Klara and the Sun, and Piranesi; Two Elegant New Stories

I’ve just read two books, recently released in beautifully tooled hardback. As I was reading them, I’d close them momentarily to gaze on their covers, which become meditative if you let them. The first, Clara and the Sun, is from my all-time favourite author, Nobel Laureate, Zazuo Ishiguro…his ninth book.  The other, Piranesi, is only the second novel of an increasing favourite of mine, Susanna Clarke, author of the amazing  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Clarke’s story, Piranesi, is a fantasy set in an alternative universe. Ishiguro’s story is almost sci-fi, set in the near-future. Yet, something  links these books, unalike though they are. The narrators express themselves with an almost stilted, careful politeness and are both concerned to a high degree with loneliness, and what they can remember. 

Although they were only born a few years apart, Clarke and Ishiguro have very different stories. Ishiguro came to England from Japan when he was five. His mother had been in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped, and was very slightly injured. His father, oceanographer, brought his family to the UK for work.

After university, Clarke worked in publishing, especially editing cookery books, while  she secretly began her first novel in her spare time. “I had a kind of waking dream,” she says, “about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some sort of magical background – he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong.’ She sold the unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury in early 2003, after two publishers rejected it as unmarketable. Bloomsbury were so sure the novel would be a success that they offered Clarke a £1 million advance. After promoting her book, she fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, and it’s taken her a long time to write a second. And, even though Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel was a huge success, Clarke has not yet fully been given her due, unlike Ishiguro.

Very early on, it because clear that Ishiguro would be a writer. In primary school he recalls creating…a character called Mr. Senior, which was the name of my friend’s scoutmaster. I thought this was a really cool name for a spy. I got into Sherlock Holmes around then in a big way. I’d do a pastiche of a Victorian detective story that began with a client arriving and telling a long story. But a lot of the energy went into decorating our books to look exactly like the paperbacks we saw in the shops—drawing bullet holes on the front and putting quotations from newspapers on the back; “Brilliant, chilling tension.” —Daily Mirror.

 As a teenager, Ishiguro describes himself as a… “guitar-playing hippie.” After finishing his degree, he worked with homeless people in London, until…”almost by accident, I came across a little advertisement for a creative-writing M.A. taught by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Today it’s a famous course, but in those days it was a laughable idea, alarmingly American.” Out of that MA came his first book, A View of Pale Hills, set in Nagasaki. 

copyright Andrew Testa

“I tend to write the same book over and over,” Ishiguro admitted in a 2015 interview with the Guardian. On most fronts, his books couldn’t be more different. But there are themes he returns to time and again…how we witness things…perceive things…and how this affects our memory. And then there is this somewhat formal and stilted narrating voice that most of his characters have.  For all this to work, he employs ‘unreliable narrators’. 

In his second book, Artist in a Floating World, Masuji Ono used to be a respected artist but now the 2ndWW is over, he recalls his past subjectively, ignoring the grim reckoning that has followed the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Ono’s guilty secrets centre on guilt, and they come to haunt him as he tries to marry off his daughter.

The Remains of the Day (1989) won the Booker Prize and is a glorious film. Lord Darlington’s butler, Stevens, has given his life for ‘the house’, without ever realising…or admitting…two things – that the housekeeper is in love with him, and that he’s been in service to a Nazi sympathizer.

My own early favourite The Unconsoled, baffled some critics who savaged it, but others right described it as ‘a masterpiece’. Written almost in stream of consciouness, it’s the story of a concert pianist who arrives in a foreign city not knowing where he is or what he’s supposed to be doing.

In Never Let Me Go (2005)  the narrator is a clone who grows up in a children’s home for clones whose organs will be harvested one day. It’s never clear at what point our narrator realises what her fate is, but she is the most delightful of companions as she unfolds her terrifying story.

Maybe Ishiguro’s seventh novel, The Buried Giant won him his Nobel Prize; it’s a very great book, which I talk about in more detail here.

