Fiction – Page 7 – Lemuria Books

Category: Fiction (Page 7 of 54)

By Paul Rankin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

Since the 1972 publication of his first novel, Coming Through Slaughter–an impressionistic-historical fiction set in the seedy underworld of Storyville New Orleans and chronicling the various misadventures of legendary coronet player Buddy Bolden–Michael Ondaatje has firmly established himself among our finest living craftsmen.

Born in Sri-Lanka and based now in Canada, Ondaatje is the author of 20 books of poetry and prose including The English Patient (1992) and Anil’s Ghost (2000), each of which achieved a rare combination of critical acclaim and popular success.

His writings have won numerous awards and honors including the Booker Prize, the Prix Médicis, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. With such a superlative record, expectations naturally run high, and his latest novel, Warlight (Knopf) does nothing to disappoint.

Set in London in the immediate aftermath of WWII, Warlight centers on Nathaniel and Rachel, siblings for whom “life was still haphazard and confusing during that period.” As the story unfolds, we witness the residual effects of chaos and devastation in their lives.

From the opening scene when their parents announce they’ll be going away, leaving their children “in the care of two strangers who may have been criminals,” Nathaniel (the narrator) describes and populates a world where everyone and everything is suspect. Theirs was “a family with a habit for nicknames,” he notes, “which meant it was also a family of disguises.” Nothing is reliable; no one can be fully trusted.

Nathaniel’s fondest memory, in those bittersweet days before the abandonment, involves his mother engaged in “various homemade theatrical performances.” All activity feels staged. Everyone wears some kind of mask. Very few characters even go by their real names.

The mother refers to Nathaniel as Stitch. Rachel, she calls Wren. Their dubious guardians are The Moth and The Darter, and even Nathaniel’s girlfriend “Agnes” has taken this name from the place (Agnes Street) where they had their first rendezvous.

This precarious sense of reality leads Stitch to draw “detailed maps” early on, obsessing over each detail “as if what was not recorded might be in danger.”

The process of mapping is one of the primary ways humans have sought to order the overwhelming complexities of life. Storytelling is another. Every map tells a story, we might say, and every story is a kind of map by which we attempt to navigate the world. Later, Stitch will turn from cartography to narrative in his attempts at preservation.

The result of that effort is the novel itself–a subtly crafted frame story in which we observe him deep in the throes of reconstructing his own life history. It is also, in a sense, a sort of existential detective story in which he sleuths for clues as to his parents’ true identity and their roles during and just after the war.

From his early cartographies to his later retrospective narrating, we bear witness to Stitch’s desperate attempts to stitch his own life together, gathering the various scraps of memory and documentary evidence, quilting them together in a coherent pattern. What emerges is a self-conscious, self-reflective composition in which Nathaniel fills in blanks as best he can.

This constitutes an impressive feat: the way Ondaatje manages to present a character who is essentially bewildered (as so many of us are), living in a bewildering place and time (as so many of us do), without the book itself descending into bewildering chaos at any point.

It was, as they say, bravely done.

Paul Rankin is a freelance writer and editor, holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, and lives with his family in Jackson where he is working on a novel.

Signed first editions of Warlight are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

‘A Shout in the Ruins’ by Kevin Powers is an affecting novel of Southern violence

By Former Lemurians

On May 28, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Guy Stricklin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

In his daring second novel, A Shout in the Ruins, Kevin Powers—author of The Yellow Birds—looks piercingly at the American South whose savage history he carefully traces in places like Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital and through characters “lined with mark after mark of whip and brine.”

Powers’ sprawling cast moves in and out of focus during a story that crisscrosses the antebellum South and its ensuing century of violence and upheaval. The story opens onto three characters each uniquely confronting a rapidly changing and wholly indifferent world: Emily Reid, the unloved and unloving daughter born in Chesterfield County in 1847; her father’s slave, Rawls, whose docked toes cannot keep his melancholic soul from wandering; and 93-year-old George Seldom, a widower losing his home in Richmond to the impending construction of the interstate highway in 1956.

Their individual lives are knit together along with numerous others in a narrative broken up by digressions of memory and shifting points of view. This dynamic approach allows motifs and whole scenes to resurface countless times. We watch houses burning, embers, ashes, bleached bones found in the ruins, a world on fire, and a world collapsed. A Shout in the Ruins is reminiscent of another recent multi-generational novel, The Son by Philipp Meyer, whose praise for Powers is quoted on this book’s jacket.

