Page 15 - Real Style August 2018

to the external world, and in the end he is the only one who can take us through to the con- clusion.
RS: What made you decide to make one of the chapters from the dog’s point of view? CD: When I was a new mother and I had a really young baby I read Anna Karenina and there’s a big peasant scene, and suddenly in the middle of this peasant scene we’re look- ing at everything from a dog’s perspective. And something that thrills me in any kind of art is feeling surprised. And it surprised me so much. It really jolted me. And so, I think that might be the origin of the dog.
RS: What inspired the world the charac- ters live in?
CD: When I was doing my research for the book I was looking at villages from Iceland and Siberia. I also worked for lumber camps for eight years, and would drive into the mid- dle of nowhere, a couple hours from the near- est small northern town. This was right across Canada. So it’s certainly that experience that helped inspire it, especially when I was cook- ing and everyone would leave the campsite for the day and I was alone. I got the sense of what it could be to disappear. And then I have been obsessed with cults and so I’ve done a lot of reading about these isolated settlements founded on the principles of a leader who might not even be alive anymore. And then the cult becomes a thing, a force in its own right.
RS: Why was there a ten year break be- tween novels?
CD: Well, you can’t rush a book. If you rush a book, you’ll make a bad book. And books take a lot of time and a lot of living. You know, you’re behind a closed door for thousands of hours. So, I waited for the right book I guess.
NEW RELEASES
FRENCH EXIT
If you’ve read The Sisters Brothers, you’ll have a sense
of the literary comedy in store from Canadian novelist Patrick deWitt. In his latest novel
he tells the story of an older well-off woman and her adult, good-for-nothing son, who are forced to flee New York for Paris to escape a scandal. Of course instead of things getting better, they get worse, in what is being called a “tragedy of manners.”
VOX
Thanksto the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, feminist dystopian fiction is more popular than ever. Vox by Christina Dalcher is the latest in the genre, and it follows the story of a woman who lives in a world where women can only speak a maximum of 100 words per day, can no longer hold jobs, and girls are not allowed to learn how to read or write. One woman fights the system, however, in order to reclaim the rights of her daughter and every other woman who has been silenced.
A RIVER OF STARS
For Vanessa Hua’s debut novel, the focus is on a pregnant Chinese immigrant who is sent to California by the baby’s father so their child can be born on U.S. soil. Once there the woman runs away from
the secret maternity home she had been sent to so she can claim her piece of the American Dream. Unfortunately, however, the baby’s father is tracking her and is on his way to claim what is his.
Culture News
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