Daniel Wallace interview

Magyar verzió

en.wikipedia.org

Daniel Wallace’s name is well known in Hungary for his novel “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician” and the film “Big Fish” based on his book, directed by Tim Burton. We asked the writer about these projects but we also talked about his glass eye collection, too. :)

You are considered to be one of the greatest figures of magical realism. Can you tell us why you have chosen this particular genre?

Before my first book, Big Fish, was published, I wrote five other novels. All of them, without exception, were realistic novels drawn from contemporary life. They were similar in that way and they were similar in another way as well: they were all bad. Very. I was trying to write the sort of book I thought someone wanted to read, rather than the one I wanted to write. So on my sixth, and what I told myself was the last, attempt, I decided to write something I liked, something that I would be proud of, regardless of whether or not anyone published it. This is when I returned to my first literary love, Greek myth, and started messing around with it. It worked.

Your most popular novel called “Big Fish: A novel of Mythic Proportions”. It was the basis for the Tim Burton film “Big Fish” and a Broadway musical. Did you like these adaptations?

Yes. The only good adaptations, I feel, are the ones in which the writer makes the work his own. Even though the original impulse for the story came from someone else, the person adapting it has to claim it, and do whatever they feel is necessary to make the story successful in this new genre, this new format. That’s what they did and I am glad they did it.

goodreads.com

Your novel “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician” is about a magician of a travelling circus. Are you fascinated by the world of circuses? Do you consider Henry Walker’s life a tragic one?

I don’t like circuses; they scare me. But I like the idea of a circus, and the strange characters that assemble under the tent. And yes, his life is tragic, but by the end of it I think he’s seeing how it might not be. But by then it’s too late.

You have written and illustrated a children’s story called “The Cat’s Pajamas” which is about a cat trying to be different from the others. Is this topic (showing your individuality instead of being a “copycat”) important for you? Would you like to write more children’s stories in the future?

I wouldn’t say the topic is ‘important’ to me. I mean, I think it’s a good idea to listen to your own songs, but it’s nothing that preoccupies me. It’s a kid’s book and in a book like that you have to keep things simple and clear and so that’s what I did. And yes! I want to write books with pictures, for children or adults. Anybody.

Your latest novel “The Kings and Queens of Roam” has not been published in Hungarian yet. What can you tell us about this story?

It’s about two sisters and the history of the town they grew up in. I know that’s not much to go on but it’s long and complicated and hard to get into. Here’s the first of it, which will give you an idea of its tone:

Rachel McCallister and her sister Helen lived together in the home they grew up in, and as far as anyone could tell (Rachel and Helen included), this is where they would die as well.  Though they were both quite young – Helen was twenty-five years old, and Rachel was only eighteen – their paths seemed clear and predictable, each girl so closely bound to the other that to imagine even a day apart was a pointless foray into fantasy. You might as well imagine building a cabin on a cloud. 

They lived in a town called Roam, a town founded a hundred years ago by their great-grandfather Elijah McCallister and his Chinese friend and hostage, Ming Kai, where they hoped to make the finest silk the world had ever known. Bordered by a great mountain on one side and a bottomless ravine on the other, and shadowed by dark green forests full of bears and wild dogs, the town – even after a century’s existence – felt like the abandoned capital of an ancient civilization: still a wonder to behold, out here in the middle of nowhere, but worn down, broken, nearly empty.  One day the vegetable world would reclaim it and all the evidence of every man and woman who had called it home, and those who still lived there (two hundred and twenty-seven people at last count, though the number grew smaller by the day) could only serve as witnesses. The dead outnumbered the living ten-fold now. There were so many dead their spirits could no longer be contained in the darkness, and, like deer, their population had spilled over into parts of the town reserved for the living.  Sometimes they formed a cool shaft of stray light that leaked into dark rooms, beneath closet doors, into alley ways. There was nowhere you could go in Roam without feeling them, but only rarely would they actually allow themselves to be seen.

Then there was Rachel and Helen. Rachel and Helen were known simply as the girls.  That’s what people called them. Have you seen the girls? they might say. Or, There go the girls.  For the last ten years, ever since their parents had died, they had never been not together: never.  Helen had been taking care of her sister all this time – but it was more than that.  It was as if their common losses had brought them so close that a biological metamorphosis had occurred, fusing them forever at the metaphorical hip.  The wonder of it was that they were thought of as girls at all, and not simply girl, so close were they, so much had one come to depend upon the other.

You have been living and working in Japan for a couple of years. How does it feel to live in a completely different culture? Did it have any influence on your writing?

I enjoyed it. Living there changed my life but I can’t say exactly how. I think about it like I’d think about a trip to the moon. But I don’t think it helped/hurt/changed anything about my writing. I’ve never written about Japan, ever.