As the novel unfolds, Powers depicts the variety of ways violence—emotional, as well as physical—is enacted and endured by these characters. George’s pain is shapeless, systemic, and reflective; Rawls’ expansive, without border, hereditary; and Emily’s private, deep, a cave whose hollowing darkness she cannot or will not plumb. Pain, though, is pain and you read on hoping salvation of a kind finds its way, though it will have to be as varied as the characters themselves.

Powers writes with a sharpness that is both convincing and convicting. This is a book rooted in a South we know. The violent rending of a nation and the unspeakable cruelty of slavery reverberate throughout, but Powers moves beyond these very real acts and takes on a perspective which sees even those seminal events as echos of some more ancient transgression. Meditation might strike closest to what this novel aims toward. Quite quickly, Powers is examining not only his characters but the whole of humanity. In passages evoking Kubrick’s 2001, he describes the order of the world as repetition: violences repeated, passed down, and given to each successive generation from the very start. “The gun goes off when the line gets crossed, and the line got crossed a long time ago, when we were naked and wandered the savanna and slept beneath the baobab trees” writes Powers. Violence, as he tells it, is both personal and cosmic; intimate and elemental.

And yet throughout, punctuating this darkness, are flickers of love and goodness and kindness: a baby rescued, help given, hope trusted, and good done in spite of its seeming uselessness, its transience, and its insignificance. As with many of his characters, Powers is asking us to consider that perhaps, in spite of all the world’s violence and pain, in spite of everything, “One good thing still counts.”

A masterful novel, Kevin Power’s A Shout in the Ruins is a timely powerhouse full of seething violence and remarkable humanity.

Guy Stricklin is a bookseller and the First Editions Club supervisor here at Lemuria.

Kevin Powers’ novel A Shout in the Ruins is Lemuria’s May 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Kevin Powers

By Guest Author

On May 21, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 20)

In his newest work, A Shout in the Ruins, award-winning writer Kevin Powers presents a powerful story of the brutal realities of violence and oppression in the American South during and long after the Civil War period.

Set in Powers’ hometown of Richmond, Virginia, the stories that make up A Shout in the Ruins stretch across nearly a century, from antebellum years to the 1980s. The plot during Civil War times unfolds for the partners of an ill-fated marriage between a plantation owner and the young daughter of a wounded veteran; as well as two young lovers enslaved on the plantation.

In a separate theme that runs alongside these characters is the story of George Seldom, a man in his 90s who was left orphaned by the war, and, in the 1950s, is looking back on his childhood. The strain of the destruction of his neighborhood brought on by the building of an interstate highway through Richmond prompts him to travel south in hopes of capturing glimpses of his origins.

In his search he meets Lottie, who helps him locate the house in which he grew up. The journey ultimately brings him to consider both the changes and the constancies of his long lifetime; and Lottie later reflects on her own middle age during the 1980s.

Powers’ first novel, The Yellow Birds (2012), was a National Book Award Finalist that captured both the PEN/Highway Award and the Guardian First Book Award. His first collection of poetry, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, was published in 2014.

Kevin Powers

With a bachelor’s degree from the Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, Powers is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

Today, Powers lives in Austin, and admits that, on the home front, he is “an avid but mostly unsuccessful gardener. There is a pathetic-looking, but still living, gardenia in a pot on my front porch that is a testament to this fact,” he said. “I also try to spend as much time outdoors as I can. Las tyear, I bought a little 250cc Honda dirt-bike that I take up to the mountains in Colorado whenever I’m able.”

You obviously did a lot of research for A Shout in the Ruins about life in and around Richmond after the Civil War. Some of the scenes are gut-wrenching. Was there any one thing that you learned in your research that surprised you? And was anything about this book that was (as in your former book) that was inspired by your own experience of war?

Growing up in Richmond, one learns a lot about all the history that has happened in and around the city, but it was different returning to that history as an adult, having the experiences I’ve had in life, and now with children of my own that I’ll someday need to explain that difficult history to.

I suppose I knew this intellectually, but in researching the period it was shocking to recognize how the institution of slavery permeated every aspect of life, and moreover, that it could be treated so casually by those who perpetrated and depended on its existence. And so, you come to see how strategic the thinking was that allowed the standing order to remain unchanged after the war, even though it temporarily no longer had the force of law behind it.

An example of a particularly shocking moment was reading the obituary of Robert Lumpkin, whose slave jail is featured in the novel and who died in 1866. It read, “He was born and raised in this city, was 61 years of age, and was an honest man.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting representation of the banality of evil.

I assume the title of A Shout in the Ruins comes from chapter 10, when George and Lottie visit the cabin he was born in. Explain how the title of the book fits with that scene.

