Saturday, October 5, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Public Library

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

The title is taken from a short story by Honoré de Balzac, "Une passion dans le désert". The relevant excerpt is quoted at the beginning of the book and roughly translated means, "In the desert, you see, there is everything, and there is nothing ... It is God without men."

 

About the Author

Hari Kunzru was born in England in 1969 and grew up there, the child of an Indian father and a British mother. In an interview with Granta, he tells of having had fantasies as a child of being abducted by a UFO. He earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Wadham College, Oxford, and an MA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Before being a published novelist he worked as a travel writer, television presenter, and music editor at a magazine. He has published three other novels, The Impressionist (2003), Transmission (2004), and My Revolutions (2007), and a collection of short stories, Noise (2005). In 2003, he was award the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, but he turned it down because one of the sponsors was the Mail on Sunday, a paper with a notorious anti-immigrant editorial position. He has been active in the cause of free speech, including reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses aloud at a literary festival in Jaipur, India, in 2012. In the YouTube clip below, he talks about his position on free speech and reads aloud a poem, "The Love that Dares Speak Its Name," which was banned in England in the 1970s on grounds of blasphemy. You may not want to watch if you are offended by homoeroticism or blasphemy.

Background for Gods Without Men

The Mojave Desert

In an interview in the Paris Review, Kunzru tells of how he first traveled to the Mojave after being trapped in Los Angeles after 9/11 and needing to get out of the city to clear his head.

Rock formation near Hole-in-the-Wall campground in the East Mojave; my husband and I camped near here in 1989.

 

The Pinnacles

The pinnacles of the book were probably based on the Trona Pinnacles, but in looking at pictures of them, I could not find a particular group that looked like three fingers.

There apparently was a real "Schmidt," though I seem to recall that his name was not Schmidt, who set up a radio transmitter near the pinnacles in order to contact extraterrestrial life, but I can't link to the article that mentions that, because I forgot to bookmark it and now I can't find it.

Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés

Francisco Garcés, as the author acknowledges, was a real person, though his presence in the novel is highly fictionalized. Here is a link to his page as a "saint of the day" at AmericanCatholic.org, and here is a picture of his historical marker in Winterhaven, Imperial County.

 

The Ashtar Galactic Command

There was, and still is, an Ashtar Galactic Command. You can visit their webpage here. I couldn't find any record album by them, but I did find out that in 1977, someone claiming to be the Ashtar Galactic Command broke into a British television broadcast to deliver a message to Earth.

The Marfa Lights

In the acknowledgements in the back of the book, Kunzru says the book was written, in part in Marfa, Texas, and in the Granta interview linked to above, he says, "I’ve never seen a UFO myself but the closest experience I’ve had is something called the Marfa Lights in Texas. It’s a paranormal phenomenon in which a fluctuating number of twinkling lights appear to be levitating over the desert night sky. Though the number varies it’s otherwise a fairly regular occurrence. No one can explain it. It’s a reliable fast-food-like UFO experience, if you’re looking to have one."

 

The Madeleine McCann Story

In the Granta interview, the interviewer references the media frenzy, as it is portrayed in the book, surrounding the disappearance of Raj as being reminiscent of the events and subsequent media circus surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. This was the case of a 3-year-old from the UK who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal in 2007. You can read about it in particular detail on Wikipedia, including the widespread vilification of the family by the tabloid media and the sighting of a possible abductor carrying the child in his arms.

Simulated Iraqi and Afghan Villages in the Mojave

The account of ersatz Iraqi villages in the Mojave desert is based on fact. These training villages are located at Fort Irwin.

For extra credit: Baghdad Cafe

This was one of my favorite movies from the 1980s. It is set in the Mojave, and it begins with a vision in the desert. I am embedding the theme song clip below. You can see the entire 1 hour and 28 minutes on YouTube.