Finally, we have Klara and the Sun. This elegant, eloquent and intricately controlled novel explores what it means to be an Artificial Friend  – a humanoid machine bought by parents to provide companionship for their teenage children, who, having been genetically manipulated, or ‘lifted’ to gain higher intelligence, are lonely home-schoolers who need a friend. Klara is chosen by Josie, who responded badly to being ‘lifted’ and is often seriously ill with something that may kill her as it killed her sister. As before, Ishiguro seeds in hints and clues about the shape of this futuristic world, allowing us to do most of the imagining ourselves. Klara takes it for granted that we’ll understand the odd pixilation she experiences with sight, and the fact she can’t smell…and the fact that some people describe her as no better than a vacuum cleaner. Klara is programmed to want to help, and unlike other AIs in fiction, who rebel, her willingness to help humans is misused in chilling ways. 

The New York Times says…I found myself thinking of Thomas Hardy, the way Hardy’s novels, at the end of the 19th century, captured the growing schism between the natural world and the industrialized one. There is no doubt that Ishiguro’s novels will become the sort of classics that Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure have become.

Will Clarke follow those footsteps and continue to bring us remarkable novels with remarkable stories? I've written about the amazing  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell here. And now we have Piranesi, in which the narrator can’t recall his original name. Devoid of reliable memories, he lives in a strange, ocean-washed (and occasionally drowned) stone-built land which consists of miles of empty halls and courtyards. In his journal he writes about a vast array of statuary in the halls, and the fifteen other people who have lived in this world, all of them now reduced to their bones, except his one so-called friend, ‘the Other’, who only visits for an hour twice a week, but brings him surprising gifts such as new shoes and plastic bowls and is the person who has named him 'Piranesi'. This is not a fond naming; Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born in Venice is 1720  and became a classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings

Work by Piranesi

of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons". So I will call him what he calls himself... The Child of the House He loves his world, and, unlike Klara’s teenaged friend, does not feel at all lonely. In fact, when someone new infiltrates this world, he’s terrified, especially as the Other warns him that this interloper will only bring madness. 

I’m going to stop there, before I reveal all the twists and turns of the story. To find out what happens to this Child of the House, and where is is he lives, and how these others are getting into it, you'll have to read this beautiful book. 

 “Some ideas go into your mind and become part of the furniture,” Clarke says. “Piranesi’s favourite statue is of a faun in the pose of Mr Tumnus. There’s so much of Piranesi in that story that I must have subconsciously remembered …Anyone who’s read Narnia as a child, for whom it is a formative book, constantly is aware that they have that desire – one day, there will be the wardrobe. Something that will take you there. It’s a very old longing in me.”

Piranesi is published by Bloomsbury

Klara and the Sun is published by Faber & Faber 

A Catch-up of Fiction Today. 7 novels that novelist can learn from.

 

I was really lucky; my final proof reading of the new Shaman Mystery was last month. As this fourth book about the incorrigible Sabbie Dare is set in February, I was able to soak up all those drear February experiences – the perpetual rain, the sudden moments of sun, the deep frosts, the dark evenings. 

Through the Floodgate opens in early December 2014, when across the the Southwest, dramatic storms began. On the Somerset Levels, where Sabbie Dare lives, floods were threatening to yet again wreck farmland and villages. The first chapter shows the secret meeting between two feuding farmers, the torrential rain not able to dampen their anger and hate. 

When Sabbie picks up the story, at the end of January,  the floods are beginning to recede. A car is revealed beneath the floodwaters in a Somerset valley...Harper's Coombe.  Many vehicles were 'drowned' in the 2014 Somerset floods, but this one contained a dark secret. A man, dead before the floods overcame his car. And lying next to him, a shotgun.

    It seemed the saddest occurrence of the all the sadness of the devastation. According to bulletins, he was named as John Spicer. He had parked miles from his prosperous farm and big family, and shot himself in the head. 

    He must have chosen it as a quiet spot and driven there through the rain, too wrecked in his life to want to go on with it. He’d stuck a shotgun in his mouth. Not a cry for help – he knew he would die. Then, as the waters rose, he floated inside his car, like spacemen float around their cabin, alone, undiscovered, the murky waters covering him as if he was a burial at sea, the car a coffin. 