Yes, and it’s a reference to all the ruins in the book. Certainly, the cabin George and Lottie visit, but also the ruined plantation house at Beauvais, and specifically that shout when Emily is discovered hiding nearby. But in a larger sense, I hoped the title would be evocative of the urgency with which I feel it is necessary to truly and honestly reckon with our shared past. The title is also a reference to a poem I love by Louis Aragon, called “Poem to Shout in the Ruins,” which while not related to the book thematically, embodies just that kind of urgency.

I loved how you wove time and place around the character of George, who came off as the light in the story’s darkness. Who or what was your inspiration for the idea of this character?

Thank you. I must admit I didn’t begin with him in mind. He emerged through the telling of the story, and the more it developed, it became clear to me that part of the process was looking for a character who could embody Virginia in all its true complexities. In my mind, George is the quintessential Virginian, to the point where I almost titled the book “The Virginian” after him. But then I realized there were already a dozen or more books, films, and TV shows bearing that title, so I went with the one it has now.

Lottie was a very pivotal character in regard to George’s attempt at making sense of his life. After George’s death, you continued to develop her character well into the 1980s. Tell me about that.

I felt it was essential to connect this history to the present, or at the very least to a world that was recognizable to me. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t treating the past as something quarantined, something disconnected from life in contemporary America.

Lottie allowed me to do that, but also having attempted to face and address the past as honestly as I could, I wanted to see what remained. What hope could there be for us, what love, what compassion? Would it be naive to think that these aspects of life were truly possible given the burdens of history that we carry into the present moment? I could see how a reader might conclude her story is tangential, but for me she is thematically fundamental to the book.

Her brief time with Billy allowed me to ask all those questions with a new perspective. I don’t presume to have the answers to our country’s awful legacy of suffering and violence, but it does seem to me that a new level of honesty will be a prerequisite to finding them. that level of honesty is present in the relationship between Lottie and Billy, and aspirational for me as an ordinary man in the world. I genuinely feel like an optimist at heart and telling Lottie’s story allowed me to put that optimism to the test.

The book ends in 1906 with George and Emily meeting by happenstance on a park bench, but not knowing one another. Emily was talking to herself out loud about love being “the only miracle.” Explain why you chose to end the book this way.

I wanted to leave the reader with a question. So, having read everything that comes before that encounter, I hope readers will ask themselves if she’s telling the truth.

I noticed a lot of references to the color yellow in this book. Does it have anything to do with your first novel The Yellow Birds?

It may just be a tic! I’m not sure. In The Yellow Birds, I wanted that connotation of cowardice to be present, but I didn’t realize it had bled into the new book. I’ll have to think more about that.

According to some reviews of your work that I’ve read, your writing compares to that of Faulkner. What do you say?

It’s certainly not a claim I would be prepared to make about my own work, but I am flattered that others have made it. For many writers from the South, his books are touchstones, and that is definitely true for me.

Can you share any ideas you may be exploring for an upcoming work?

Nothing has cohered yet, but my recent reading has tended toward the spiritual: Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, C.S. Lewis, and others.

My own spiritual life is characterized primarily by doubt and confusion, but whenever I’ve had those feelings about a subject in the past, I’ve tended to write about it, to see if there’s a way that I can crack the code or at the very least throw words at the mystery in a way that might be interesting to myself and others. So, I’ll either do that or write a love story. I can’t say for sure at the moment.

Kevin Powers will be at Lemuria tomorrow, May 22, at 5:00 to sign and read from A Shout in the Ruins. A Shout in the Ruins has been selected our May 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

Finding Her Way: ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller and ‘Motherhood’ by Sheila Heti

By Former Lemurians

On May 17, 2018

In Fiction

by Trianne Harabedian

How is an immortal witch from Greek mythology like a modern writer in her late thirties? They both defy the usual expectations of women and make happiness for themselves!

circe I first heard about Circe, the novel by Madeline Miller, from Tayari Jones. The author of An American Marriage came to visit Lemuria back in February and she kept mentioning how she had read an advanced copy and loved it. So when it finally came out in April, I bought a copy immediately. She was right–the retold story of the witch from the Odyssey was completely captivating and did not disappoint. As the daughter of Helios, the sun god, Circe falls short when she does not exhibit powers of her own. Increasingly isolated in her father’s house, she begins to spend time in the realm of mortals, where she discovers her connection to nature and her calling as a witch. The novel follows her life, weaving in other characters and stories from Greek mythology. I’m a huge fan of retellings, especially of fairy tales and myths, so I devoured this like candy. I couldn’t predict the ending, which was fun because I can usually tell where stories are headed. But it made so much sense and wrapped up so nicely that I felt complete and satisfied.

