, just for the jolt of sound it creates. In the arts, particularly the visual arts and fiction, we speak a great deal about discovering new ways of seeing.  But what about hearing?  How do we hear the world?   How might the way we hear language make us feel more alive, more connected, or less so?   I write from my ear, almost like a composer, to achieve certain rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, syncopations and, as in music, the ensuing sound both creates a particular world and suggests how to navigate its music.  To use Freud’s term, Remedy’s relationship to language is somewhat polymorphous perverse; she alliterates and rhymes with unabashed pleasure as if living in France, in this great fishbowl of the French language, has lead her to rediscover something of her childhood tongue and the experience of finding words full of wonder, ripe with mystery as if by their very sound, on the cusp of meaning, they have the power to transport us and awaken feeling.

How would you qualify the role Catholicism plays in the novel? Remedy unravels in a sequence of chapters each dedicated to a (usually idiosyncratic saint); she attends Mass every afternoon with the blind Sister Dagobert and her tumor-laden dog; she baptizes her neighbor, Jeronimo, raises his cat from the dead, ordains herself as a priest and performs a gay marriage ceremony. Clearly this is not your mother's Catholicism!

Let’s just say that Remedy is a faithful but very unorthodox Catholic!  She rewrites the rules to her taste and becomes a self-ordained priestess,   She knows better than to butt heads with one of the most unshakeable hierarchies in the history of the western world!  But her choice to “reform” from within rather than to slam St. Joe’s door is significant. I think you noticed that Remedy does not shuck or reject; she accumulates.  She records the daily details of life, fashion trends, her favorite foods, rituals, lovers, and as she does so, her odd collection gains meaning or takes on new meanings.  For example when Remedy first mentions her former lover’s stove top espresso maker, it might seem like a random detail, but when she continues to talk about it, to worry and fuss over it, to take it to Djamila, her “fairy godmother,” for a de-tarter treatment, we see that the coffee maker comes to symbolize what she desires deep down, namely the stimulant that the love connection is, the feeling of being fully incarnated, nerves aflutter because of love!  But why does Remedy evoke (and provoke!) all these minor, plus a few major,  saints?    First of all, she is fascinated by their excesses, by their striking fortitude born of the single-mindedness of their mission.   But she is also raising a fundamental question about spirituality as she converses with them: Might one also achieve spiritual fulfillment by embracing presence?  Are suffering and renouncing the sole means by which we advance the soul?  There is a poem by Mary Oliver that goes You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal part of your body love what it loves.  This is similar to the spirituality Remedy embraces, which has to do with a quality of presence, receptivity, an attentiveness to the world that suspends judgment.

What's the function of the chick lit format-- girl works at a magazine, has kooky sidekicks, and practices "Adult Sex," all in the pursuit of True Love?

My intention was to subvert the chick lit format.  I wanted the novel to be its antidote!  Remedy, though it does play with chick-lit-like figures early on, quickly spins off into something of its own, something very singular.   I set the novel in the fashion world because at the time I was working for a press syndicate and next to me, behind a thin partition, was a fashion web site run by couture junkies who talked non-stop about bee striped boxers and the size of Angelina Jolie’s mouth . Whether I wanted to or not – and I didn’t - I had to listen to their chatter all day long  (not even earplugs availed me). To sublimate the situation – and to take revenge! - I came up with the idea to use (and mock) the world of couture as the backdrop of a narrative.  And so I started reading fashion copy, picking up articles left in the photocopy machine or in the recycle bin, and, to my surprise, began to revel in the depictions of Fashion Week’s offerings.  I didn’t experience any kind of conversion; it was not fashion that interested me as such, but the language that represents it.  I found it lush, funny, absurd and completely mad, and I loved the energy of it, the rush it created.  Writing about fashion was a wonderful way of talking about something else, I found, namely the economy of excess I already mentioned.  As I read fashion descriptions (and wrote them!) I felt something akin to the marvel I feel at the Galérie de l’Evolution when looking at the rows and rows of butterfly displays.  Butterflies!  Beautiful, of course, but what is the point?  Why so many patterns and colors of wing?  Why all this insane variety?  And yet we know that as we kill off such “pointless” species we are reducing the possibility of continuing life on this planet.  So there is something about this excess that is essential and at the heart of life.  I find that the Catholic Church, to return to your earlier question, with its nimiety of rituals, saints, mystics, hierarchies, and art is a perfect playground for celebrating this dimension of existence.

