davidtreuer.com
Novels:
Little
The Hiawatha
Dr Apelles
Essay Collection:
Native American Fiction
here is the list of top 10 books by dead writers, books one cannot do without, books one must read to get into heaven (or whatever you call it) no particular order:
1. Lolita
2. Pale Fire
3. Remembrance of Things Past
4. Zeno’s Conscience
5. Senility (or Emilio’s Carnival)
6. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
7. Collected Stories of Raymond Carver
8. Mrs Dalloway
9. The Group
10. Austerlitz
Ton ten books by NOT dead people:
1. The Time of Our Singing
2. The Emperor’s Children (I know, I know–but it really is that good)
3. Austerlitz (Sebald is, in my mind, sort of dead and sort of not)
4. Geek Love (a classic)
5. Beloved
6. Illywacker
7. In Praise of the Stepmother
8. White Noise
9. Mystery Train (non-fiction) and Lipstick Traces
10. Collected Stories of TC Boyle
11. All The Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian
12. The Farewell Symphony
That’s all I can think of now. But it is 6 AM and I’m just going to bed.
Reading now: Feast of Love–a wonderful thing, that book. Not what you’d ever expect.
David Treuer Q&A
Q: How did you come up with the idea for this book? What attracted you to the idea of a document only one man can read?
A: The story (and the characters cursed/blessed to live it out) always comes first. In this case, Dr. Apelles—a special, unique, singular, rather quietly beautiful human being; terrified of the world, terrified of being “mis-known” and misunderstood—appeared as a person with a dilemma. Namely, how to let himself be known (as an individual and as a Native person) without sacrificing any part of his sovereign self and while dodging and ducking the stories that many (most?) people tell themselves about Indians. It seemed to him (and to me, his kindly father) that the best way to “become himself” was to dive into the very source of his problem: the romantic, lace-edged, valentine-hued, comforting, and often maudlin stories about his (and my) people. But in a way his problem is the problem that we all face. How do we let others know us? How do we tell our own stories that preserves our integrity and singularity to the people we want to love and who we want to love us? How do we all end up translating ourselves and with what languages?
Q: As a follow-up, do similar documents—ones written in languages dangerously close to being forgotten—exist in the real world? Why does language preservation matter?
A: The sad fact is: we will lose up to 90 percent of the linguistic diversity in the world over the next 100 years. We will all witness the extinction of nine out of ten languages in our lifetime. So if such documents don’t exist now, just wait a few election cycles.
Q: People have called Translation an “edgy” love story, a postmodern, “Escher-esque” tale, a literary satire, and a cultural statement. How would you categorize the book, if you had to?
A: I would call it: “the book everyone told me I shouldn’t write but I simply had to even though it doesn’t try to fit any category as much as it tries to transcend them all.” I would call it: “a metaphysical valentine written by a book and dedicated to another, sitting like an old couple that can’t stop touching one another on a bookshelf in a forgotten corner of the reader’s own heart.”
Q: Do you identify particularly strongly with any of the characters in the book?
A: No. I am much more personable and social than Apelles, not as beautiful as Campaspe, not as handsome as Bimaadiz, and not as self-reliant as Eta. And they all have a lot more sex than I do in many more pastoral and public places.
Q: Why did you decide to tell two intertwined love stories? How do they relate to one another? What is to be gained from their coexistence and relationship? How do they inform each other?
A: They help each other out. Apelles manages to spring clear of the valentine that seeks to trap him (springing like a heart from a pop-up book), while, at the same time, his life is informed by that valentine. Bimaadiz and Eta’s story is like a valentine: silly, ideal, a little purple around the edges, dented by the thumb in the supermarket of erotic romance, ready for picking. But, ultimately, Apelles and Compaspe have a more mature, “real world,” compelling, intricate, and soaring relationship than their bookish counterparts. But they all feed one another.
Q: You’ve drawn some fairly critical attention for your nonfiction book, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. To what extent do you think Native American identity shapes your—or anyone else’s—literary endeavors?