In contrast, I picked up an advanced reader copy of Motherhood by Sheila Heti by accident. I thought it was a collection of funny, nonfiction stories about parenting. Instead, I found myself reading, and absolutely loving, a serious and sarcastic novel about what it means to be a woman and how that role is too often defined by the existence of children. The narrator, a writer in her late thirties, feels like her approaching fortieth birthday means she needs to decide once and for all whether she wants to have kids. She spends time with her friends and their children, trying to imagine herself in their place. She examines her marriage and her husband, a man who has never personally desired children. She also reflects on her relationship with her own mother. Through it all, the narrator has a set of ancient Chinese coins that she uses to answer questions, like tarot cards or a magic 8 ball. The writing style reminded me of Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro, with its honest narrator and nonfiction-esque storytelling that makes you really think about your own life. It took me a few pages to get into, but I fell in love quickly. By the time it ended, I wanted it to keep going to I could read that book forever.

It’s been exactly a year since I graduated from college, and more and more I realize that no one’s life looks the same. Women especially are expected to do certain things by certain ages, to hit milestones and fulfill specific roles. But the fact is, everyone is different. We all deserve to be able to choose our own path, which is why I loved reading these two books in a row. They are incredibly different, but both carry the same message: Love yourself and do whatever you feel called to do.

A tribute to Jim Harrison by Barry Gifford

By Lemuria

On May 16, 2018

In Fiction, Lemuria Culture, Poetry

jim harrison by barry gifford

Jim Harrison

I miss Jim Harrison
not just his new poems and novels
he won’t write,
his blind, wandering left eye,
gargantuan appetite, his generosity–
He loved Mary Lou’s flowers,
sitting in our garden–
He’d never been to a racetrack
so I took him, taught him
how to read The Racing Form,
how to bet–we both won
a little that day–
He’d call me after midnight,
I could hear the ice clink
in his glass of Scotch
before the gravelly voice–
He’d never fail to mention
Mary Lou’s flowers in letters,
on the phone and when we met–
When I was in my twenties
he told me, “If you lived in New York
you’d already be a famous poet.”
Walking on his property near
the Arizona-Mexico border
he brushed away a rattlesnake
with his cane–“I don’t
shoot snakes any more,” he said
“unless I have to, like
writing poems.”
He died two years ago–
Mary Lou’s flowers are beautiful
this year, Jim, especially
the blue irises.

-BARRY GIFFORD

John Evans met the author and poet Jim Harrison (1937-2016) about 37 years ago, before the publication of Warlock, and John met Barry Gifford about 30 years ago, and developed a friendship with both. Barry and John shared much respect for Jim’s work and formed a bond this way. Barry has shared this as yet unpublished poem with John to share with the Lemuria community. Both authors have been great friends of the store, and have enriched its shelves with their magnificent words.

Jim Harrison (L); Barry Gifford (R)

Jim Harrison wrote many novels, volumes of poetry, and collections of non-fiction, including his last works, The Big 7 and Dead Man’s Float. Barry Gifford has also written many novels, volumes of poetry, and collections of non-fiction, including his most recent work, The Cuban Club.

Anne Tyler and Eudora Welty

By Lisa

On May 15, 2018

In Fiction

By Lisa Newman. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 6)

Anne Tyler discovered the writing of Eudora Welty when she was 14-years-old in her school library in 1955. The book was Welty’s collection of stories, The Wide Net. Tyler reflects:

I can even name the line. It’s the one where she says Edna Earle is so dim she could spend all day pondering on how the little tail on the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign. I knew many Edna Earles. I didn’t know you could write about them.

dinner at the homesick restaurant Anne Tyler is now 76-years-old and her twenty-second novel, Clock Dance, will publish in July. Over the years, Tyler has endeared millions of readers with her characters living the very ordinary lives most of us lead. We, readers, feel our heart swell with the recognition that we are not alone in our triumphs and disappointments with family and friends. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons (1988), a couple turns an unremarkable day-long drive into a revealing journey that strengthens their bond. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), three grown-up siblings express their longing for the “perfect” family and the heartache of loss; Eudora Welty talked about Anne Tyler’s last sentence in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant:

“If I had written that sentence, I’d be happy all my life!”
(Yale Review 1984, “A Visit with Eudora Welty” by Barbara Lazear Ascher)

All of Anne Tyler’s novels demonstrate what she learned at a young age: “Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things . . . I’m very interested in day-to-day endurance. And I’m very interested in space around people. The real heroes to me in my books are the first ones who manage to endure and second the ones who somehow are able to grant other people the privacy of the space around them and yet still produce warmth.”