"Sad man. Can't sleep. Wishes he could read Objectiv a Fiókból. Lucky readars!"
Message from Wallace :) 

You are a professor and lecturer of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at the University of North Carolina. What do you think to what extent can writing be taught and learnt?

Like anything else: you can show someone how to do something, whatever it is, and some people can’t do it, some people can, and some can do it exceptionally well.

Who are those writers from whom you learnt the most?

GG Marquez, Kafka, Vonnegut, Flannery O’Conner, John Cheever.

What are you working on currently?

I’m finishing up a novel that is due out in May, 2017, called Extraordinary Adventures. It’s about a man named Edsel Bronfman, whose simple life is complicated when he receives an unexpected phone call . . .

en.wikipedia.org

Glass eyes are returning motives in your stories and you collect them, too. It there a special reason behind your attachment to them?

Here is that story:

I have this thing for glass eyes. I guess you could say they’ve become one of my subjects, right in line behind fathers and dogs. In Big Fish, my first book, an old lady’s glass eye is stolen by some college boys. In Ray in Reverse, there’s a single mother with a glass eye, and all the kids in her neighborhood want to know whether her new baby has one too. It’s unclear to them whether you’re born with a glass eye, or get one, somehow, later. So they hatch a disastrous plan to find out.  In real life, I learned everything I ever needed to know about glass eyes from my neighbor, Frank McGowan.  He actually had a glass eye. He lost his real one when the blades of a tiny electronic helicopter spun off its bearings and impaled itself in his vitreous cavity, the very inside of the eye. 

Things were pretty good for me then. My father’s business was doing well enough that we moved from Homewood, Alabama, to the suburb of Mountain Brook. Mountain Brook was all old money and big houses. It was like a picture-book. My parents were in love, and my sisters were beautiful. 

Frank McGowan lived across the street from me. Frank was my age, but he was shorter, and pudgy, with chalk-white skin and reddish-brown freckles. His bangs stopped about an inch above his eyebrows. I thought his haircut was a mistake, but it happened again and again. He wasn’t especially brilliant, and he wasn’t good at sports, and with his puffy jowls and buck teeth, he looked like a chipmunk. Nobody really liked him.

Frank was in Mrs. Flower’s sixth grade class with me. Given that we were neighbors, and knew each other right from the start, we were always teamed up when teaming was necessary. If we had a little math quiz, Frank graded my answers and I graded his. If there was a take-home project, it only made sense that Frank and I worked together.  And when Frank had to wash his glass eye, which was three or four times a day, he always asked Mrs. Flowers if I could accompany him. It was a request she never refused. It the middle of a lecture or a reading or even a test, Frank would raise his hand and say, “Mrs. Flowers, I need to wash my eye.” She would nod, and then Frank would ask, “Can Danny come?” And she would nod again. This was no doubt her first experience with a glass eye: who knew what strange protocol was necessary in its washing? Maybe it was a two-boy operation.  But one thing was clear to her and to everybody: without a doubt, the eye could stand a washing. Over time a tiny gelatinous mush would collect around the eyelet, where Sleep collected in mine.

My presence wasn’t really necessary; Frank just wanted me to be with him. I think he thought of me as his friend, maybe his only friend, though I wasn’t, really.  I went with Frank, not out of friendship, but because I was happy for any excuse that got me out of class.

In the bathroom, he and I would stand in front of the sink, not saying much, and he would turn on the tap, letting the water run for a moment. Then he would reach up to his face and, gently pulling back his bottom lid, insert his fingers beneath the lower edge of his eye, and out it would slip. He held it in the palm of his hand like a treasure, and let the water rush over it, until it glistened in the florescent light. It was green, and it was shaped like a sea shell, or half of a hollowed-out, oblong marble. The pupil was piercingly black, and the green of the iris was deep and very real.  It was so weird, that Frank – a boy, just like me – would have this accessory in his life, the way my grandparents had false teeth, or my aunt wore a wig because she was balding, or the way my sister used a cane. I never asked to hold the eye and Frank never offered; it would have been too much for us both.  I just watched as he took a brown paper towel from the wall dispenser and dried it, and then as he used the same towel to wipe whatever mush still clung to the skin. Then, the eye held in the soft tips of his fingers, he brought it to the socket and sort of  . . . pushed it . . . and . . . moved it . . . around, until it felt good to him, in its place.

“Okay?” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

Then we went back to class.

Why do I write about glass eyes? It’s because of Frank McGowan. The children in Ray in Reverse are too young to know that life is a process of subtraction, and that much of your time is spent looking for ways to make up for the loss. When Frank removed his eye from his head, and he held it in the palm of his hand, I still felt it looking at me – me, who had all my parts. It was like a preview of coming attractions.

What is the size of your collection? :)

71.