Ninemsn, Australia
April 7 2006
Author trawls net for a Russian bride
Saturday Apr 8 07:01 AEST
When Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre started trawling the
internet for Russian brides, it wasn’t a wife he was after.
Rather the Australian-born author was looking for a woman with spirit
enough to take on the worst the western world had to offer her as the
central character of his next book, Ludmila’s Broken English.
“I did hours and hours and hours and hours, probably weeks and weeks
and weeks, poring through Russian internet bride websites,” Pierre
says in an interview with AAP, revealing hints of an Australian
accent with an Irish overlay.
“And I corresponded with some just to get a handle on that.
“And just in the same way that these characters in the book came upon
a face that jumped off the screen at them, there was one that jumped
off the screen at me.
“And that is Ludmila. So it’s a real woman.”
Pierre, whose real name is Peter Finlay and now lives at Leitrim in
rural Ireland, was so haunted by the face while he was writing the
book that he made up a mock cover with a photograph of the woman’s
face, and hung it on his study wall for inspiration.
“It’s beautiful. A dark haired young woman, and she’s looking out,
her head slightly bent down, eyes looking up under a little fringe of
hair and there’s just something challenging in her eyes,” he says.
“There’s a kind of a wickedness, there’s a shyness, and a challenge
there.
“She’s saying come on, come on sucker.
“And it came to symbolise the whole rest of the world looking at us
bumbling around, arrogantly, ignorantly, thinking we’re going to go
and organise the world and tell everyone what to do.”
It is clear from the very beginning of the book that Ludmila Derev is
nobody’s fool, when she fights and kills her grandfather as he
attempts to rape her.
In a bizarre satire of globalisation, the young woman from a remote
village in a war-torn region of the Caucasus then sets off on an
ancient Soviet tractor to save her family from starvation.
At the same time, Pierre introduces a pair of newly-separated, adult
conjoined twins, Bunny and Blair Heath, recently released from the
English institution in which they have spent their whole lives after
it is privatised.
The twins fortify their forays into their new-found freedom with
alcohol and drugs, and it is simply a matter of time before Blair
discovers Ludmila on a Russian brides website.
“I came to almost see it as symbolic of our whole culture, you know,”
Pierre says.
“Sad and flabby and affluent men, who imagine that just for the smell
of a dollar we’re going to get some beautiful foreign girl to go down
on her knees and do everything we want without question.”
The tall, dark novelist with a dishevelled air and gold watch on his
wrist, was born in Adelaide, but spent most of his childhood in
Mexico, where his university lecturer father moved the family when
Pierre was seven.
He settled back in Adelaide in the late 1980s and remembers much of
that time through a drink and drug haze.
His pseudonym, DBC Pierre, a nickname which stands for “dirty but
clean”, is also a reminder of those times.
With debts estimated at $200,000, he won the Booker prize in 2003 for
his first book, Vernon God Little, and has since led the life of a
successful novelist, also managing to repay what he owed.
He claims he has not read the critics on his latest book, some of
whom have condemned it in part for its confronting violence and
coarse language.
However, Pierre justifies these, saying he has actually softened the
deprivation of communities in war-torn Armenia, which he visited
while writing the book and on which he modelled Ludmila’s home
village of Ublilsk.
On the other hand, the most fun he had in the writing was creating
the Ubli language, with its outlandish and colourful cursing. Unable
to speak Armenian, Pierre based the rhythm and structure of the
imaginary language on Russian translations.
Ludmila’s Broken English, which was interrupted when he won the
Booker prize, developed slowly, he says, as he became fascinated with
the idea that migration has become the “over-riding story of humanity
in the last century”.
The idea of globalisation, however, he condemns as a scam.
“I have a real thing about language,” he says striking a match to
light another roll-your-own cigarette.
“And globalisation, which is an invented word, connotes a kind of
coming together, an equality, a kind of a trading which I don’t think
is happening.
“We’re not so much globalising as exploiting.”
The novel is a “sort of splashing” in these arguments, and doesn’t
promote an agenda.
However, “The promise is Ludmila,” he says pronouncing the woman’s
name with a Russian accent.
“She is the only hopeful character in the end,” he says.
“She’s in control and if you take it as a straight symbol, the future
is woman, and the future is probably foreign woman.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