Anne Tyler has never been a touring author, and she gives very few interviews. Understandably, she finds the spotlight distracting and incongruous with writing. Although she has roots in North Carolina, her space has been a modest house in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.

Anne Tyler wrote about her 1980 visit with Eudora Welty at her home in Jackson in preparation for the essay that would appear in the New York Times:

She lives in one of those towns that seems to have outgrown themselves overnight, sprouting—on reclaimed swamp—a profusion of modern hospitals and real estate offices, travel agencies and a Drive-Thru-Beer Barn. (She can remember, she says, when Jackson, Miss., was so small that you could go on foot anywhere you wanted: On summer evenings you’d pass the neighbors’ lawn scented with petunias, hear their pianos through the open windows. Everybody’s life was more accessible.)

On a recent cool April evening, Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, sat on Miss Welty’s porch with conversation partner, Holly Lange. The audience was attentive in chairs on the lawn, the walk to the front porch winding in between listeners, and Sal, the Welty House cat, arranged comfortably, as one of us, on a listener’s bag in the grass.

dinner at the homesick restaurant

Once we got settled in with sounds of the Belhaven neighborhood around us, we listened to Charles Frazier talk about the subject of his latest novel, Varina, the wife of Jefferson Davis. I think Anne Tyler and Eudora Welty would have been pleased with our gathering and the space around us.

This year Anne Tyler’s long-time publisher, Knopf, is releasing new Vintage paperback editions of all of her novels, giving her fans a great excuse to remember why they fell in love with her stories in the first place or a way for new readers to discover why Anne Tyler is one of America’s most enduring writers.

The Past is Female, Too: ‘Varina’ by Charles Frazier

By Hillary

On April 26, 2018

In Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

varina I know that Charles Frazier is most known for his novel, Cold Mountain, but I must admit…I haven’t read it. So, I’m going into his writing with no preconceived notions of any past greatness to compare it to. When we received advanced copies of Varina and I learned that Frazier would be joining us for a signing and reading at The Eudora Welty House, I figured this would be the best time to start my Charles Frazier reading journey.

Set in the Civil War era with a strong, female protagonist, Frazier’s new novel is mostly narrated by Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis. Married at 17 to a man nearly 20 years her senior, Varina is thrust into political life during the brutality of the Civil War. She suffers the loss of several children and then decides to rescue a black child named Jimmie to raise as her own.

When we first meet Varina, she is much older and reflecting back on her life with the now-grown James (Jimmie) after years apart. Once Lee has surrendered, she is fleeing with her still surviving children, a young black boy named James, and a black woman through an almost lawless land. They find danger on their journey, and narrowly escape a few captures by Federal soldiers while trying to start a new life for themselves. There are a lot of historical figures whom she encounters along the way. Some may find this a bit much, but it turns out (because I did a little research on my own) that Varina was just that connected in her real life. Ultimately, this is a story, written in Frazier’s beautiful prose, of Varina pulling herself together, and those closest to her, after the devastation of the Civil War.

Frazier has done a fantastic job of depicting the damage done to the landscape and people of the south during this time. He has also given us a story of a strong female historical figure, forced to marry young, and shows her feelings of culpability for her actions and the actions of her husband concerning slavery. He has taken someone who is on the “wrong” side and made one feel empathy and sorrow towards their troubles. He has shown the horrors in both the North and the South during the time following the war in great detail. I know this is a historical novel, but Frazier did his research, and as far as I can tell Varina was exactly the woman he has produced in real life; a very intelligent, kind, hard working woman who was able to face anything head on in her life.

I really enjoyed this read. In fact, it reminded me of a non-fiction book, Trials of the Earth, which I read and loved a couple of years ago, about Mary Mann Hamilton and her life in the Mississippi Delta. If you’re looking for tales of strong Southern women surviving in a harsh landscape, these books are are for you.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House today, Thursday, April 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

By Guest Author

On April 24, 2018

In Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

Amidst a timely controversy about the relevance of Confederate monuments scattered across the South and a national discussion about race, Charles Frazier’s newest novel examines the role of Varina Davis, wife of the Confederacy’s only president, Jefferson Davis, and her influence on history.
In Varina, a work of historical fiction, Frazier places the former first lady of what he refers to as the “imaginary country” at a health resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. The year in 1906, and the story begins just weeks before her death at age 80, when she gets a surprise visit from a middle-aged African-American man she doesn’t recognize.

The stranger turns out to be the young boy she took in off the streets of Richmond 40 years ago, who is searching for clues about his own identity. As she recounts her story of the war years and beyond, he begins to clarify his personal history.

