Music of the Ghosts/Vaddey Ratner: My Chicago Tribune Review

In today's Chicago Tribune I review Vaddey Ratner's novel of Cambodian loss and love, Music of the Ghosts. 

The entire review can be found here.

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Landscaping our prose (Virginia Pye, Vaddey Ratner, Chloe Aridjis)

Today (among so many other things) we're talking about landscape in memoir, about the ways that topography and visual detail elevate and suggest a story. We've read two chapters in Howard Norman's I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place. We've written responses. And now we'll talk.

I'm going to be sharing these three very different approaches to landscape (each drawn from novels). I now share them with you. What do you learn from them? What do they teach you about possibilities?

First, from the courageous first novel (River of Dust) from the dear Virginia Pye, this evocation of a dusty province in China, 100 years ago:

On springtime mornings like those, when the rain had finally stopped, they waded out toward the creek that had been rising for days. From farms upstream floated all manner of tires, cut logs, old boots, and once a bloated cow, swirling in an eddy until it was skewered by the limbs of a fallen tree.

Now a snatch of London from Asunder, by the amazing Chloe Aridjis:

The dusk of Millbank had filled with the amber lozenges of unoccupied black cabs, miners with lantern-strapped foreheads rushing towards or away from the city centre, as I made my way to meet Daniel at the Drunken Duck, a pub a few streets from Tate Britain.

And now from my friend, Vaddey Ratner—words originating from Cambodia, from the deservedly bestselling In the Shadow of the Banyan:

In the courtyard something stirred. I peered down and saw Old Boy come out to water the gardens. He walked like a shadow; his steps made no sound. He picked up the hose and filled the lotus pond until the water flowed over the rim. He sprayed the gardenias and orchids. He sprinkled the jasmines. He trimmed the torch gingers and gathered their red flame-like blossoms into a bouquet, which he tied with a piece of vine and then set aside, as he continued working. Butterflies of all colors hovered around him as if he were a tree stalk and his straw hat a giant yellow blossom.

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The Vaddey Ratner Interview: this is one you cannot miss

I have been driving poor Ed Nawotka, editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives, just a tad crazy these days.  (Sorry, Ed!)

Please can we run the Vaddey Ratner interview, I've emailed.  Pretty pretty please.

My urgent requests being made despite the fact that Ratner's book, In the Shadow of the Banyan, will not be released for a few more days.

It's just this:  Ever since I saw Ratner at the BEA during the adult buzz panel, I knew.  I knew her book would be huge, and I knew Ratner (who in real life is a gorgeous petite) would be huge, as well.  Banyan, a novel based on Ratner's childhood experience during the Cambodian conflict, isn't just lush and harrowing, infused as it is with both poetry and heartache.  It is moral, compassionate, and electrified by a consonant humanity.  Ratner stands for something good and right in fiction making, and here's what's so cool about that:  the world is noticing.  Her book has wings.

(For a small excerpt from the beginning, go here.)

Ed has given me the opportunity to interview a number of wonderful people in publishing (see the sidebar on this blog for links to former stories).  I am grateful, Ed, that you gave me room for this long piece on Ratner.  I asked questions by email.  Ratner answered with great care.  This, for example, is how the interview begins.  Please read the whole of it here.  It's about life.  It's about writing.  It's about hope.

You returned to Cambodia after many years away and lived for a time within your country.  Can you recreate your first moments of return?  What did you look for?  What did you find?  Beyond the return to the palace and the gift of rice, how did you spend your time there?

The first time I returned to Cambodia was in 1992, thirteen years after our traumatic escape from the country, the whole experience still very much fresh and alive in my mind.  Indeed, parts of the country were still controlled by the Khmer Rouge rebels.  While their regime had collapsed in 1979, they hadn’t completely relinquished their grip, terrorizing the population with random abductions and killings and launching attacks against the government’s forces.  Thus, you can imagine how my mother felt about my decision to return at this particular time.  “I risked everything to get you out of there,” she said, her voice taut with love, and fear for my safety.  “Now, you are going back.”

The last leg of that journey, the flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, I remember, was full of overseas Cambodians, all of us on this joint return to the homeland we couldn’t forget despite our desire for a new home, or stop loving despite the bloodshed and brutality.  At our first glimpse of Cambodia from the plane—the landscape like a tattered tapestry patched with arid rice paddies and stitched together by the flimsy threads of rivers and lakes during the dry season—we all simultaneously burst into tears.  Only the beautiful young Thai flight attendants remained dry-eyed and composed, as if by now well prepared for this kind of homecoming.  They did everything they could to give us our dignity, as if the entire cabin of passengers collectively sobbing aloud was nothing out of the ordinary.  I found this particularly kind of them, for it allowed us to express, without shame or fear, our long withheld sorrow.

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on teaching teachers

This week, as readers of this blog know, I am at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where K-12 teachers from all around the area have gathered for the VAST: Nature Through the Lens of Art/Science program.  For two hours each afternoon I share passages from books I love, lay down challenges, talk about Rilke and Cezanne, Stanley Kunitz and Vaddey Ratner, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, ghosts in gardens and rivers that flow.  They write and I listen.  I suggest, and they counter.

The teachers surprise me.  They make me smile.  They are writers, too, many of them, and certainly they are readers—men and women with opinions about what can and should trigger memory, say, or about the color blue, or about students they'll always remember.  They are charming and determined and, most of all, curious and hopeful.  They make me wish that I was learning in their classrooms.

