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An interview with Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin
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Note: Novel does not come with reading chair. Source: Amazon.com
Ceridwen Dovey's first novel, Blood Kin, is a fable of the corruptive nature of power written from the perspective of those who perform non-political services for a dictator, and later for his usurper. Written with a precision uncommon to freshman novelists, the book has received glowing reviews from Man Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, and The Times (London). It was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and has been published in thirteen countries.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Dovey when she read with three other acclaimed debut novelists at the Boston Public Library back in June. She graciously agreed to answer a few questions via email. Six weeks of busy schedules, travel, and technical difficulty later, here it is:
Peter Franklin: In your blog post for Penguin, "Superfluous People in the Service of Brute Power," you discussed how Blood Kin examines the culpability of people who perform otherwise innocent services for heinous wrongdoers. What made you decide to take that approach for the novel, rather than focusing on the character of the President?
Ceridwen Dovey: I felt that I already knew what a "president" or "dictator" would think/say/feel - enough writers have tackled that perspective and done it so well that it wasn't really interesting to me to explore it once again (Barnes, Garcia Marquez, wa Thiongo, Vargas Llosa). I was more interested in nuanced and complicated ways of thinking about wrongdoing and evil and abuse and corruption - where we couldn't just blame the mad king but could begin to understand that the mad king is within every one of us - and so I kept being drawn to these characters around a man in power. While I don't think I even thought through this explicitly when I started writing Blood Kin, this interest stems from my own struggles to understand my relationship to South Africa as somebody who grew up there in the 80s as a white girl, too young to really be accountable for what was happening, but I feel that this is too easy and simple as a way out for my generation. I found myself being drawn to thinkers who were grappling with a much broader spectrum of human wrongdoing, in particular the anthropologist Mahmoud Mamdani's three categories of victims, perpetrators and beneficiaries of an abusive political system. It is always the beneficiaries I find myself drawn to, and in particular beneficiaries who are unaware of the very fact that they are beneficiaries of a political regime.
PF: You mentioned at your reading at the Boston Public Library that you envisioned the different voices of the novel comprising a Greek chorus of sorts. Was that your original intention? In other words, did you begin writing these characters with the specific notion of creating this 'chorus', or did it just work itself out that way in the writing process?
CD:That's a great question. It's funny how you can justify any creative decision in retrospect! I don't think I set out with that intention, but I soon realized that I wasn't able to make each voice sound idionsyncratic or original - I didn't have access to accent or dialect or word choice as a tactic to make the voices distinctive because those are all culturally bound markers, and I didn't want there to be any hints of where it was set. I tried to play around with different narrators at different points in writing the novel, but kept coming back to the relentless first person "I" for each voice, because without it, the narrative lost its sense of witnessing. So I stopped fighting the impulse to make them recognizably different, and when I had the whole thing down, the repetitions and the cycles of abuse came to seem meaningful. I only came up with the title of the novel at the very end, and it was my way of trying to signal (or perhaps warn!) anybody who read it that they shouldn't come to it expecting a traditional novel with characterization all worked out, but I hoped instead that they would experience reading the characters as members of a Greek chorus-like set, speaking in unision, echoing one another, with a kind of ripple effect. Whether or not that works, I have no idea!
PF: Similarly, you have described the novel as a fable, void of cultural and geographical markers. I feel that so many writers use vernaculars and cultural allusions to give depth to their characters, while drawing atmosphere and occasionally symbolism from specific settings. Was it difficult to avoid that and still provide humanity and depth while writing Blood Kin?
CD:This decision felt more like necessity than choice at the time when I started writing Blood Kin. I felt then that I had absolutely nothing to say about the places I knew well enough to know their various forms of vernacular. I'd just moved to Cape Town after ten years living outside of South Africa and I just felt paralyzed when I imagined trying to write something set in South Africa - I would have felt like a fraud, and I couldn't find a way to say anything authentic about the country. The novel just sort of came out as a fable, perhaps as a psychological trick I could play on myself so that I felt that less was at stake than if I were trying to write authentically about South Africa. I think I knew from very early on that my characters were never going to be easy to identify with - and as if in compensation, the things I kept wanting to describe in the novel were the rituals that my characters kept performing, over and over, which all happened to be very intimate and haptic processes. Again, I'm not sure this was a conscious decision, but I hope that the language itself and those repetitive descriptions of embodied processes (grooming, cooking, painting etc.) is the way that a reader might connect with those characters.
PF: Blood Kin features a striking attention to the minor details of everyday life, which accumulates gravity as the story unfolds. This is accompanied by an elegant tautness of language. Was Blood Kin the kind of novel which is fleshed out through editing and revision, or was it pared down from its first drafts? Or were there no significant changes made in the process?
CD: It was written chronologically so the structure it ended up with was the structure I started with at the very beginning, and the language was pared down from the start. I was deeply influenced by the work of J.M. Coetzee, and whether consciously or subconsciously, I think I was trying to mimic his style and his absolutely restrained yet precise language.
I was working with my Masters in Creative Writing supervisor, the South African poet Stephen Watson, while I wrote the novel, and we would meet regularly to discuss my progress. He was never didactic in giving me his response to whatever chunk he'd just read, but he would direct me to certain books along the way, and his reading suggestions never failed to be absolutely spot-on in terms of re-directing my attention, or helping me find my way back to a certain character. He also edited it while it was being written, along the way - so by the time I had a full draft, I didn't really go back to make many changes retrospectively.
