Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday October 1, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Mislaid by Nell Zink

Virginia Tidewater Region

Biography of Nell Zink (cribbed wholesale from Wikipedia)

Nell Zink  was born in 1964 in California and raised in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A. in Philosophy. In 1993, while living in West Philadelphia, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997 and "featured submissions and interviews with punk musicians about their pets, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp writing about his rabbit Beaton Bunnerius Bun, to Jon Langford, of British punk band The Mekons, discussing his loach fish." Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive, and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. Zink moved to Germany in May 2000, eventually earning a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen. She worked as a contributor for the daily newspaper in Tübingen, Schwäbisches Tagblatt, and later as a translator for Zeitenspiegel agency.

Zink has been married twice. On May 8, 1990, she married Benjamin Alexander Burck in a "very simple civil ceremony" at the Henrico County Courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. She later married the Israeli composer and poet Zohar Eitan.

After fifteen years spent writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen with a "brazen" letter promoting the work of the German ornithologist Martin Schneider-Jacoby. The two writers began a correspondence, and Franzen was surprised to learn that Zink had no published literary work. Zink began to create work for Franzen.

In early 2012, Zink sent Franzen her collected manuscripts. Franzen tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers in her work. It was Franzen's agent who finally negotiated a six-figure publishing deal for Zink's Mislaid. Meanwhile, The Wallcreeper, "about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists" (Keith Gessen), was published independently in the United States in 2014. Her third novel, Nicotine, is due out next month.

In the video below, Nell Zink discusses The Wallcreeper and Mislaid for a French television program. The interview is in English.

Only Tangentially Related

While researching material related to Mislaid for this blog, I heard Nell Zink say she grew up in "Tidewater Virginia." Apparently, this is not a town, but a region (which also includes parts of Maryland and North Carolina). My search also turned up this video of a sales pitch from an older Virginia gentleman, which is highlighted as an example of the Virginia Tidewater accent. I recognize this accent from my high school Home-Ec teacher, who was from Virginia. Note only that the accent is "non-rhotic," which means that r's are pronounced before but not after vowels, as is common for most southern accents, but "ou" is pronounced as "oo" as in some Canadian accents. This is what I remember as being most distinctive about my teacher's accent. Apparently, this accent is dying out. Embedding has been disabled for this video, so you'll have to click on the link if you're curious. Please note that this video is used simply as an example of the Virginia Tidewater accent, and no endorsement of buying swampland is implied.

Book Discussion, Saturday, September 10, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Meet the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. His family moved to England in 1960 when his father was invited to be a research fellow at the National Institute of Oceanography. This assignment was only supposed to be for a couple of years but kept getting extended, and Ishiguro didn't return to Japan at all until 30 years later. He attended a grammar school for boys in Surrey, the University of Kent in Canterbury, and a postgraduate creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. While attending university, Ishiguro worked as a social worker in Glasgow, and then after graduating in London. He is married to a social worker, Lorna, and they have a daughter, Naomi.

In 1982, after publication of his first novel, A Pale View of  Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro was named one of the "20 Best of Young British Writers" by Granta. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction four times, and his third novel, The Remains of the Day, won that prize for 1989. The Readers Roundtable has featured two of Ishiguro's books, The Remains of the Day in 1997, the second book ever read by the Readers Roundtable, and Never Let Me Go in 2007, one of the first books I read after joining the group. Both of these novels were made into movies.

In a conversation on a talk show from Toronto, Kazuo Ishiguro talks about his latest novel, The Buried Giant, his first novel in ten years.



Part 2 of this interview is also available on YouTube, as is a video interview conducted by The Wall Street Journal. If you have time, follow the links for more info. Of particular interest, in the WSJ interview, Ishiguro talks about the spare English dialect that he came up with for the characters in The Buried Giant.

Themes and Questions

I was going to do a lot of research about the post-Arthurian setting of the novel, as well as the themes and questions raised in The Buried Giant, but the more I read the more questions I had, so I'm just going to highlight some of the major topics we might want to talk about.

Memory and Forgetting

Modern research has indicated that forgetting is a necessary part of remembering, getting rid of conflicting memories in order to organize old memories and form new ones.  It is even suggested that you can intentionally dump unhappy memories. But should you? How can you dump unhappy memories without destroying associated good memories? How can you learn from your mistakes if you're always erasing them from memory?

How does this work in a marriage or a family? Among your family and friends, do you ever find yourself saying, like Beatrice, "If that's how you've remembered it, (insert name), let it be the way it was." How does it work in a community? Are the residents of Axl and Beatrice's community really forgetful, or do they just have different memory priorities than Axl and Beatrice? Is it possible that humans have done things so horrible that even God wants to forget about them?

What does Querig, the dragon, represent? By the end of the book, do you believe that it was the mist from her that was really causing the widespread forgetfulness? Who wanted to kill her and who wanted to keep her alive and why? Do you find the use of mythical creatures as an explanation for real-world phenomena jarring or does it fit in with the spirit of the age it represents?

The Legend of King Arthur

The first thing you find out when researching "the real King Arthur," is that there very likely was no such person. No mention of him is found in any historical chronicle until a single line in a history from 830 A.D. The legend doesn't appear in anything resembling its current form until 200 years after that, and it has been told and retold and reworked constantly from that time, its form depending on the sensibilities of the people doing the retelling. In some of the Arthur stories, Sir Gawain appears as the oldest male relative (nephew) of Arthur and therefore his heir-apparent. What is Sir Gawain heir to in The Buried Giant? How well does he uphold the tradition of Camelot?

The story of King Arthur's court, as it first appears in the middle ages, has become a story of distinctly medieval character and contains many anachronisms, in particular the code of chivalry, which didn't exist in the time that the story of Arthur purports to represent. By the time the tradition reached the current era, though, a medieval person would have a hard time recognizing their own era as it had been transformed through the retelling over the ages. In a BBC series available on YouTube, Terry Jones of Monty Python, a Medieval History major at Oxford before his Python incarnation, explains what are the myths about the middle ages and what is the historical reality.

Critical Opinions

I don't read reviews of books until after I've finished the book, in order to avoid spoilers, so if you feel the same way, avoid reading these until after you've finished The Buried Giant.

Loved it: Tom Holland, a historian, writing in The Guardian.

Admired it Greatly but Didn't Love it: Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman in The New York Times.

Thought It a Failure: Book critic James Wood at The New Yorker.