 Sabbie is thinking about John Spicer because she's at the funeral of a childhood friend. Kerry, who she knew as a child when she lived at the Willows Children's Home, had thrown herself from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

 In this latest episode in Sabbie's life, I will explore the darkness that surrounds suicide, the darkness that pervades sexual abuse, and the way natural catastrophes can wreak havoc on the farming community.

But writing should never stop you reading, in fact, it is the most important and useful method of developing as a writer. I'm going to look at seven books I've read since the pandemic has locked us down at home. All of them are very different, but they have all helped me write and rewrite.  Because the shops are shut, they came into my possession in a variety of ways; I collected an armful from charity shops, and a pile from the library before it closed. I filched a couple from a 'free books' shelf outside my village hall, people have kindly given me books, and I ordered one from the net. This was a motley collection and the reading generated a diversity of reactions from me. Here are seven, in order from most disliked to most loved. 

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

Jim Crace  is known for slightly off-beam...okay, slightly weird stories. His Harvest is a favourite of mine, a gripping tale set in a quasi-medieval village. But Being Dead left me as cold as the two main characters, who are dead within a page or two of the opening. We watch them decompose, after an opportunist thief kills them to steal the little they have brought with them to make love in the dunes beside the beach they met on, thirty-odd years ago. They are not all that likeable, in life or death, and I might have given up   entirely, had it not be

The Lonely by Andrew Michael Hurley

Atmospheric and brilliantly described, the landscape of this book supports a slow-burning story that takes you into dark places. Two brothers, one almost fully responsible for the other, discover that the grown-up world they are both almost part of is bleaker and more disturbing than they could have imaginined. I do feel that the story would have told better if we'd moved between the present day (where they're older and wiser) and the past; the visit to The Lonely to heal Andrew, the older brother.

Akin,  by Emma Donaghue 

I’d been gifted the very beautiful hardback copy of this book, with its slightly Art Deco cover depicting Nice on the Cote D’Azure. I’ve already read two books by Donaghue; Room, and The Wonder. These two books are as different as a pea is to a pod, and I was not disappointed to discover that everything about Akin is different to those earlier novels.

I was drawn to the book because I know Nice well, I have family just along the coast, but it was the moment I read the blurb on the flyleaf that I knew I would not be able to put this book down. Who could resist this; A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

As you leaf through the frontispieces, towards the first chapter, you come across the dictionary definition of ‘akin’, and also several very grainy black-and-white snapshot pictures. A grand Nice building, a strange symbol, a couple on a park bench, snapped from behind. What these mean is revealed steadily as you read into the book.

Noah Sevaggio is eighty next week. He’s never been back to the city where he was born, and in the past few years he’s lost his entire family; his brilliant wife, Joan, his sister and brother-in-law and even their son, Victor, who died of a drug overdose in his twenties. Eleven-year-old Michael is Victor’s son, and has been living with his granny since his mother, Amber, was thrown into jail for selling drugs. Now Granny has died and Michael has no-one.

Of course Noah is talked into taking on this child. Michael is savvy and streetwise and battered by a young life of hardcore experience, deprived of almost everything Noah would hold as needful for an upbringing. He’s full of suppressed anger and blatant cheek, with a mouth chocked with swearwords Noah didn’t know even existed. He’s had little education, but he’s smart. Noah trails him around Nice, so that we can also enjoy getting immersed in its seascape, its sounds and landmarks, its smells and tases. They are searching out the past of Noah’s mother’s final years in the city, after she’d packed Noah and his father off to the US.They use the grainy photos he’d found in her effects and Micheal becomes as keen on the quest as his great-uncle. 

‘All Noah was attempting to do was fill a gap, throw his ungainly self down so the kid could ross over this abyss. Weren’t all of us bridges for each other one way or another?…And then it struck him that it was really the other way around. This boy was saving Noah. Rescuing him from the trap of habit, the bleak tedium of counting sown the year of his retirement. Michael was the little ark, crazily bobbing, in which one lucky old man could go voyaging. 