A: Well, charting the exact ratio of “identity” to “influence”—that is, the degree to which the author’s identity matters and the degree to which the books we’ve read, the people we know, the schools we’ve attended, the jobs we’ve had, the TV shows we like, the tragedies (communal and individual) we’ve endured, the hearts we’ve broken, the times our own hearts have been bruised matters—seems kind of pointless after a certain point. Obviously one’s personal identity (largely a fiction of our own making “drawn from life”) is hugely important . . . to the person. As for books, as for literary endeavors, well that’s the strange magic of books, isn’t it? They somehow exist inside us and outside us at the same time. They are of us, but they are always “of” other books, too. I think it would be tragic to only or even mostly interpret Hamlet as an expression of “English-ness” or of Shakespeare’s identity as an “English man.” It would rob Hamlet of its magic and wouldn’t help explain in any lasting way why the play is important and moving to many people. The same goes for Beloved. And The Magic Mountain. And A Boy’s Own Story. And The English Patient. But this is exactly what happens more often than not to Native American stories. The result: “red-faced minstrelsy.” Speaking of the book I am working on now: it is as much a mixture of my self, my love, my ambition, my people, my tastes—running from Thomas Mann to Christina Aguilera and back again—and my devotion to my craft as anything I’ve ever written.
Q: Who are some of your greatest literary influences?
A: Svevo, Calvino, Borges, Nabokov, Saramago, Antunes, Queroz, Ondaatje, Morrison, Mann, Proust, Nabokov, Woolf, Swift, Longus, Voltaire, Poe, Marvell, Yeats, Muldoon, Pamuk, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Peter Carey, any writer who writes as all writers should: that is, ecstatically, all-encompassingly, completely, bravely, going for the whole thing, and not playing it safe
Q: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Was it a specific moment, or a gradual process?
A: Right now I can’t remember wanting to be a writer. Right now I’d much rather be inside one of my books rather than at my desk writing one! I think I’ll just slip between the covers . . .
Hello All–Check out the “last line” section of esquire.com for a new essay about my new novel NEVERLAND. It’s prurient, but it’s got heart.
For those of you who have come here FROM the Esquire site, here’s the exceprt from the new novel that I wrote about. Let me know what you think. Of course, excerpting a novel is a bit like interrupting sex: it’s usually ill-advised and not worth the trouble. But here it is anyway, and like interrupted sex, it probably won’t make much sense.
Lily was on the couch watching television while Windy made hotdish in the kitchen. Weissman let the door close behind him and he stood just inside the door for a few minutes while he warmed up, surveying the scene. Lily looked up and smiled warmly at Weissman, and since there was no rush (and perhaps because they had seen one another so recently in the hotel laundry and their passion reached such a pitch that now, in the warm incandescent light of the house, they were a little embarrassed) she turned her attention back to the television. Windy acknowledged Weissman but stayed in the kitchen after informing Weissman that he needed to hurry and finish his hotdish because he was going to another wake and Weissman was welcome to come along. Weissman, who had grown very cold while talking with Caspar, kept his coat and gloves on and let himself warm up by the door. This way he could pretend like he was gazing in on Lily’s life, as he was simply a viewer and not part of the view. It was a pleasant sensation.
Lily sat as she had before, when he had first come to Windy’s house after visiting the sacred fire at the school; with her legs tucked underneath her and her arms folded under her breasts, breasts that he now knew by touch. She wore a loose, comfortable-looking sweatshirt. She must have woken up not too long before because her straight beautiful hair was pulled up casually and folded into a black scrunchie at the back of her head, which exposed her long neck and smooth, unblemished skin. She didn’t wear any make-up.
Weissman turned his attention to the television. He once again admired the large, sleek, flatscreen attached to the far wall. The program itself was confusing. The program looked like a talkshow. A studio audience mostly made up of teenagers and youths in their twenties sat in stacked rows, like those of an amphitheatre, which bent around a small stage. A very attractive woman in her late twenties with a microphone and ample cleavage walked both through the audience and gave the audience members a chance to speak into both the microphone and the cleavage before adding her own comments. The occasion had an informal feel to it. The kids in the audience wore hip T-shirts emblazoned with catchy or cryptic sayings. Their hair—male and female—was architecturally messy. From what Weissman could see they looked happy and enthusiastic. After talking to a few audience members the host spoke into the microphone and addressed the camera after which the program faded into a music video.
Weissman couldn’t catch what the artist’s name was. It flashed across the screen too quickly, and all he managed to read was the last part of her name, “—ilera” and the title of the song, “Candy Man.” What he did catch was that she was a very petite platinum blonde with an enormous vocal range. The song itself sounded to Weissman like a send-up of an Andrews Sisters number. But the vocalist was much sexier than the Andrews sisters had been, that was for sure. The story or theme of the video was a pastiche of images from the 1940s, set mostly in a very stagey version of a USO club. The singer was dressed in a body-hugging version of a sailor’s dress whites with her cap set at a jaunty angle. As soon as Weissman’s eyes had absorbed the cocktail of music, image, and song the video cut to another scene—this time the singer had joined the audience of shouting servicemen and was dressed in a baby pink dress. The jitterbuggers of Weissman’s era never looked so good. Then the video jumped again to the singer made up like Rosie the Riveter or the female factory worker from Ypsilanti, MI featured in the We Can Do It! poster. Her hair under a scarf and a red work shirt clinging to her ribs, her naval exposed and her breasts pushing out the top. Weissman wished, with a sudden ache, that Norman Rockwell had painted this singer instead of the scarily brawny woman featured on the Saturday Evening Post. The tune itself was catchy and Weissman felt his toes and feet beginning to move in time with the peppy music. The reinvention of WWII in the video made the war, at least this side of it, seem like a party that everyone was invited to. Black and white soldiers jumped and jived and marched in integrated formation, which made Weissman chuckle. The song ended in a large dance number, the singer having lost most of her clothes. She was clad now only in baby blue sequined hot pants and matching halter top—a combination of stewardess, officer, and prostitute. Needless to say, Weissman enjoyed the video, even though it seemed to come from a different world.