Charles Frazier

Frazier, who won the National Book Award for his internationally bestselling debut novel Cold Mountain in 1997, has said that he believes events of the past few years have left America still searching for a resolution to issues concerning race and slavery.

Frazier’s other novels include Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods. A native of North Carolina, he still makes his home there.

Why did you choose Varina Davis to write about now–was it influenced by the efforts of some today to remove statues of Confederate leaders, including her husband Jefferson David, president of the Confederacy?

varina I was interested in the fact that she left Mississippi shortly after Jefferson Davis died and moved to New York City to become a newspaper writer when she was over 60 years old. I found out that she had lived in London for some time, alone. As she grew older, she stayed engaged with the world around her and her opinions continued to evolve. At a time in life when most people start slowing down, she was digging her heels in, thinking mostly about her work, writing.

The novel is crafted around the conversations of an aging Varina with a man she had apparently rescued as a child–a man she had not seen in 40 years. He has come to her for answers about his own identity, and she provides clues as she tells her story. At the time he visits, she is 80 years old and has been earning her living by writing for publications in New York City. Tell me about their relationship.

It’s not certain that she rescued him. The story that (Varina’s friend) Mary Chesnut told was that Varina was riding through Richmond in a carriage and she witnessed the boy being mistreated and took him in; there is another story that there was a group of boys, including her sons, running around Richmond and they brought him home with them.

The (recorded) history of that child ends in 1865. I elevated him to a grown-up. I wanted it to feel to her like a child had returned. (All four of her sons had died young.) He had always wanted to know his story, so different from hers in that she had benefited from slavery her whole life.

Varina was a remarkably strong and independent woman, well-educated and ahead of her time in her thinking about political and social issues. She married Jefferson Davis when she was 18 and he was 37. How would you describe their marriage relationship, with its many moves, the tumultuous time in the country, and the deaths of their four sons at a young age?

There were lots of separations–sometimes because of his work and sometimes because they were not getting along. They quarreled over his will that left her totally dependent on his brother. There were some rocky periods, for sure, but divorce was out of the question.

When Jefferson Davis learned that he had been appointed president of the Confederacy, he and Varina took the news with a sense of dread. Why was that?

He was appointed and inaugurated (as provisional president) in Montgomery, Alabama (on Feb. 18, 1861), and was inaugurated again in Richmond (on Feb. 22, 1862) after he was actually elected to the post (in November 1861).

Varina had expected him to be named the president and didn’t feel like he had the temperament for the job. She told (her friend) Mary Chesnut that he would be president and that “it will be a disaster.” They had just settled back in at their home at David Bend (near Vicksburg) when word came. Both were depressed about it.

Tell me about Varina’s role as the Confederacy’s only first lady, especially considering that she didn’t agree with her husband on everything politically, and this was a job she never asked for.

Varina Davis

She performed a lot of the conventional duties of a first lady, but was constantly criticized by people in Richmond for being too opinionated, too sharp-witted. Many looked on her as being too Western and crude. Mississippi was still a frontier area when she was growing up there, and it bothered some people who thought that she was not as polished.

Other characters in the book reveal much about Varina. Tell me about Mary Chesnut and her relationship with Varina. Also, who is the mysterious character of Laura, who befriended Varina when they were both guests at the health spa in Saratoga Springs?

Many Chesnut and Varina were friends in the real world. They met in Washington when each was 18 and their husbands were members of Congress.

Mary was from South Carolina. She was well educated in Charleston and was known for being smart and quick-witted. Mary’s husband had important positions in the Confederate government (as an aide to the president and a brigadier general in the Confederate Army). The diaries she wrote during the Civil War were later published and they provided a great deal of firsthand information about that period.

For Laura’s character, I pictured someone with lots of problems whose rich parents sent away to get better. At the end of the book, they are trying expensive new medical treatments for her. Also, Varina had lost so many of her own children, and, in Laura, she finds someone to take care of.

The use of mixing wine with morphine, or taking opium or laudanum seemed to be a common practice as a way to relax and forget life’s problems, and we see Varina using it fairly often. How common was this?

You didn’t need a prescription for laudanum (or tincture of opium)–it was the type of thing you could get at traveling medicine shows. It was used for practically anything, especially for women, from mild depression after childbirth, to husbands saying their wives were too high strung or high-spirited. I don’t know if Varina was a big (user), but I do know Mary Chesnut was. I expect some periods of Varina’s life could be explained by her use of it. For example, the way she suddenly left during her husband’s inauguration in Montgomery, with no explanation.

Please tell me how you hope Varina will address your concerns about some of the unrest about race that we still see lingering in our country, with the removal of Confederate statues and the division we continue to hear in the national rhetoric.