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood  

The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up. I imagined it would be about a twelve-year-old boy's assent into manhood, where he learns the facts of growing up by taking a trip with his estranged father. ‘I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share.’ That might have been clue enough that things were going to take a dreadful turn. Wood  breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… with the words; As we drove off, [Mum] was smiling at herself, a limp hand spread across her heart. It was the last I ever saw of her. What’s the writer doing? I had to ask. This is a dangerous tactic, only to be used when you’re hugely confident it’s the right approach. By the time I was a third into the novel, I could see his rational. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability. They’re heading towards the Lake District, but as the story moves through this beautiful landscape, it becomes a place of blood and terror, it’s beauty is replaced by a ragged, tattered, chaotic, menace. The seedy pub, the rusty gates, the cluttered interior of the Volvo’s boot. No one is going to fully survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands. 

The Beekeeper of Alepo by  Christy Lefteri 

Lefteri, herself a child of Cypriot refugees, volunteered in a Greek refugee centre during the Syrian crisis, then came home to London and wrote this book. Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his wife Afra, an artist blinded when their small son is killed as a bomb lands in their back garden take a hazardous route across Turkey and Greece to find safety in the U.K. The novel moves betweenether this journey that starting in Aleppo in 2015 and the other from England the following year, where they are applying for asylum. Nuri and Afra manage to escape their shattered hometown, but they bring with them memories that haunt them. Nuri thinks, as they travel, wait and apply, that it's his wife who is the broken one of the two. He has no idea that he is suffering silently from PTS. 'You are lost in the darkness,' Afra says to Nuri. He still has his love of beekeeping and Afra still has a gift for art, and we get deep into their thoughts, indeed their souls, helping readers to understand experiences they will luckily never have. 

The Past by Tessa Hadley   

I love Hadley's writing, and so I should as she was one of my mentors on the MA in creative  writing at Bath Spa University. Each of her novels allows for a steady and subtle exploration of very ordinary people…albeit mostly middle class ordinary people…who hardly know, at the start of the stories, what hidden depths they actually possess. In The Past, a family of four siblings arrive at their dilapidated family home, to talk about selling it.  There’s a lot of them in this former rectory, but they squeeze in and proceed to do anything but talk about selling the house. The teenagers make love, the unwelcome new in-law makes a friend of one of the three sisters. Another sister tries to face up to what she thinks is her failed life and the third has no idea what her two children are up to…they have found a dead dog in a ruined cottage…and they know who it once belonged to. As we move towards the climax, there is attempted suicide by a deep river and a devastating fire. Nobody dies, but as the past is revived, everyone changes.                

The Little Red Books by Edna O'Brien.
This book has been feted by the literati and reviewers world wide, and rightly too. It has a mythical feel from the start, but is overlaid with comedy, tragedy, horror, history and realism. It has a wide panorama which starts in a tiny village in Ireland Cloonoila, , with its priest, its nuns, its housewives and its gossipy pub and posh hotel. But it spreads out, to Bosnia, London and finally to the Haig, where the Bosnian war criminal, Dr. Vladimir Dragan, based on Radovan Karadžić. It has wide-ranging themes, but the most clearly portrayed is that of exile; immigration and asylum, focusing first on the workers at the posh hotel, one of whom, soon recognise Dr Vlad and is terrified. Through the story walks Fidelma, the draper's wife, who falls badly for the sexy Vlad, and hopes he will give her the child she's failed to have with her weary husband. She get pregnant, Vlad gets arrested, she gets bloodily attacked by his Serbian followers. Some of this book is shockingly hard to read, and it's as though, at eight-five, O'Brien has decided to pull out all the stops, employing many styles of writing and many structures of plotting. The book is full of interiors, with a lot of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, as well as a lot of pulling-back from close narrative perspectives, so that we feel as if we are soaring over countries to see violence, disregard, and strong ethical actions in equal measure across Europe. This is a must-read for anyone who loves books that really want to tell you something about our world, and are not afraid to do so.   

Trail-blazing Teen Writers – "How They Got Published – Stories of Writing Success",

 Trail-blazing Teen Writers. 

In this occasional series, "How They Got Published  – Stories of Writing Success", we look at how writers got their very first contract; the story of how that happened and how they are so very willing to share their advice with other hopeful writers. 

