Hunger (10 page)

As a first-time novelist, have you been reading the reviews of your book? If so, what effect has that had on you?

It's tempting to say that I haven't been reading them, but the fact is that I'm too curious not to. It's too early to know what effect it will have. My confidence about having my work in the world has grown some — simply by learning that at least a few people like some of what I'm doing. But it's also disconcerting and a little embarrassing. If a reviewer really creams me, it will hurt — all the
more so if the criticisms are on the mark. I hope that I can learn from criticism without getting distracted, without damaging my very intimate relationship with what I am working on.

You are currently working as a copywriter for Princeton University Press. What has your experience been like working at an academic press? What are your impressions of Princeton? (Should my little sister go there?)

Academic presses are great places to work, offering as they do intelligent colleagues interested in ideas. I've learned a lot — or, more accurately, I've learned a little about a lot. (If your sister has a full scholarship or your family is wealthy, she could do worse than Princeton. I'm the product of state education and a bit of a populist, so perhaps she shouldn't take my advice anyway.)

You attended the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and in the fall you are joining the writing faculty at Boise State. What was your motivation for seeking out a teaching job? Do you think you learned more about writing during the time you were studying at Irvine or during the time you were writing
Hunger?

I like teaching, and I am looking forward to having my day job center on fiction and writing. (And of course I
crave those summers of intense writing.) What Irvine provided more than anything was the time and support to write and the pressure to read, but also I learned important craft lessons from teachers and peers. The sense of shared enterprise is a wonderful thing. Yet writing is not a collaborative activity. The crucial understandings come only from that bloodletting that goes on when I am alone with words.

When can we expect your next book?

I plan to complete it in about eighteen months, and I certainly hope it finds its way to library and bookstore shelves quickly after that.

The complete text of Matt Borondy's conversation with Elise Blackwell first appeared at
IdentityTheory.com
on May 18, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

by Elise Blackwell

I was living on several acres south of San Diego, working as a food writer, journalist, and freelance translator. On the side, I started to garden and, with my husband, to raise exotic fruits — cherimoyas, guavas, macadamias, jujubes, and others. Though both my parents are botanists and I grew up with some knowledge about plants, I had very little experience growing anything other than houseplants. I don't remember where I first heard of it, but I learned about the Seed Savers Exchange — an international network of small farmers and gardeners who preserve and trade rare, traditional, heirloom, or otherwise interesting fruit and vegetable seeds. I began to grow all sorts of vegetables — red okra, speckled blue beans, yellow pear tomatoes, tiny eggplants — and to trade seeds with other people around the country. I came to deeply value the things that I was growing and to appreciate the people who had collected them, brought them to this country, and kept them going.

Every year, the Seed Savers Exchange publishes a collection of essays and papers on the seed-savers movement. One morning while flipping through one of these, I was struck (and I mean
struck
as if physically hit) by two photos. One showed a herbarium full of wooden cabinets. It resembled rooms in which I had spent a great deal of time as a child, looking at plant specimens, waiting for my mother to finish working in her lab. The other was a prison photograph of a man's face, intelligent and still defiant but also haunted and doomed. It was Nikolai Vavilov. I read there the story of what had happened to him and how his colleagues had protected his collections during the siege of Leningrad. I knew right then that I would write a book about it.

Although I knew I wanted to write about the siege of Leningrad and had a true story on which to hang my book, the idea marinated in my brain for a long time before I knew who would narrate, what the fictional story would be, why the material resonated for me, and what I wanted to make and say with it. During that time, I did some very conscious thinking and some very direct research, but I was able to find out very little about what happened during the siege. Some of the sketchy accounts I found focused on Vavilov and
presented those who remained at his institute after his imprisonment as bad scientists or as people who had slandered their colleagues during Stalin's purges. Others, focusing more on the siege, portrayed the remaining scientists as great heroes, comparing them to the workers who preserved the artwork in the Hermitage — a better-known story from the siege. I guessed that the truth was much less black and white. Lacking the linguistic and financial resources to interview people in Saint Petersburg, I wrote to a number of people who might know some of the details I sought. None of my letters was answered. At the time, I was frustrated that I couldn't find out more. But as I waited and thought and took notes for the book, the fictional story began to materialize.

