Sun-Sentinel.com, FL
Feb 15 2009
‘Skeletons’ author Bohjalian coming to Coral Gables, Palm Beach
By Chauncey Mabe | Books editor
February 15, 2009
For most of his career, Chris Bohjalian has been considered a woman’s
novelist ‘ not surprising for a writer who came to national attention
in 1997 when Oprah Winfrey selected his fifth work, Midwives, for her
televised book club.
That’s started to change with Skeletons at the Feast, published last
year and now out in paperback. His first attempt at a historical novel
dramatizes the suffering of Jews and Germans fleeing before the
advancing Soviet army in the final months of World War II.
"A number of readers were surprised and gratified I was trying
something new, even if the experience was too brutal for some of my
female readers," Bohjalian says. "But I have a lot more male readers
than I used to have. Men found this book."
Women who can tolerate the depictions of privation and suffering will
find a love triangle at the novel’s core: An aristocratic young
Prussian woman, a Scottish P.O.W. and a dashing Jewish man posing as a
Nazi officer, all struggling to survive.
"I wanted to explore the complicity of the average German in the
Holocaust," he says. "That’s the only thing I knew going in."
Bohjalian’s ideas come to him unbidden ‘ he’s never finished any of
his 12 books wondering what to write next ‘ but sometimes the
gestation period is long. The inspiration for Skeletons at the Feast
came in 1997, when a friend at his daughter’s kindergarten in Vermont
asked him to read a grandmother’s diary.
"She was part of the Prussian exodus fleeing the Soviet advance at the
end of the war," he says. "I was writing contemporary novels then, so
I shared the diary with Random House. They said it was interesting but
nothing new."
Meanwhile, Bohjalian steadily produced best-selling novels about
ordinary, often small-town folks under extraordinary pressure. But he
never wrote with an eye toward keeping up the stratospheric popularity
of Midwives.
"Oprah’s selection was the greatest commercial and professional
blessing, a gift," says Bohjalian, 48. "But trying to write to
maintain that kind of attention wouldn’t be fun. I start writing at 5
a.m. If a book’s exciting me, it’s easy to get up. If it’s not, I drop
it."
Besides, readers are smart. Bohjalian says they would know right away
if he tried to fake it.
"I’ve talked to enough book groups to know they can tell if you’re
trying to phone it in," he says. "They’ll turn away. There are so many
books and authors out there."
Bohjalian’s novels ‘ The Double Bind, The Buffalo Soldier, Before You
Know Kindness, among them ‘ defy categorization. Too well written to
be mere popular fiction, Bohjalian’s books are too popular to gain
acceptance as literary novels. He gets rave reviews but, as he jokes,
seems in little danger of winning a National Book Award.
"My brother told me I’m a ‘tweener,’" Bohjalian says. "He said I fall
between genres. I knew exactly what he meant. I don’t mind. It means
my readers don’t expect formula from me. I’m not constrained by reader
expectations."
In 2006, Bohjalian read Armageddon, Max Hastings’ history of the last
year of World War II. Remembering the diary, he asked the woman who
wrote it, by then 77 and living in Portland, Maine, for permission to
base a novel on it.
"I told her, ‘It won’t be exactly your story, but you’ll see it before
publication,’" Bohjalian recalls. "She said fine. So I started looking
up all the Holocaust survivors and Germans I could find. I was off and
running."
The diary gave Bohjalian the time, setting and circumstances, and two
characters, a 16-year-old girl and her mother. None of the other
characters in his book appear in the diary. The cast "exploded" once
he started talking to survivors.
"The stories people had ‘ no time was more brutal," he says. "But
there were also astonishing acts of kindness. All the people I
interviewed were 70 to 90. They survived because some angel parachuted
into their lives."
A New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller, Skeletons at the
Feast did well with critics too.
Margot Livesey, writing in The Washington Post, called it "a deeply
satisfying novel, one that asks readers to consider, and reconsider,
how they would rise to the challenge of terrible deprivation and
agonizing moral choices."
Bohjalian says writing about the Holocaust may show him the way to
write about the biggest tragedy in his own family history, the
Armenian genocide. He’s already tried it once ‘ one of the 400-page
manuscripts he abandoned.
"I started a novel that was set in Turkey in 1913 and South Beach in
the present day," Bohjalian says, laughing as he adds, "It’s a
terrible book. My God, is it bad. It’s the kind of train wreck where
you don’t even want to look for bodies."
Maybe, he muses, the family stories from his father and aunt were "too
close to home. Maybe I just needed more gray hair, or less hair, to
approach material of this gravitas. Maybe at 40 I just wasn’t old
enough to work my way into material this important."
Meanwhile, Bohjalian jokes, the 21st century has made him a "dinosaur"
on not one but two counts. In addition to novels, he has written a
weekly column for the Burlington Free Press since 1992.
Books and newspapers, the very definition of "old media."
"My world is pretty wonderful," Bohjalian says by phone from Vermont,
where he lives with his wife, the photographer Victoria Blewer, and
their daughter. "But as a novelist, I’m not exempt from the challenges
of the digital age. Maybe I’ll become a waiter."
While many of his generation can’t imagine being without a book at
their bedside, Bohjalian says, younger readers, their attention fixed
on computers, TV shows, cell phones or video games, can go weeks
without reading.
"It’s not that they’re illiterate," he says. "But they approach text
differently. They read blogs and posts online."
But if fewer people are reading the old-fashioned way, those who do
are more passionate than ever. Bohjalian finds them in book groups.
"Three or four times a week I’m on speaker phone with book groups," he
says. "That’s the change the digital age has placed on
novelists. We’re no longer disembodied faces on a book jacket.
"Thanks to digital technology, readers can connect to novelists as
people. They can ask us questions. We’re neighbors."
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