This time we look at some writers of Young Adult fiction; a popular genre both to write in, and be read in. Teens are not the only readers of YA fiction; adults love it too and due to its popularity, the publishing houses also are on the hunt for good teen fiction. Here are four writers who 'made it' with their very first novel.

Sue Lynn Tan was born in Malaysia, studied in London and France, and currently lives in Hong Kong with her family. Her first book, published in 2022, Daughter of the Moon Goddess has been described as a ‘epic, romantic — an all-consuming work of literary fantasy, with a perilous quest, legendary creatures and vicious enemies, and a moment where the protagonist, Xingyinm, must make a vital decision between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos.

Tan’s fantasy world is rooted in a non-western canon using the myth of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess, who was married to Houyi, the archer who shot the nine suns. Houyi was gifted an elixir of immortality but did not drink it, as he did not want to be parted from his wife. Yet Chang’e drank it instead, becoming immortal and flying to the moon. Here, she takes to Utopia State of Mind about the aspirations she gained from the myth and how she transformed it into a YA novel, her thoughts on the characters, and the editing she undertook.

‘While researching the legend, I was struck by its variations: Was Chang’e originally an immortal or mortal? Did she drink the elixir to save the people from a tyrannical Houyi, or to save it from thieves, or did she want to become a goddess? And in the end, did she reunite with her husband or live out her eternal years in solitude on the moon? Perhaps the variations morphed to portray Chang’e in a different light, though we will never know the answer. What is certain is that she is a much-loved figure, and one that I adore myself. I studied the different variations of the legend of Chang’e and Houyi, though I could not include them all in the story. I also researched archery – the materials of ancient bows, an archer’s posture, the sound the arrows made as they sliced through the air. I especially loved researching Chinese dragons which are quite different from their Western counterparts: though equally as powerful, they are typically wingless, creatures of water, benevolent and kind.

‘I love Xingyin’s resilience and hope. When she faces devastation and disappointment, she does despair like anyone might, but does not yield to it. Yet her nature can be reckless and impatient, particularly for things she finds hard or which she is eager for. Xingyin is a skilled archer with strong magic, but of equal importance is her intelligence and emotional depth—her ability to empathize with her enemies, even those she despises, to try to understand their motivations.

‘Xingyin’s love for her mother is the driving force behind her ambition to return home, and free her. Their bond is especially close because the moon is a solitary place, and they only have each other for company, along with a single attendant. It is not always a smooth relationship for Chang’e is dealing with heartbreak from her separation from her husband, and there are things that she is reluctant to share. Yet Xingyin is empathic and compassionate, and considerate of her mother’s feelings.

‘I tend to find drafting more challenging than editing—figuring out the story at the same time as developing the characters, although it is also the most exciting stage. For me, it is a slower process, with a lot of back and forth. I enjoy editing, refining the story and thinking about how it can be made better, although it depends on the deadline as well.’  (Utopia State of Mind 2022)

Before Luke Palmer began his debut YA novel, Grow, he wrote poetry; a debut pamphlet of poems, Spring in the Hospital, won the Prole Pamphlet contest in 2018. Grow (2021), which has been studied throughout this pathway, is published Firefly Press. Grow has strong themes of racism, terrorism, rape, grief and loss, and cultural coercion:  Josh is struggling to cope with his father's recent death at the hands of terrorists when he becomes attracted to a white supremacist group which tightens its hold over him. But Palmer counteracts this by offing moments of respite for the protagonist, when he  becomes involved in some ‘gorilla gardening’ with a school mate.  The introduction to this landscape coincides with Josh waking with the dawn, face down on the ground, after taking a beating the night before:

        ‘’The blackbird turns its head, flied off. I watch it as it comes to rest on a stone wall about five metres in front of me. Patches of moss, cascades of great leaves with purple flowers cover most of the wall’s significant height. I realise there are walls on three sides of me and, with the wooden boarding at my back, I’d say I was lying in a pretty even-sided square.                                           The blackbird trills on, and above its head a scurry of wings brings two more birds into view. I don’t know what these birds are, but when they move they look like pale blue streaks. One of them arches its flight to land on the branches of a small tree in the corner of the square. When it lands, I see its chest is yellow against the bush’s purple spears of flowers. I force myself up, every joint in my body complaining.'   (Pg 43)

Palmer talks here about the trigger for this story:

‘A few years ago, I was sitting in a room full of teaching colleagues attending a compulsory Prevent strategy training session. A general murmur of dissent went through the room at another case study of radicalisation of a young Muslim student in a school hundreds of miles away. This school’s percentage of non-white students was well below 10%. There had never been a Muslim student on roll. Radicalisation was Someone Else’s Problem.