When the song was over and the program returned to the studio, Lily dimmed the volume and turned to Weissman.
“You should come sit next to me.”
He took off his coat and shoes and walked over to the couch and sat next to Lily. She didn’t change her position on the couch except to reach out and take Weissman’s hand. They both watched the television instead of gazing at one another. It was very pleasant for Weissman. Very comforting and family-feeling. His heart surged and he imagined sitting like this into old age, which was a very strange feeling because he was already old, but he didn’t feel that way. He felt quite young actually, not just physically, but emotionally as well. The simple thrill of sitting next to a very beautiful girl on a couch holding hands and watching music videos made him feel as though he had stepped out of his age. And there was also the fact that his heart beat wildly and his thoughts churned and turned, jumping from subject to subject.
“What is this program?” asked Weissman with awe.
“Oh its nothing, a video program. On MTV.”
Weissman had heard of MTV, of course, everyone had. But he had never watched or heard MTV even though he, and many others, made casual references to the “MTV generation” or the “MTV-ication” of America, by which they meant the plastification and packaging of culture and art itself, ready for easy consumption. If he’d known he’d enjoy it so much he would have been less critical.
“I know you’re thinking this is a very silly thing to watch—”
“Not at all!”
“—but it’s actually pretty amusing. It’s a program called TRL, which stands for Total Request Live. Audience members talk and chat and choose their favorite videos, which are then played, and then more talking, and more videos. Obviously, the program was given a playlist and told that certain videos have to be played. But it’s fun anyway.”
On the program the chat with the audience drew to an end and another video began. This time Weissman caught the name of the artist: Christina Aguilera. The video was entitled “Ain’t No Other Man.” The video was once again set in the 1940s. This time the director had chosen a noir theme, complete with femme fatale juke joint singer and private eye in double-breasted suit, but had opted to omit any kind of plot in lieu of a sequence of dance numbers ranging from on-stage (where Aguilera was clad in a silver sequined dress) to the dressing room (white satin and tulle corset) to a mixed-race slumber party scene (red scoop neck sweater and white cotton panties). Weissman was once again speechless. He suddenly hated his record player and his Mahler records and never wanted to see them or hear them again. When the video was over Lily once again turned the volume down.
“When I was little, I always wanted to be an actress who specializes in music videos. Watching this stuff now seems silly, especially with you because I’m watching with your eyes and mine at the same time, and this seems like a program for children.”
“I don’t think it is childish at all. And it’s certainly not for children.” He was thinking of the corset.
“Maybe. But it was made by children, don’t you think? But as I was saying, when I was younger I wanted to be in videos like this. I didn’t want to be a singer or a dancer or even a regular actress like many girls want to be. I just wanted to be in these videos. I wanted those worlds to be my world. I wanted to be someone else’s fantasy. Life is so much easier that way. I wanted to borrow their fantasies. No wonder America is in love with music videos and movies and such things: it is much safer to borrow someone else’s fantasies than it is to make your own. Or to have your own. When all you can imagine for yourself is more pain and sorrow and bad luck and uncertainty, it seems much better to borrow a world that always keeps you entertained and you can be sexy without fear of repercussion and everyone’s always dancing and instead of talking you sing and everyone loves everyone else and even enemies dance out their aggression instead of shooting one another.”
Weissman suddenly remembered the musicals of his day. Sound of Music, Camelot, South Pacific, even West Side Story. World War II spawned these productions—the terror life sending ordinary citizens into the arms of musical fantasies that were just as Lily had described. Much safer indeed to live inside someone else’s fantasy indeed.