I think of historical fiction as a conversation between the present and the past, and Varina Davis’s life offered me a complex entry point into that dialogue. That war and its cause–the ownership of human beings–live so deep in our nation’s history and identity that we still haven’t found a way to reconcile and move forward. And it’s important to remember that most of those monuments didn’t spring up right after 1865, but are largely a product of the Jim Crow South. Their continued presence indicates how much the issues of the Civil War are like the armature inside a sculpture–baked into the framework of our country and our culture.

Do you have other writings in the works at this time, or ideas for your next project?

I’ve got a couple ideas in the works and will decide which one to pursue this summer.

This interview has also been posted on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Charles Frazier’s ‘Varina’ is an immersion in the Civil War South

By Guest Author

On April 16, 2018

In Civil War, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

As historical fiction, Charles Frazier’s Varina can be seen as an imagined memoir of the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis—but only barely.

varina It draws heavily from the verified facts about the former Varina Howell of Natchez, but is seamlessly layered with the insightful thoughts and personality of a woman from an attractive belle to an arch and wise matron in her later years. It’s truly a fascinating journey.

It covers her courtship as a young girl with the then-widowed Davis more than a decade her senior, from living on their plantation at Davis Bend near Vicksburg to moving to Washington, D.C., when he was first a congressman from Mississippi, then a U.S. senator, to being secretary of war, and, finally their days after the Civil War.

Davis himself does not get off lightly in her estimation. For example, she confided to one newspaper reporter after his inauguration as the Confederate leader that sometimes even she wanted to murder him. (Married folk can relate!)

But she speaks fondly of him, too, recalling his young man’s dream of being simply a country lawyer who wrote poetry; much as she wistfully recalled her own dream of being First Lady, not of the South, but residing on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., back when Davis was a U.S. senator and war hero. It seemed a likely prospect at the time.

The tale is told through her words to a black man who tracks her down as she is living out her later years in New York. The man, James Blake (or James Brooks), was known as Jimmie Limber when she and Davis took him in as a child from the streets of Washington and raised him, until they were split apart by the war.

As oddly as it might sound to the uninitiated, the story of a black child being raised side by side with their other children is true—at least, for a short time until the war intervened.

Some of the most gripping of the narrative (a la Gone with the Wind) involves Varina and Blake’s flight for Havana and hoped-for sanctuary in an arduous journey that ended on the Florida-Georgia border as their world came crashing down.

Frazier, known for his masterful work Cold Mountain, draws the reader in with broad strokes of often quite profound observation, along with period details, powerful accounts of the hard life of citizens after Sherman’s march, and thoughtful reflection.

For example, how she came about understanding the complex nature of slavery as a child amazed her, how even slight gradations of skin color could be so determinant. It boiled down to the sense “that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed,” one that “traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.”

And it was firmly enforced, in society, in public, in private, in homes and churches, a biblical injunction (Luke 12:47): “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

The South and all in it were beaten down by it, wholly, individually, even the land itself “defaced and haunted with countless places where blood … would keep seeping up for generations to come.”

It makes one wonder, have the scars ever healed?

Frazier has produced a time machine where the reader is immersed in the Civil War era, pondering through the eyes of Varina Howell Davis the complexities, mysteries, brutalities and banalities of days long gone.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Chris Offutt

By Guest Author

On April 10, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 1)

After nearly two decades, award-winning author and screenwriter Chris Offutt of Oxford has released his long-awaited next novel–and this time it is definitive Southern Gothic, as he lays out the story of Country Dark, a rough read about the tragic lives of one family as they face a difficult life situation, and a husband and father who can’t help but take matters into his own hands.

The story chronicles the family’s life beginning in 1954, when 18-year-old Korean war veteran Tucker returns to his Kentucky home and meets Rhonda, the 14-year-old girl who agrees on that day that they should be married. It carries readers through 17 tumultuous years of poverty, prison, and the despair of dealing with the eventual reality that four of their six children struggled with severe emotional or physical disabilities.

Offutt, who grew up in a community of 200 people on dirt roads in the hills of eastern Kentucky, is himself most comfortable in rural settings.

“I tried cities–Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque–and I didn’t like them,” he said. “I now live at the end of a dirt road in Lafayette County.”

Chris Offutt

His mastery in capturing the tone, the language, and the attitudes of the hill people shows through clearly in this tale of a good man who gets pushed too far, and resorts to violence at any any cost to save his large family.

Now an associate professor of English and screenwriting at the University of Mississippi, Offutt earned a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Morehead State University; and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa.