The next case study involved a young white male. Teachers in his school had grown concerned after he voiced several right-wing opinions in his lessons. Following an investigation, a number of bomb-making materials were found in his bedroom along with plans to attack a nearby mosque. The earlier murmur of dissent turned to one of realisation – radicalisation wasn’t just one way. We’d all been having more and more frequent conversations with students around the increasingly polarised sides of the Brexit debate, and the rising tide of nationalism. Pupils were getting angry – the kind of anger that bubbles up when young people are engaging in vital but un-nameable conflicts with aspects of themselves; aspects that cut straight to the heart of identity and selfhood. All around me, names of certain students started to circulate, and questions were asked about how to challenge radical and pervasive viewpoints, and to address this anger in the classroom. This is where the book that became Grow first started.

I wanted to write a book which addressed that anger; that explored the difficulties of coming of age against a backdrop of increasing animosity and xenophobia towards elements of our society, of toxic ideologies that try to breed and harness that anger, and of competing models of how to be a good citizen. I wanted its central character to be pulled by the extreme ends of this spectrum, enticed and revolted by them in equal measure. I wanted him, above all, to suffer through his anger in the way one suffers through grief. But I also wanted him to come out the other side wiser, more aware.

And I wanted to write a book that was believable, now. A book about multiculturalism that rings true for the many people who don’t experience it on a daily basis except mediated through their computer or phone screens. People in a society where suspected far right radicalisation now outweighs any other referral to agencies involved with the Prevent strategy. Perhaps those two things are connected.

But most of all I wanted to write a book about growing up, about changing, about becoming the person you want to become, about relationships with mothers, fathers and friends. I wanted to write a book about connections, that might speak beyond its immediate context to the core of that anger; the need to be understood.

The book that I wrote is Grow. The wonderful team at Firefly Press have helped me to bring this important story into the world, and for that I’m eternally grateful.’     (Palmer 2021)

Tomi Adeyemi is a Nigerian-American novelist known for her novel Children of Blood and Bone (2018). the first in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy. It won the 2018 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and went on to win the 2019 Waterstones Book Prize. She is also now a creative writing coach, and was one of Time’s “Pioneers" 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Here, she talks about her love of YA fiction, and offers some advice to students of the form.

’It was painfully clear what writing is for me and what it's always been for me, which is just my lifeboat, It's this outlet for me and this sort of companion through this really insane process of being alive.

I think why YA speaks to all of us is not just because it's so emotionally intense and usually more plot driven because it has to be,” she says. “We're not separated from who we were growing up.

Focus on cultivating your ‘inner world’ of creativity before worrying about what the world thinks of your work. Dive into yourself and put what’s on your mind on the page. If you solidify that inner world that you dive into for that creativity and for that process and for what it does for you — something that you have 24/7 access to right now, that you don't need an agent or a publisher to give you — that's all you need. The other stuff can come.’     (Mosely & Hagan, 2021)

Angie Thomas is still perhaps best known for her very first book; The Hate U Give (2017), is told entirely in a single first person POV, using the present tense, and yet its thematic depth is constantly engaging – and terrifying. Here she talks about her early misgivings, and wondering if her writing would matter:

‘I think at the time it was just, I'm just going to have the audacity to write these books about young people who look like me and neighborhoods like mine. And if I just have to sell them out the back of my truck, then that's what I'm going to do. It's important for white kids to read about Black kids and read about the different kinds of Black kids. But on the other hand, we have this whole idea that anything done by a Black author or a marginalized author has to be excellent when we should be able to do a range of kinds of books. We shouldn't have to hit a certain level to be able to get a seat at the table.