They lapsed into silence and let Total Request Live do the speaking for them. Weissman’s thoughts turned to his high school years in Yellow Springs. This was the early 1940s and perhaps his thoughts went bouncing back there because of Christina Aguilera. She seemed like an obvious stimulus. So naturally his thoughts returned to this time. What was unexpected was that Christina Aguilera’s sexy video antics provided inspiration for a new series of thoughts about writing, and he was once again overcome with the desire to write. His thought was this: that new and unexpected literary styles aren’t shocking as much as comforting, that the unfamiliar can be very comforting and we can find our true expression in the strange. Of course, Bertoldt Brecht (his own father’s favorite playwright) had realized this seventy years before Weissman sat on the couch with Lily watching MTV on The Reservation.
Weissman asked Lily quietly, “Do you mind if I go write a little bit?” He needed to put down in words the thoughts that were cruising around his dome. He wanted to tell her about his conversation with Louis Boisson, but that could wait a few minutes.
“Of course not. Please write. But I have a favor to ask: could you stay here? Do you think you can write here on the couch next to me? That would be very comforting. If not, I understand, and you can go in one of the back bedrooms or even sit at the kitchen table. We can tell Windy to keep his cooking to the countertops.”
“The couch, your side, they will be fine. Better than fine. Perfect.”
Lily smiled. Weissman smiled. Then he got up and retrieved a pen and a pad of hotel paper from his coat pocket and then returned to the couch and began to write, with Lily and MTV in the background. His mind was split into three sections: one part stayed with Lily on he couch and watched Total Request Live. Another part skated far ahead into the future where he imagined being far away from The Reservation with Lily, someplace they could be happy forever. The third section of his brain, the writing part, wandered back to his own adolescence. Taken all together, he felt he could live on the couch with Lily for eternity and be happy. He was happy.
well, it had to happen. 8 months and 640pp later, the novel is finished. yep. done. usually it takes me 5 years to write a book so either i must be on to something or . . . well. or i’m on to something. we’ll see. i’ve managed to wander off in a new direction again, can’t bear repeating myself. this new novel is a strange, accessible, beast.
other than that, we’re getting ready for the paperback release of THE TRANSLATION OF DR APELLES slated for January 2008. So get your gift cards ready. APELLES will be cheaper soon.
oh–and look out for a piece on Esquire.com in the next month or two. in their “last line” section.
so . . . its been a while. sorry about that (it’s hard to apologize to millions but i’ll do my best).
i’ve been in paris, montreal, san antonio, wisconsin, home, wisconsin, home, montreal, paris. et cetera. for the last two months.
paris was wonderful as usual: the stellar group at Albin Michel were stellar as usual. Thanks Francis Geffard, Anne-Emmanuelle, Sabine, and the rest. I was there with Charles D’Ambrosio and Craig Davidson–both wonderful short story writers and great company. Read RUST and BONE and also THE DEAD FISH MUSEUM if you want to be reminded of why short stories can be so potent.
Montreal was incredible. I’d never been there before. San Antonio as well. Beautiful, despite the crickets.
What’s new on this end you ask? I now have 500pp of the new novel. Hush hush. But it’s almost done. And hard at work on the book about modern rez life. So if you’re a rezzy person and what to talk about what life is like for YOU–feel free to drop me a line.
Reading: Camus: Nuptials and Roth: The Professo of Desire and Richard Powers: The Gold Bug Variatons.
Hello all and everyone. I lied. I said that I would write a daily blog. I hereby formally apologize to the 3 people that care . . .!
In other news: the NYT (A09) announced today that I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for my work on a non-fiction book about contemporary reservation life. I am pretty pleased. Honored. The writing itself is going very well. So that’s a relief.
And a plug for the book of a friend: Mohsin Hamid’s THE RELUCANT FUNDAMENTALIST is an amazing book. Read it. Most of all, BUY IT. If you want a truly unique and strange tale about the terrifying paths the heart can take in this post 9/11 world, read this. Don’t read anything else.
Evidently the NALS conference in Michigan this last weekend was a success for everyone involved.
From what I hear there were really funny jokes made at my mother’s expense and wonderful assessments of my character and intellect were produced by people I have never met or barely know.
I don’t much like talking about myself, my experiences or feelings or even my private tragedies. And I don’t like talking about OTHER people’s tragedies or habits or feelings or motivations, especially when I don’t know them (or their mothers).
I DO however, love talking about issues and ideas and the various struggles we are all engaged in to make things better, to make the world safe for indigeniety.
I welcome any and all comments on this here blog about my work or your own work and will gladly post comments (like I did with college students and high school students around the country) about my USER’S MANUAL and any other books. If any of the presenters on my work would like to post their papers here, they are welcome to and I will gladly respond. And if anyone working on my work wants an interview I would be happy to do that.