Much of the story accrued by accident or — if you believe in design more than I do — serendipitously. One day, I found a visiting friend (whom I guess I wasn't feeding properly) hiding in the pantry eating dried pasta straight from a storage jar. This became an important image in my mind and, eventually, in the book. Another time I picked up a book while waiting for a friend and found myself reading Anna Akhmatova's poems about Leningrad. I went on a trip to Central America and afterward learned that Vavilov and
his associates had traveled not only there but to many of the places I had been in my life, including Mexico, the Southwest, and even my home state of Louisiana.

It was barely comprehensible to me that people could starve to death without eating anything they could get their hands on, so I began to think about a character who was unable to stand it. I imagined a man who was given to strong appetites, a man whose appetites, in combination with circumstances that leave him tragically compromised, exact a heavy price from him.

During the writing of the book, my physical setting seemed to mirror my story in some ways: collapsing and growing colder as I moved from a big house on a large piece of land in southern California to a small house on half an acre in northern California and later to a cramped apartment in the Northeast, where a few potted plants were all that was left of my gardening. Those moves, combined with my memories of more tropical travels, helped me get closer to my narrator than I would have otherwise been able to, helped me develop sympathy for him when my initial opinion of him was closer to disdain. This was an essential development for me to write the book in its final form.

Though I had nowhere to grow them outdoors, I still had many of the rare seeds I'd saved. I began to see the book in them. They inspired me of course, but they also influenced the novel's form — my decision to write a series of fairly short, discrete sections, each capable of expansion but containing the essential germ. It is my hope that the novel's meanings and emotional force accrete from section to section and that the sections interlace and echo so that the book's ultimate statement or identity arises from the whole in such a way that the reader comes to an understanding that is somewhat different from the narrator's conclusions.

 

1. Not long after the siege begins, the scientists at the institute form a pact and agree to preserve the seeds at all costs. What is the narrator's immediate response to this decision? How does this scene foreshadow subsequent events?
   
2. Describe the narrator's relationship with his wife, Alena. What draws them to each other? How does the narrator see himself in comparison to his wife? Do his infidelities belie his claim to love her deeply, or do you believe his devotion to her remains separate from his sexual escapades?
   
3. In the novel, images of the devastation of the hunger winter are offset by equally vivid images of the narrator traveling to exotic locales, collecting specimens, and eating local foods. What insights into appetite and deprivation does the narrator gain from contrasting these experiences?
   
4. Alena is arrested for her role in the campaign to release the great director. What is the reaction of her husband and her colleagues to her decision to sign
   the letter? Given the risks, do you think her act was foolish or futile, or did she achieve something through this act of resistance?
   
5. Throughout the book, the narrator meditates on the nature of courage and cowardice and on the choice of those who survived the siege and those who did not. He says, “The bravery to survive is a ruthless one. Martyrdom leads, by its very definition, only to the cold ground” (page 34). Which do you believe is the braver choice? What do you think you would do in such a situation?
   
6. Several of the book's female characters — Alena, Lidia, Efrosinia, Klavdiya — are strong personalities in their own right. How does the narrator view each of them — with admiration, with contempt? Why? Although these women are quite different from one another, do they have anything in common?
   
7. Babylon is a recurring theme throughout the novel. What do the images of this ancient civilization represent to the narrator? What is the significance of the epigraph by Paul Valéry at the beginning of the book?
   
8. At the end of the book, the narrator catalogs the contents of his pantry, including an unusual keepsake. What is the significance of this eclectic collection? Is his attitude at the end of the book one of regret, acceptance, bitterness, or something else?
   
9. Does the narrator change as a result of his experiences during the siege, or does he emerge much the same as before the war? Do you think suffering is always a wholly negative experience, or do you believe it can ennoble us? Does the reader come to an understanding that is deeper than, or at least different from, the narrator's understanding?
   
10. Discuss the author's choice of narrator. How might the story be different if it were told from the point of view of another character? Which other point of view would you most like to know about?
    

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