I once had a white parent come up to me at an event and she was like, ‘I don't know if my 14 year old is ready to read ‘The Hate U Give.’ And I said ‘Well, could you tell that to the Black parent who was having a conversation with their 9 year old about what to do if they're stopped by a cop?’    (Giorgis, 2019)

You might like to research new YA authors you’ve discovered and loved reading. Your first stop is the internet, especially author blogs, YouTube and publishing websites. You might also find your author speaks directly to their readership at the back of their novels, and in magazines/journals that focus on literature or writing.

To read more 'how the got published' blogposts, click here

Doctor Zhivago: Novel or True Story?

Boris Pasternak 

 'Stellar Authors', an occasional 

series of posts on 

Kitchen Table Writers

For almost all my  life I’ve been under an illusion – a massive misapprehension – that I can trace back to an afternoon matinee in 1965 when we settled into our plush popcorny seats for the new David Lean Epic, a film that featured spectacular landscapes, a heartbreaking love story and brutal scenes of civil war.

Yes, Doctor Zhivago, the film.

Five years later I bought a two-volume edition of the book and started the long journey though those landscapes, that love story, that awful bloodshed. Yesterday, fifty years on, I finally came to the last page in  Pasternak’s book. As I did so, my illusion lifted. 

For all those years of faltering, stopping and restarting at the beginning of the book yet again…I understood and presumed that Doctor Zhivago was a real person. 

It was clear to me that the book was biography. I was unable to come to terms with the idea that anyone could invent such an epic tale –  starting at the time of the last Tzar and documenting the revolutions of 1905 ad 1917, finishing in the  days of the 2nd World War. Surely such an expansive boundless tale was based in some truth? Surely Pasternak had researched the real, if slightly forgotten, life of a Moscow doctor? 

Hum along as you read

I’m a novelist myself, always on the lookout for characters and ideas, but not for one moment did it occur to me that Pasternak had made those  life-sharp characters up….Yuri and his gracious wife Tonia…Lara and her idealistic, ruthless husband Pasha Antipode…the evil Viktor Komarovsky and the shadowy figure of Yuri's half-brother, General Yevgraf Zhivago. 

But of course Doctor Zhivago is a work of fiction. It’s not even Pasternak's first work of fiction, although most of his writing is poetry. Of course, he made it all up!

Or did he? 

Pasternak's sister, Anna,
wrote a book about Olga

In 1946 Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya, a 34 year old single mother, Every afternoon Boris came to her office and walked Olga home. They became lovers, despite Paternak remaining married. In 1949, while carrying Pasternak's  baby,  Olga was arrested by the KGB. Her apartment was ransacked for items connected with Pasternak and she was repeatedly interrogated. She refused to say anything incriminating about Pasternak. She was sentenced to ten years hard labour and miscarried early in her time in the GULAG. When he heard of her arrest, Pasternak said, weeping, "Everything is finished now. I'll never see her again. It's like death, even worse…Stalin is a ‘murderer.’"

Of course all novelists are inspired by the love they themselves feel – all loved ones are the most ‘special’ of people. Olga Ivinskaya was a poet, a clever and compassionate person and I like to think that their deep love, and their terrible parting, galvanised Pasternak to write his greatest work. Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Europe by an Italian journalist and published in Milan in 1957.

Boris Pasternak

Now that I know the truth, I can see that in the novel Pasternak created his own alter-ego – a poet, philosopher and physician whose life is disrupted by war and his enduring love for a charismatic, beautiful woman. Most of us have seen the film, and know the story shows the way his life brushes past Lara’s at crucial times in hers – they both witness her mother attempting suicide, and Yuri is there when she tries to shoots her abuser, Komarovsky, at a party. Pasternak sets up this yearning and almost eternal love early on in the story.

One of the most romantic aspects of the book is the way Zhivago journeys through the vast landscapes of Russia. After serving in the First World War, the Zhivago family leave communist Moscow for the Ural Mountains, where, Tonia is pregnant with their second child and Yuri begins an affair with Lara. Zhivago is forced to join a partisan army fighting the Tsarist Whites, but he escapes, walking through the snows to Yuriatin, where Lara lives. 

