|
|
| |
|
| A Conversation with Kalyan Ray about
NO COUNTRY |
| |
How did you come up with the title of your novel? In what way is it central to the theme of the book?
Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium” - which starts with the line: ‘That is no country for old men.’ - is the quintessential poem about crossing over time and space, from the transitory into permanence, from consciousness into contemplation of what is past, passing, or to come. These are the underlying themes of my novel of transitory journeys, and Yeats's poem catches this fundamental idea perfectly.
Your book covers two centuries and three continents. Why did you choose Ireland, India, and New England as the main settings for your novel?
My own life, and the lives of my family members, has been shaped by migrations: uprooted first from the Ganges delta by riots and political upheaval, I escaped alone to Delhi from Calcutta during the Mao-inspired Naxalite killings. I then traveled to America where I was a penniless student with only my meager merit scholarship (and illegal work) to fend off penury and fuel my wanderlust. There, I looked for my kin in the history of immigrants, the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians. NO COUNTRY grew out of all these roots.
Much of the novel is about storytelling. Were you thinking about the art and the history of storytelling across cultures while crafting your own story? Do you see Indians, Irish, and Americans as having different ways of telling a story - or stories having different forms, roles, or purposes in the three cultures?
I was born into a culture of storytelling. Even among unlettered and semi-literate people who came from villages and neighboring states to work in Calcutta, or among the waves of refugees who drifted to Calcutta after traumatic events across the porous eastern border of India, there was a strong tradition of gathering together after the day’s work to tell stories. When I travelled to the US as a wide-eyed scholarship student, I listened to very different anecdotes and stories, and found incredible similarities and variations of the ones I had heard back in India. I became increasingly aware of the nuances and differences of storytelling in the east and west: the lyrics of the blues in America and folksongs of East and West Bengal, for instance. Later in my professional life, I came across amazing strands of stories wherever I went, in Jamaica, Ecuador, Kenya, Thailand, Greece, Argentina. People inherit and live stories, telling them to survive and make sense of themselves.
Your novel has so many wonderful characters. Do you have any favorites, and if so who and why?
I have many favorite characters in NO COUNTRY, but one which is very dear to me is so because she has no words; what obscure part of my subconscious Madgy Finn came out of, I shall never know - or want to dig too deep. Her wordless voice, inhabiting the edge of society and language, is clear to me.
The novel is told in alternating first-person point of view. Was it a difficult transition to make while writing, going from one character’s voice to another when starting a new chapter?
I found that I absolutely needed to take time out, sometimes days, sometimes a few weeks between certain sections, since I needed, like an actor as it were, to get into the next role. Oddly enough, I found writing the women’s voices less difficult, for I found them commanding the emotional direction of the narrative. Some characters, particularly Madgy Finn, wrote themselves into the narrative in ways that I had not consciously anticipated or thought out. I realized that I could never have deliberately planned how she serendipitously re-enters the narrative after Maeve and Brendan have left Ireland, and even in the final moments of Maeve’s tragic life.
What did you do to help yourself get into the mindset of the novel?
Here is one example: I knew I needed to "earn" the Irish voices of the nineteenth century, so for half a year before I wrote the Ireland segment, I read nothing but contemporary Irish pamphlets, numerous letters, stories, and newspapers, including "Freeman's Journal," and “The Nation,” a newspaper started by Daniel O'Connell himself in 1842. It is no coincidence that in NO COUNTRY, the act or reading old found letters plays an important role in the narrative device.
Your novel starts with a small-town murder, but readers don’t find out its significance to the story until the end. Why did you frame the novel this way? What is the inspiration behind the murder?
One fall morning in Manhattan, as I sipped coffee and opened an inner page of The New York Times, I came across the report of a double murder in an obscure Upstate town. As I pondered the strange genesis of the event, I absolutely knew that I had stumbled upon the opening and conclusion of my novel. It was one of those rare inexplicable moments in a writer’s life when everything became clear to me.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a novel about the nature of devotion, religion, and violence; like NO COUNTRY it has three main settings: Somalia, India, and New England. It examines faith and identity, religious authority and nationalism, and how violence is used, increasingly, as a form of political language. |
|
|
| |
| |
| The Indo-American Arts Council is a 501 ©3 not-for-profit secular arts organization passionately dedicated to promoting, showcasing and building an awareness of artists of Indian origin in the performing arts, visual arts, literary arts and folk arts. For information please visit . |
| |
|
