A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: The interplay of hope and despair is extraordinary in this dystopian tale set in an apocalyptic yet strangely familiar urban environment. In many respects, In the Country of Last Things is a bleak story, but your heroine, Anna Blume, brings to it an undercurrent of optimism through her integrity, stamina, and humanity. What inspired the construction of this uncanny place?

PA: It was inspired by New York City. I started thinking about this story in 1969, during my one postgraduate year at Columbia. At that moment, New York was in a state of near disintegration: crime was rampant, there was menace in the streets, and the infrastructure was collapsing. It culminated in the financial default of the city in the early seventies. It was hard not to feel, right along your skin, how desperate the place had become.

PA: Difficult to say, since the book evolved over many years. I heard Anna Blume’s voice, and at first I made her the narrator of the story. Then I started having second thoughts about writing from a female point of view and switched to a male narrator. Then, for a long while, I actually gave up on the whole thing because I wasn’t sure how to make the story work. Later on, every now and then, Anna’s voice would come back to me and I’d write a little bit, but then she would disappear and I couldn’t go any further. This went on for years. It wasn’t until I was working on The New York Trilogy (I think I was between Ghosts and The Locked Room) that she came back to me in a big flood. I wrote the first forty pages or so, but I was still uncertain about it. I showed those pages to Siri and said, “This isn’t very good, is it? I don’t have to write this book, do I?” She read it and said, “No, it’s very good, I love it, I think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done. You have to finish the book for me.” That’s why the book is dedicated to her. So, once I’d finished The New York Trilogy, I went back to Anna and continued. Before that, however, I did something I’ve never done before or since: I published a fragment of the novel before it was finished—while I was working on the last volume of the Trilogy.²⁶ I did that so I would feel committed to finishing the project—a secret promise to go back to it.

IBS: So, parts of the book are inspired by historical sources, but a great deal is clearly invented.

PA: Oh yes, but not all of it. For example, the garbage collection system was inspired by an article I read about Cairo [Egypt] where the work of trash removal was apparently farmed out to brokers. So that was based on fact. As were several other things inspired by events from World War II. For instance, from reading Harrison Salisbury’s book²⁷ about the siege of Leningrad, The 900 Days, I learned about the human slaughterhouses that sprang up around the city—nightmare places in which people killed other human beings in order to sell their bodies as food. They would lure their victims in with the promise of a pair of shoes. That’s what happens to Anna in a pivotal scene in the book. I took it directly from historical sources. Fantastical as the book might seem, it has struck a chord with people living in places that have gone through profound upheavals. I’ve been moved, at times even overwhelmed, by their strong, passionate responses to the book. For example, when I met the Argentinian woman who translated it into Spanish, she said, “What you’re writing about feels like our day-to-day reality in Argentina.” Later, there was the Sarajevo story. Do you know about this?

PA: During the siege in Sarajevo, a journalist from somewhere in the West gave his copy of In the Country of Last Things to a local theater director named Haris Pašović. Haris thought, “Why do I want to read a book written by an American ten years ago?” But then, living as he did in a cold, bare room with no heat or electricity, that is, alone at night with nothing better to do, he started reading it. For him, too, it was a book about the day-to-day reality of what was happening in Sarajevo during the siege. He became so enthusiastic that he decided to adapt it as a play and have it performed right there and then—in Sarajevo, smack in the middle of the fighting and bloodshed. They did a Bosnian version but also an English version. He managed to get Vanessa Redgrave involved, and she went over to perform in the play. I was going to go as well, but when I was about to leave, all the airports were shut down and I couldn’t get through. I don’t know how he organized it, but when the war was over, Haris got support from Peter Brook, the director of the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. His company gave Pašović’s group a grant to tour Europe with the play. I met up with them in Berlin. It was sometime in the mid-1990s. There were about twenty-five people in the company, ranging in age from seventeen to seventy-five. What was so remarkable and moving to me was that they had all memorized the book: they could all recite every word of the book by heart! I’ve never seen anything like it. An extraordinary experience.

IBS: Given these responses, the city in In the Country of Last Things takes on almost universal significance, doesn’t it? Were you thinking of this when you decided to leave it unnamed?

PA: I didn’t name it because it was inspired by several different places, and I wanted to create the impression that it could have been anywhere. Crumbling New York City from the late sixties—the Warsaw Ghetto from World War II, somewhere in South America from any moment in the twentieth century—first world, third world, second world. It comprises elements from so many different cities, I wouldn’t have known what language to use if I’d chosen to give it a name. Americans read this book and think it’s fantasy, but you know, for people in these less fortunate places, it’s not. There are fantastical elements to it, but it’s about the real world.

PA: Well, it’s that, too. I think the essence of the book is about how to remain human in a world that’s falling apart.

PA: That’s why I think of her as a heroic character. She’s probably the character I care about most from all of my novels. That’s why she keeps coming back.