What is your favorite Emily Dickinson poem?

Without a doubt her poem “Wild Nights - Wild Nights!” which Remedy recites for inspiration.   There is so much passion condensed in this short poem and it shoots out with Dickinson’s dashes and exclamation points.  It suggests the kind of internalized eroticism usually associated with mystic marriage.  And I love the strange image of rowing in Eden.  Her “Ah, the Sea!”  It really is a very erotically charged poem!  The eroticism is sublimated and yet remains quite explicit: “Might I but moor – Tonight – In Thee!”  Goodness!

WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Q&A with Cara Black

Cara Black is the author of eight unputdownable mysteries, each set in different neighborhoods of Paris. From the Marais, to the Ile Se Louis, to the Bastille, she captures the feel of each quartier, so strongly that her work elicits a sharp pang of regret in the bosoms of those unlucky enough to be absent from Paris. The Aimée Leduc mysteries have become required reading for anyone in love with the City of Lights-- and anyone who relishes a good mystery.

The most recent installation, Murder in the Rue de Paradis, takes place in the 10th arrondissement, and will be published in hardcover tomorrow by Soho Crime. By turns seedy, bobo, and working class, the rue de Paradis and the surrounding streets provide the perfect setting for a mystery which blends Kurdish and Islamic terrorists hiding out in Paris, a mysterious foreign correspondent, and the strung-out male prostitutes of the Canal St Martin. Black gives a wonderfully detailed portrayal of the underside of Paris that is unromanticized in its honesty but still glamourous and noir enough to make the reader want to get on the next plane to Charles de Gaulle.

She was kind enough speak with us via email from her home in San Francisco.

Maîtresse: So many great mysteries are set in Paris-- why do you think that is? What was it that drew you to Paris? Do you think think there's something about the city that lends itself so well to mystery and noir fiction?

Cara Black: To me Paris lends itself to mystery...the cobblestones, the dark passages, the ever-present past and the challenge to show the darker side of the City of Light. I've had a long affair with France. Blame it first on my father, a Francophile, who loved good food, good wine and made me watch Jacques Tati's classic films constantly when I was growing up. I attended a Catholic elementary school and our teachers were old French nuns who taught us archaic French. My uncle went to Paris after World War 2 and studied art on the GI bill and drank lots of red wine.  Dinner conversation at home was often full of my uncle's tales of Paris and it really intrigued me.

There's a saying 'write what you know'  but I had a writing teacher who told us 'forget that, write what you're passionate about' and I took those words to heart.

I never intended to write a mystery, let alone in Paris, but I wanted to tell the story of my friend's mother, a hidden Jewish girl in the Marais during the German Occupation. Murder in the Marais, my first book, is really about the grey areas of history, the past, the collaborators and how people survived during the German occupation. What choices did they have and what compromises did they make if they had children to feed, family to take care of? I thought a lot about that and about the repercussions fifty years later in the present day that could come back to haunt them. At the time I started writing Murder in the Marais, I had a young son and had returned to Paris for a visit...it made me wonder what I would have done if I'd lived there during the war, what options I would have had and what I would have done to protect him and put a roof over his head. And it's about people, people in the wrong time the wrong place in that slice of history. The story comes from a true one that happened to my friend's mother, a young 14 year old Jewish girl living in the Marais during the Occupation. She lived with her family on the rue des Rosiers and came home from school to find her family gone. This was 1943...she lived in the apartment by herself waiting for them to return, going to school after all what else could she do? The concierge, unlike my story, helped my friend's mother giving her coupons for food, rations for coal in the winter. In 1944 at the Hotel Lutetia at Liberation she searched for her parents every day - it was a terminus point organized by the Red Cross for deportees and camp survivors returning after the war - she never found them. One day a woman who'd lived on her street saw her and came back from a camp said 'I saw your sister get off the train at Auschwitz' so that's how she knew her family were gone. Nothing more and that's the only closure she ever had. Regarding the love affair; let's just say that a woman who was also a hidden Jewish girl during the war who I met and interviewed told me that some of the young German soldiers were just boys, and as much as she tried she couldn't hate them, they were her age, forced into the military and just boys...after all it's about people she said. And when we forget we're all just people, the same under the skin, that's when war happens.

M : How do you decide on a neighborhood to focus on? What makes for a really good Paris setting?