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from the writerly life to the reviewing life

There's a funny thing that happens when you stop writing your own books—when you cool the fever, when you walk the garden, when you do not rise at 3 AM, determined.  Other people's books become your obsession.  Their stories, their words, their worlds.  You grow responsible for understanding.  You yield your empathy, devote your time.  The days are long and hot and languid, and New Orleans wafts by courtesy of Ruta Sepetys, and Haiti, thanks to Edwidge Danticat, and the humor of Haven Kimmel, the confessions of Caroline Knapp, the daughter of a salt god (Ilie Ruby), Cambodia at war (Vaddey Ratner), the very secret life of objects (Dawn Raffel).

Over the course of the last month, I have bought nearly 100 books and others, due out soon, have made their way to me, courtesy of publishing houses and authors.  My triple-stacked shelves in every book-devoted room are officially overtaxed.  Book piles approximate architecture.  Most women get up and ask, What will I wear?  I wonder, upon rising, what to read.

My mind is clear; it is at peace; it is satiated.  I sleep better than I did.  I want less.  I am comforted by books, comfortable around them, and the words I do write these days are reviews and essays, opinion pieces, suggestions.  Short pieces, perhaps 1,000 words a day, that help me put into context those things that I'm learning about language and how it works for others.

It seems enough, for summer.

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Let's talk about the label-ization of books (and Kristin Cashore)

The other day I pondered my own capabilities as an interviewee and concluded that I still need a bit of work.

A lot of work?  Yes, indeed.  A lot of work.

In this New York Times By the Book interview, Kristin Cashore, author of the esteemed Graceling (which I read and loved) and Fire (and, now, Bitterblue) shows us how a real interviewee chooses words rightly.  For Cashore's unwillingness to cop to easy answers or generalizations, for her range of knowing and wisdom, I respect the whole conversation.  I especially respect Cashore's response to the question, What makes a great young adult book — as opposed to a great book for full-fledged adults? Her answer:

The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don’t entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it’s impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it. Age and experience aren’t always among the most relevant factors.

Perhaps I celebrate this response because I hold this opinion this myself—and have often tried to express it, with varying degrees of eloquence, in interviews and on panels.  Just as I have fretted over the labeling of individuals, the attaching of classifications or lower-case nouns (oh, he's a manic depressive, oh, she's a workaholic), I do not cotton to the label-ization of books, to distinctions between young adult books and adult books, say, or to the assignment of fixed and self-limiting categories.  

What adult, for example, should not read Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again, and what teen should not read the never-officially-stamped-or-stickered To Kill a Mockingbird? Why should the first thing one is told about Julianna Baggot's Pure be that it is a dystopian novel, as opposed to an intelligent and artful and imaginative novel? Shouldn't the readership of Vaddey Ratner's astonishing, forthcoming "adult" novel about a child growing up in the Cambodian killing fields, In the Shadow of the Banyan, be both teens and adults? Doesn't Ilie Ruby's forthcoming The Salt God's Daughter have much to offer any age, and can't we talk about its gentle mysticism, its magic as poetry as opposed to brand or tag?

Certainly, I know how hard this would make things for booksellers and librarians.  I know that commerce requires labels, depends on it.  But wouldn't it be lovely if readers talking to readers dropped the labels and distinctions?  If we said, among ourselves, You must read this book because it is, quite simply, a great book, and because it will transport you. 

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Vaddey Ratner, a distinguished and compassionate new voice

To read my Publishing Perspectives interview with Vaddey Ratner, go here.

This August, readers will be introduced to Vaddey Ratner, a new and important advocate not just for story, but for compassion.  I had the opportunity to see Ratner speak at the BEA on a panel facilitated by Ron Hogan.  She struck me then as the real thing—unpretentious, honorably motivated, deeply committed to unveiling the Cambodia of her childhood.  There was terror, then.  There was great loss.  There was abominable sacrifice.  But there was also beauty, and Ratner, who came to the United States in 1981 as a child refugee speaking no English, has spent years parsing together a story that, if closely aligned with her past, does pretend to mirror it precisely.  Fiction, not memoir, is the right choice here.

When Ratner spoke of Michael Ondaatje as one source of literary inspiration, when she talked about leaving room to understand, when she asserted her decision to learn writing primarily through reading (as opposed to allowing others to shape her voice), I knew I would have to read In the Shadow of the Banyan.  I am doing that now.  I am seventy pages in.  I know, already, that Ratner is the writer she worked so hard to be.

I will have more to say when my reading is done.  This morning I quote from an early page.  The colors of a Cambodian garden, pre-Khmer Rouge, through the eyes of a seven-year-old child:

A tiny pale pink butterfly, with wings as delicate as bougainvillea petals, flew up from the gardens below and landed on the railing near my face.  I stilled myself.  It heaved as if exhausted from its long flight, its wings opening and closing, like a pair of fans waving away the morning heat.  Mama?  In one of her guises?  No, it was what it appeared to be—a baby butterfly.  So delicate it seemed to have just emerged from a chrysalis.

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BEA Buzz Books: The Adult Titles. The Panelists Speak.

My final Publishing Perspectives story takes an inside look at four of the Buzz Authors of adult books—British actress and playwright Rachel Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry), Vaddey Ratner (In the Shadow of the Banyan), Susannah Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness), and Antoine Wilson (Panorama City).  Facilitated by Beatrice's own Ron Hogan, the panelists reflected not just on what they write but how they hear the voices that carry their tales.

The whole story can be found here. 

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