PF: Are there any authors, living or dead, that have had a major influence on your style? What are a few of your favorite books?
CD: Coetzee (see above), and other South African authors like Damon Galgut and Andre Brink. South African literature - for obvious reasons - has a tendency to be bleak, pared down, bare and I was conscious of that tradition while writing Blood Kin. A few of my favorite books: Wide Sargasso Sea; Dusklands; Villette; A Bend in the River
PF: Going back to the blog post I mentioned before, I thought it was interesting that you used the term "moral fallout." It reminded me of a concept in Confucianism and Taoism, where a ruler's virtue (or lack thereof) diffuses throughout his constituency. Were there any philosophies or ideas like that which informed Blood Kin?
CD: I mentioned above Mamdani's categories, which influenced my thinking. Other thinkers who have written on the concept of evil in very interesting and unusual ways were influential too (Susan Neiman and Hannah Arendt in particular). Ryszard Kapuscinski's interest in "ordinary people in the service of brute power" in his non-fiction book The Emperor has always intrigued me and definitely influenced BK.
PF: Blood Kin has been published to a lot of acclaim in South Africa, England, Australia and the U.S. Can you tell me a little about how your experience publishing and promoting the book changed between these four countries? Did you (or Penguin) initially plan to have it published in the States, or did that only occur after the book's success in South Africa and Australia?
CD: Penguin South Africa bought world rights when they first took on the book, and they sold it very unexpectedly (for everybody involved) in the UK and the US before it had been published in South Africa (to my great surprise and gratitude). I was only lucky enough to find an agent because BK was already being published in those countries. I did almost no promoting of the book in England or Australia, did publicity in South Africa for a couple of weeks when it came out (no readings - mainly magazine interviews), and did a short tour in the US when it came out here in March 2008. I find the publicity stuff very, very difficult to do, and I'm not exactly sure why. I meet so many authors who are unfazed by it, and just see it as part of their job. Compared to many much higher profile authors, the little bits of publicity I did are nothing, and yet I found it very stressful. It feels like such a self-involved, narcissistic process where you have to go around selling yourself alongside your book. Of course I understand that this is what it takes in the current publishing climate, in a market-driven economy, and I accept that good art no longer seems to speak for itself - but sometimes I wish I had the guts to say no to absolutely everything and accept the consequences of that (probably never being published again!). It seems like a cruel thing sometimes to make somebody who likes writing because they're not particularly exhibitionist do a photo shoot and get them all dressed up and made up and expect them not to be dying of embarrassment and awkwardness. But that's how things are, I suppose...
PF: How has the experience of publishing Blood Kin, and perhaps the aftermath (book tours, reviews, etc.), compared to your initial expectations for writing and publishing your first novel? I find that so many first-time authors have almost a fantasy of how it will be, and often that leads to a serious change in expectation at best, or total disillusionment at worst.
CD: Due to the weird way I got published (as I explained above), I had absolutely no expectations of how it all worked, and I was surprised at every step of the way. I honestly did not expect to publish the novel anywhere at all, and then I only expected it to be published in South Africa, and the rest all happened completely by chance. I feel like I was completely unprepared for what it entailed (from the blurbing process before the book comes out to the publicity stuff you're expected to do afterwards), but in a naive kind of way. The learning curve has been incredibly steep as a result, and it has been fascinating anthropologically to understand how this whole process fits together, but I wouldn't say I feel disillusioned because I had no illusions to start with: I had never ever thought about what publishing a novel would be like. I was very much in "gratitude" mode throughout, just feeling so grateful to everybody involved, that I don't think I thought critically about some of the parts of the process the way I would the second time around. I think I'm still keeping the whole "author" identity very much at arm's length, probably as a kind of survival mechanism, and so I haven't felt deeply invested in the whole process - of course, that makes it easier to protect myself from getting hurt, and perhaps that's the wrong way to experience it all.
PF: You mentioned in the guest blog for Penguin how much you love libraries. Where are some of your favorite libraries?
CD: My university libraries past and current (Widener Library at Harvard and Bobst Library at NYU); and Stanton Library near my parents' flat in Sydney. I had never seen stacks before I got to Harvard, and was initially completely intimidated by them, but then I got a job as a research assistant my freshman year and once I'd gotten over my fear of the stacks, I fell in love with them completely! Stanton Library is much smaller, and I love it because it's a local library, and it's where we always go to get bags and bags of books before our family Christmas holidays at the beach.
PF: And lastly, the obligatory final question: What's next? I got the impression when you spoke in Boston that getting the second novel done and published might be more difficult than with the first. What hurdles are you encountering?
CD: I'm working on a new novel and it's been a lot of fun. I've been working on this now for a long time and I'm still not quite sure what it's going to turn out to be, but I'm trying something quite different from Blood Kin, and that feels liberating. It has also been liberating to walk away from a couple of projects that I was quite far along with before I realized they were not working because it reassures me that my internal critic is very much alive and kicking. I've heard that publishing your second novel is harder than publishing your first for all sorts of reasons, but it's not something you can really think about while you're working. I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon, so I feel like I will keep writing while it's interesting to me and just see where that goes.
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