PA: Yes, she returns there, but also in Moon Palace. She’s the person Zimmer is desperately waiting to hear from.

PA: Not really, no. That’s the funny thing about invented characters: they become real.

PA: I’m not sure about that. She’s the only central female protagonist, but in other books, especially later books, there are quite a few important female characters: Sunset Park, Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, Leviathan.

PA: It’s difficult, but then, once you get going, it’s not as hard as you think. Writing novels is like falling under a spell. You become the characters—whether it’s an old person or a young person, a woman or a man. If you’re able to go down deep enough into that subconscious spot where you are completely open, then you can do it. Think of how many men have written brilliantly from a feminine point of view.

IBS: Absolutely, and vice versa. That’s why one is wondering why, in your writing, Anna is the only truly rounded female character in the first half of . . .

PA: Of my literary output? Yes. Well, stories take hold of you, you go with them; you’re sucked up into them, and two or three years go by, and then something else takes hold of you. There’s no master plan in this. It’s mostly about what grabs you at any given moment. As you know, it takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel. You have to be completely involved. You can’t do it halfheartedly. And so, whatever it is that’s pulling you, whatever it is that seems most urgent—that’s what you go with. And no other female protagonist has called out to me as loudly as Anna Blume did. Not yet, in any case, although women characters seem to have become more and more dominant in my novels.

IBS: The story is set in the country of “last things,” and it’s very much a book about ephemerality. Nothing lasts here for very long. There are several reports on how language is deliberately used as an instrument to change reality:

For the best results, you must allow your mind to leap into the words coming from the mouths of others. If the words can consume you, you will be able to forget your present hunger and enter what people call the “arena of the sustaining nimbus.” There are even those who say there is nutritional value in these food talks—given the proper concentration and an equal desire to believe in the words among those taking part. (9–10)

Words describing culinary pleasure can fill your belly here. That’s extraordinary.

PA: When the desired object is absent, conjuring it up in your mind doesn’t help much, but these people can’t stop themselves from doing it anyway. They’re desperate. So, they invent these activities to satisfy their needs. Those needs aren’t fulfilled, but it’s a distraction.

There is a small minority, for example, that believes that bad weather comes from bad thoughts. (26)

PA: Yes, there’s a perverse edge of humor to all this. In catastrophic times, when it looks as if the world is about to end, the crazies come out in force: new religions are invented, strange sects, bizarre philosophies, desperate attempts to deal with the intolerable. A basic human response. End-of-the-world madness.

IBS: Even in the most wretched circumstances, your central characters here find the energy to continue writing. Sam, for instance, has devoted everything to his grand narrative:

The book is the only thing that keeps me going. It prevents me from thinking about myself and getting sucked up into my own life. If I ever stopped working on it, I’d be lost. I don’t think I’d make it through another day. (104)

PA: Sam is a journalist. That’s his job. He was sent there to report on the collapse of the city, and he wants to give a full-scale picture of what has been happening. It becomes his cause.

PA: Yes, and a distraction, too. By focusing on his project, he has something to keep him going, which helps ward off permanent despair.

IBS: The Jews in the library also persist with their studies, and it seems that their devotion to the book is proportional with the hardship of living.

IBS: [Laughs] Then, suddenly, they’re gone from the library. People, objects, words cease to exist all the time here:

It’s not just that things vanish—but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever. (87)

PA: It’s not just that physical objects are vanishing, but the words for those things evaporate as well, and once we don’t have the words anymore, the things can never be brought back—or even imagined. They’re gone.

IBS: Is Anna’s project, then, similar to Stillman Sr.’s or to the son’s in “Portrait of an Invisible Man”? They all seek to keep alive what is lost or broken by speaking or writing about it?

PA: The books were all in my head at the same time, so there are bound to be some echoes from one to the other—especially about the relationship between language and reality.

Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing collapses into gibberish. (89)

In effect, each person is speaking his own private language, and as the instances of shared understanding diminish, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with anyone. (89)

IBS: In the Country of Last Things is often described as a dystopia, a place in constant disintegration. I was wondering, is there a connection between the crumbling of space, the collapse of social structure, and the fragmentation of the self here?

PA: I never thought of it in those terms, but yes. In fact, what’s going on here, in this city right now,²⁸ illustrates precisely that. As the days go by, the people out there in Rockaway become more and more desperate, more and more angry—and every day the veneer of civility wears a little thinner. It’s only been a week. Imagine if they had lived in that chaos for a year. Circumstances can change you utterly. Siri’s mother tells a story about the German occupation of Norway in World War II. She was friendly with an obsessively clean middle-class girl. She was so clean that she took two or three showers a day and changed her underwear just as often. She had the misfortune to fall in love with a German soldier who died on the Russian front, and for a while she had to go to Germany to look after her mother-in-law—in a city under constant bombardment. They were destitute: wretched, dirty, hungry, living out of garbage cans. After the war, after having gone through all that, she came back to Norway and immediately began taking three showers a day again and changing her underwear just as often [laughs]. We adjust to circumstances. You see this same mechanism in the residents of Woburn House in the novel: once conditions improve a little, they start complaining. It’s not that they’re ungrateful. They just want more. All of us always want more.

