The Unbound Book Festival is happening in Columbia this weekend and KBIA has been speaking with some of this year’s featured authors.
Idra Novey’s latest novel, Take What You Need, explores the way art can address divides between family members…and between the nation.
Novey recently sat down with KBIA’s Lilley Halloran.
Lilley Halloran: First off, I would love to hear how this book came about. What inspired you to write it?
Idra Novey: When I go home to the town where I grew up, in the Allegheny Highlands, which is in northern Appalachia, there are many homes that are boarded over and there’s nobody in them.
My brother lives on a street where there are a number of homes that are vacant. There's only two occupied homes on his street. So that was sort of the street where this book took place, you know, in a fictional version in my mind.
And I was just thinking, whose art could be in there? Who has done something extraordinary and we may never know? And what are we missing out on as a country when we're not open to taking that art seriously?
I think if we can't cross the divides to have discussions about art and beauty, how are we going to cross them in order to have discussions about our future as citizens of the same country?Idra Novey
Halloran: The novel really excellently explores the nation's changing political and physical landscape. Why did you feel the need to explore this theme?
Novey: Well, I think if we can't cross the divides to have discussions about art and beauty, how are we going to cross them in order to have discussions about our future as citizens of the same country?
And I think that art, for me, seems like a meaningful way — since that's what I do — to think about like, what, what can I do as an artist that can talk about our divides? And how are we deepening them through the art that we make?
Are we opening them through the art that we make? And how can that move us forward as a sort of more functional country?
Halloran: A really main tenant of the book is that it involves two characters, Jean and Leah, navigating their estranged relationship. And I wanted to know why you felt this estrangement and distance between them was something that was important to write about.
Novey: Well you know, I originally was going to do a nonfiction book, and I started interviewing people in my town.
Almost everyone I interviewed brought up someone that they were estranged from. There was this real pain about feeling estranged from people who had been significant in their lives and to their sense of self.
And so, I think when you write a book, you have your initial intentions, and then you have to follow the course of the book where it goes.
And I think often you know you’re getting closer to the book that you're meant to write when your initial intentions fall away and you're surprised. Because then I think you're more likely to surprise your reader.
Halloran: At Unbound, you're speaking on a panel about translating literary works. So with that in mind, how did your work as a translator play into this book’s process and also the storyline?
Novey: So Leah and Geraldo are a Spanish speaking family and they are speaking Spanish as they travel. And so I was imagining their conversations in the car happening in Spanish and translating them into English because the novel is written in English. But I think the sensibility of their humor to me was very much happening in Spanish.
When you translate, you have to think about what makes this author's voice distinctive. And what can you do in the course of a sentence to convey that?
And that has shaped how I think about voices in fiction and how a character's voice comes alive. It's very much the same questions I would ask while translating another writer.
See more Unbound Conversations here and see more including the complete schedule of events on the Unbound Book Festival website.