Pasternak’s intent was to interconnect Zhivago to as many of the Russian people as he could.  Like his inventor, Zhivago’s gentle and artistic character makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. He is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. leaving poems as his legacy. 

Doctor Zhivago is not an easy read, but it is a heady and rewarding one. 

Wikipedia sums it up when it says; The plot of Doctor Zhivago is long and intricate. It can be difficult to follow for two reasons. First, Pasternak employs many characters, who interact with each other throughout the book in unpredictable ways. Secondly, he frequently introduces a character by one of his/her three names, then subsequently refers to that character by another of the three names or a nickname, without expressly stating that he is referring to the same character.

Oh, ye gods, those names are sooo hard. This Wiki character map shows what that really means for the reader; 

But I do like to complete a work of classical literature every year, and 2000 was a great year to be reading this complex but breathtaking book. I started again at the beginning once more, and I kept going…until I reached the end of the story. 

I felt fantastic. I’d read this book, described as ‘the first work of genius to come out of Russia since the revolution’ (V.S. Pritchett). I'd loved every word of brilliant prose...

…But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landslides of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been feast for the stomach!

In 1958, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Six days later,  under pressure from the Soviet Union, he sent a telegram: "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure.” Pasternak’s poetry, plays, and translations were well known in the USSR but Stalin’s government  had threatened, suppressed, and spied on him. Doctor Zhivago was never published in the Soviet Union. 

Alec Guinness as  Yevgraf Zhivago
and Rita Tushingham as Tanya

It is the ending of the story that is most surreal and puzzling…most of which is absent from David Lean’s 1965  film version. After Yury has tricked Lara into taking her daughter and going away with her previous abuser, Komarovsky, he returns to Moscow and begins living with Marina, and they have two children. On the way to his first day’s work at a Moscow hospital, he dies of a heart attack. Lara comes to the funeral and asks Yury's half-brother if there is any way to track the location of a child given away to strangers. She stays for several days and then disappears, likely dying in a concentration camp. Years later, Misha and Nicky are fighting in World War II and encounter a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her life story. They determine that she is the daughter of Lara and Yury. And that is how the story ends, except of course, there are pages of the poetry of Pasternak, writing as Zhivago. These straggling, strangely plotted final sections only consolidated my idea that all this must be true. It felt too raw, too human and, to a degree, too far a coincidence. I could see the reality of the lonely man seeking solace, already sick at heart and shameful that his wife and first two children now live in Paris. It felt painfully true.

Doctor Zhivago is mind-widening and lyrical. Beautiful prose and strange, eloquent dialogue. Descriptions of the huge landscapes of Russia, and a story that documents its turbulent twentieth century. If you've never read it, you can do so here, in an excellent translation (Pevear and Volokhonsky).

STARTING TO WRITE: Find Your Writing Guidance With an Easy Click

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I'm Nina Milton, and this blog is all about pulling out the laptop or the pen and pad to get going with your writing. And then, keeping going with your writing...just as you always wanted to, but never quite managed. 

I've been writing crime fiction, children's books and prize-winning short stories for over a decade now. I'm a member of the Crime Writing Association, I hold an MA in Creative Writing,  I'm a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy andhave extensive experience in teaching creative writing and assessing at degree standard. I have written current course materials for the Open College of the Arts Degree Course in Creative Writing so if I can't help you, I'll probably know someone who can.

This week, I've been busy collating all my creative writing blogposts. It's been hard work, but at least it's heading for a storm outside so it took my mind off the weather! So now you can find the post that relates to YOUR writing problem or concern at the click of your mouse. In the past 10 years I have written about every writing topic from character and plot to pitching your novel and finding a writing soulmate. It's all there; have a browse through...and if you can't find the one writing subject you want to know more about...just contact me on my blog, below, or in an email (to the left of the home page). You can start right now, just click here…

The Kitchen table writers' Guide to Starting to Write; and Keeping Going.

Or go the the banner above the blogposts to click on the right page, where you will also see the route into other specialist pages, including my children's books, short story reads, and more about paganism, shamanism and druidry.