IBS: That’s the uplifting dimension of In the Country of Last Things, Woburn House. The perfect place for Anna, among people just like herself, who want to help. They don’t lose their humanity—on the contrary!

PA: Victoria is another exceptional person, almost a visionary. Then you have Boris, a schemer, an operator, but also someone with a moral commitment to helping the doctor’s daughter. He’s one of the few people left in the city with a sense of humor and a taste for adventure. A survivor. He can cope with situations that would crush other people. A man clever enough to outsmart the system, whatever the system might be. There are people like this. And there are also people like Ferdinand—bitter, angry, and abusive.

IBS: Where do these nasty old men come from? Ferdinand reminds me of Effing;²⁹ he even talks a bit like Effing.

PA: Not really. But what the two of them share is an immense talent for ranting. Ferdinand is a shattered human being. He’s lost his masculinity, and he’s grown to hate his wife.

PA: Yes, she kills him. If you read the passage closely, I think it’s clear. I didn’t want to say it outright, but I think Anna understands that Isabel has killed him because of his attack on her. That’s the last straw: Isabel can’t take it anymore.

IBS: In fact, death is one of the few things they still have some control over in In the Country of Last Things:

I sometimes think that death is the one thing we have any feeling for. It is our art form, the only way we can express ourselves.

Still, there are those of us who manage to live. For death, too, has become a source of life. (13)

PA: She’s talking about the Leapers. They’re trying to make death as beautiful as possible.

IBS: So, orchestrating their own death adds a quality to their miserable existence?

IBS: Yes, I was wondering about that because there’s so much death in this book and very few births.

IBS: There’s a miscarriage. It’s one of the most harrowing moments in the novel. It struck me that, in your writing in general, there are very few births.

PA: That’s an interesting point. Well, let’s see: in The Locked Room there are the births of the little boys.

PA: In Moon Palace there’s an abortion . . . In The Book of Illusions, of course, Zimmer has two boys. In Leviathan, Sachs and Fanny can’t have children, but then, Aaron has a son and a daughter. In Oracle Night, Grace is pregnant, but, of course, she loses the baby. In Man in the Dark, there’s a crucial passage in which Brill tells Katya that it was her birth that brought him back together with his wife, remember? He said, “You’re responsible, your birth did it.”

IBS: But she’s grown up when he tells her that. There’s a child in The Brooklyn Follies, of course. She plays a prominent role.

IBS: And in Mr. Vertigo, the protagonist is a child through much of the novel. So, there are children in your novels, but more often than not they have been lost, either through abortion or in some tragedy. Isn’t that true? And we hardly ever—if at all—hear about them being born.

PA: It’s strange that you mention it, because in fact it’s something I’ve been fiddling with lately. I don’t know if it will come to anything, but I’ve written a long passage about a father writing to his daughter on the day she’s born and describing her birth in great detail. It’s in a notebook, not yet typed up. Who knows what will happen to it, but getting back to In the Country of Last Things, what I was trying to evoke was a world in which no children could be born anymore—not as an individual problem but as a societal problem. In The Last Kings of Thule, a book written by the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie, he explains how babies cease to be born among the Eskimos during times of famine. Then, in times of plenty, children begin to be born again. Interesting, no?

IBS: Yes, it is. There’s definitely an almost apocalyptic sense in In the Country of Last Things of the world coming to an end. The rabbi has an interesting perspective on this:

Every Jew, he said, believes that he belongs to the last generation of Jews. We are always at the end, always standing on the brink of the last moment, and why should we expect things to be any different now? (112)

PA: This is a world in which everyone might be part of the last generation. It’s just that the Jews have a deeper understanding of what this means.

IBS: So, every generation, in a sense, believes itself to be the last? This plays into the ending of the novel, I think. We don’t know whether they managed to escape the city.

PA: They do get out. Even if we don’t know what happens to Anna exactly, we know that the letter reaches the person she sends it to. That’s the optimistic conclusion to the book: that somehow or other this notebook made it—one assumes—to Zimmer.

PA: From Moon Palace we know that Zimmer is waiting for a letter from Anna, and the opening pages of In the Country of Last Things imply that someone has received a letter. “These are the last things, she wrote.” The person writing the word “she” has read the letter, but whether that person is Zimmer or someone else is not clear.

That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense. (85)

²⁶ “In the Country of Last Things,” the first pages of the later to be completed novel, came out in the Paris Review, no. 96 (Summer 1985).

²⁸ This conversation took place six days after superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast in November 2012. Rockaway is on the Queens shore, which was badly damaged. Many people still had no roof over their heads a week after the disaster.