Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Q: Death in his hands portrays a heroine even lonelier than the protagonists of your other novels.
I wrote the draft several years ago, before Eileen [son premier roman, publié en 2015]. I wanted a project that would keep me company, that I wouldn’t have the pressure to consider publishing. It’s a very different, unplanned process, a kind of documentary writing. Every day I wrote 1000 words without planning or looking at what I had written the day before. I was in the present and motivated by the thoughts that came to me. It allowed me to understand my character and the way his brain worked. She is not disorganized, but lives in the present moment. She lives to the rhythm of her rheumatism. I went back two or three years ago and found something pure.
Q: In interviews, you have already made a connection between the subject of your latest book, the old widow who finds a note about a murdered woman, and the death of two loved ones, your brother Darius and a mentor, by 2017.
It happened long before, it had no connection with my writing. It happened between the time I finished my second novel and its publication. I couldn’t have written another book after what happened. It was too painful. That said, everything I’ve written is about people I’ve lost. It is an unconscious preparation. I am someone who often thinks about death.
Q: Where does this interest in death come from?
Probably just being alive and wondering what’s going to happen. For each of us, the idea that our mind will one day no longer exist is an impossible concept to contemplate. It inspires all kinds of existential questions.
Q: Why is isolation so important in your work?
I’m interested in characters who come to terms with their own minds. When alone, the characters are at their most honest. They don’t show off to others, they don’t adapt their identity to the situation. The way someone’s behavior changes depending on whether they are alone or with this or that person is very revealing. For me, the tension is between the inside and the public facade of a person.
Q: As in Eileenthe heroine of Death in his hands is stuck in an abusive relationship.
When her husband dies, she realizes she was imprisoned in her marriage. While sinking into dementia, she explores her past from a new perspective. Close relationships have negative potential. A tension between the characters creates the drama.
Q: Your next novel, Lapvona, will take place in medieval Eastern Europe. Is there a link with the Croatian origins of your mother?
It is a fictional village that is possibly in Eastern Europe. Over the course of a year, we follow the lives of the villagers and the noble who manages the village. It evokes in a certain way my ancestral history, but there is nothing biographical. I wanted a world that would be unfamiliar to us, that would have no connection with current American politics. I wanted to detach myself from the place where I live.
Q: What aspects of American politics do you want to run away from?
We have been through long lockdowns and find ourselves in a terrifying political moment. We are preparing for an election campaign where everything could collapse.
Q: You are also preparing a novel about a Chinese woman who moves to San Francisco. Does it echo your personal story, your Iranian Jewish father who had to flee the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini?
It is a misrepresentation. I am not Jewish. I also have Finnish ancestry, but that’s not part of my identity either. My genealogy is 50-50 Croatian and Iranian, but people like to emphasize the exotic, non-white part of my identity. The media are more interested in an Iranian-American novelist. I am an American novelist whose parents come from two different countries.
Death in his hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
Fayard
252 pages