He has scripted five screenplays and two films, and has worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds.

A versatile writer, Offutt’s previous books include My Father, the Pornographer in 2016, along with two other memoirs, No Heroes and The Same River Twice. Other fiction works include the novel The Good Brother and two story collections, Out of the Woods and his first book, Kentucky Straight. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies.

Your new novel, Country Dark, is a story of one man’s passion to keep his family together–a desire matched only by his willingness to eliminate any obstacle that would stand in his way. Tucker, the main character, is a complicated mix of compassion, tenderness, revenge, and violence. What was your inspiration for this character and this story?

People who live in the rural South are often portrayed negatively in the mainstream media, movies, and TV. I wanted to write a novel that showed rural people as smart, self-reliant, resourceful, loyal, and loving.

Initially, I’d planned to write a family saga of three generations. I became so enthralled by Tucker that I stuck with him for the entire book.

The story takes place in rural Kentucky from 1954 through 1971, and the characters’ lives are steeped in hardship and varying levels of despair. Why this time frame, and this place?

The book is set where I grew up. The biggest influence on me was the landscape and the adults. I wanted to examine both. Also, I was interested in writing about the “pre-technology” world of no cell phones and no computers.

People had telephone party-lines in their houses, which meant your neighbors could listen to conversations. As a result, nobody really talked personally. If you wanted to communicate with someone directly, you went to their house. In the hills, it was often shorter and easier to walk through the woods than along the roads.

When main characters Tucker and Rhonda first meet, they decide that day that they want to get married–and they go on to endure much heartbreak during their marriage. What was the glue that held them together so securely?

They met very young under difficult circumstances. They fell in love without quite meaning to–which is how most of us fall in love.

Couples of that era in the hills of Kentucky tended to stick together no matter what. Marriage is compromise and personal growth.

Rhonda and Tucker were lucky–they grew together, not apart. They accepted their difficulties and faced them head on as a team.

In the sad descriptions of Tucker and Rhonda’s disabled children, Hattie, the social worker, reminds her boss that “It’s not black and white here. It’s all gray.” Explain what she meant by that, in this family’s situation.

There is a tendency for many people to reduce everything to either/or, good/bad, black/white. It’s easy, but it’s short-sighted and wrong-headed. You see this often with politicians trying to get votes. It’s a divisive way to see the world, one that essentially translates to “us versus them.” I object to that viewpoint.

All humans are complex individuals who respond to their emotions and to a complicated world.

I’m using “black and white” as a metaphor for polar extremes. Everyone I know lives in the middle–the so-called gray area.

After writing three books of memoirs, why did readers have to wait so long for your next fictional work?

A couple of reasons. I needed to send my sons to college and had very little money when they were in high school. I worked in Hollywood to finance their education, which took me away from novels for eight years.

When they graduated from college, I moved to Mississippi and returned to fiction.

I was writing all along, but not in the sustained way that a novel requires. Right now, I have two other completed books–a collection of stories and another novel. Plus, I’m working on a new novel.

You grew up in rural Kentucky. What brought you to Oxford, and when?

I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to leave my isolated rural environment. As a young man, I hitchhiked out of the hills and lived in several cities, where I never fit in. I then spent the next 30 years trying to get back to the country!

In 2011, I moved to Oxford to teach screenwriting and fiction writing at the University of Mississippi. I live outside of town and have never been happier or more productive.

Your work has been compared to that of the late Larry Brown of Oxford. Did you know him personally? And would you say that is an accurate description of your writing?

Yes, I knew Larry. He was very supportive of my first book, published in 1992. I used to come down and visit him. We’d go fishing and talk about books–in particular, Southern literature.

I’m not objective enough about my own work to know if our writing is similar. If it is, I’m flattered and honored by the comparison. I learned a lot from reading his books. He’s a great writer.

What’s next for your readers?

Novels and short stories. It is my sincere hope that my life is so boring and mundane that it will never again warrant a memoir! All I want to do now is make stuff up.

Chris Offutt will be at Lemuria on Thursday, April 12, at 5:00 to sign and read from Country Dark.

Category: Fiction (Page 7 of 54)

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‘A Shout in the Ruins’ by Kevin Powers is an affecting novel of Southern violence

Author Q & A with Kevin Powers

Finding Her Way: ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller and ‘Motherhood’ by Sheila Heti

A tribute to Jim Harrison by Barry Gifford

Anne Tyler and Eudora Welty

The Past is Female, Too: ‘Varina’ by Charles Frazier

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier’s ‘Varina’ is an immersion in the Civil War South

Author Q & A with Chris Offutt

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