Given the overwhelmingly positive things people had to say at NALS I would have thought that I’d get more feedback here. Please do. It’d be fun.
Now back to work people. And be safe out there.
David
So . . . . the big NALS (Native Amerian Literature Studies) conference is coming up. As I mentioned before–there is a paper being presented entitled “IS Treuer’s USER’S MANUAL a User’s MANUAL for DUMMIES?”
And . . . one recent blogger has suggested that my stance that all books (in this case N.A. fiction) are related to other books is indicative of a kind of “STOCKHOLM SYNDROME” (that I am identifying with my “captors”–my captors being western “influence” or”contamination”), I thought I’d condense my argument about fiction (since it seems to be eluding and escaping many people’s notice. My points below have not been proofed, so pardon my typos and whatnot. Here it goes:
* My main POINT in NAF was in some ways very modest: I began with a
question largely posed from my perspective as a writer: what are our
books made from? That is–where do we get the images, ideas,
characters, scenes, and language (all the building blocks f fiction)?
Do they come from the “culture” and if not, where?
* I was also motivated by a concern which was: I READ and HEARD a lot
of other critics making arguments for the culturality of NAF: that our
novels derived from our respective cultures pretty much to the
exclusion of all else. This was NOT the way I wrote. AND–my work as a
speaker and translator of OJIBWE gave me a different perspective in
that, in the case of OJibwe writers, I did not see many points of
connection between the texts and oral performances I translate and the
novels I taught in my classes. SO there seemed to be a disconnect
(sometimes willful at other times wishful) between the NOVELS and what
people were saying about them. Why the disconnect? Why the insistence
on reading novels AS INDIAN CULTURE rather than as SUGGESTING OR
CREATING SEMBLANCES of INDIAN CULTURE?
* I purposely did NOT want to address the identity of the writers of
these texts. If felt like cheating, and, if I was to talk about a
writer and what they intended or thought or how they saw their texts I
would have to make assessments of their lives and characters and that
felt disrespectful to them and to the literature.
* I also did not address the body of scholarship that has been growing
for the past 30 years in the field of Native American Literary
Criticism. Primarily because I wanted to push away everything around
the few texts in question and to look at them and only them in order
to better hear their sounds. I state CLEARLY in NAF that identity,
politics, tribe, and history are very important for understanding
anything but FOR THE PRESENT MOMENT I chose to ignore those
things–other critics have been doing a great job bringing those
issues to bear on literature for the last 30 years. I don’t need to
repeat it.
* I also read an enormous amount of scholarship about NAF that never,
not once, not ever, quoted directly from a novel in order to
understand the novel. And the same for essays or articles that took
into account more than theme or structure and included imagine,
language, metaphor, character, setting, description . . . NOT one of
the things I read really dealt with style at all. I found this
troubling.
So I embarked on NAF. And my conclusions:
* All texts (like all identities) are constructed.
* All cultures (lived and literary) are largely inherited without our
knowledge and through the miracle of the imagination and life are
constantly in a process of transformation.
* All texts (no matter who wrote them) are more closely related to
other texts, and less related to an individual author’s identity and
vision. BARTHES’ “Death of the Author” covers this quite well.
* The texts i treated (and I treated individual texts in individual
essays–not careers or arcs or ouevres) seemed to me VERY closely
related to other texts, in particular to texts from the Western
TRADITIONS (plural) of Romanticism, Realism, Greek Epic, American
Naturalism to name a few. This is hardly unusual and is to be found in
every single genre of fiction–Asian American, African American, et
cetera. This is not a crime. BELOVED is no less powerful because
Morrison drew on the Oresteia and Faulkner. This is a TRUTH and it is
a STRENGTH and in NO WAY suggests that a fiction is a fraud or a phony
or not “INDIAN” or not worth considering. ALL FICTIONS are FRAUDS, and
they counterfeit new fictions on the paper of older fictions. The only
novel not worth considering is the poorly written one with terrible
ideas masquerading as truth. And there are many of these passing under the guise of “Indian truth.”
* I did NOT arrive at a conclusion about the “Indian-ness” or a given
text or author–I did not assess the attributes of what makes
something or someone Indian or not Indian. I DID discover that NAF is
largely made up out of other fictions, particularly WESTERN fictions,
on their way to making their own worlds and creating their own visions
that are unique and powerful and original.
* I DID discover that in order for our genre to continue and to grow
we must see our fictions as suspended in and spinning their own part
of a larger web of texts. This is what lends them their power and
beauty and sense.
* If we insist on seeing NAF as channeling or evoking Indian culture
we run two risks: our discussions about literature devolve to a
discussion of what an author IS, and it opens us upto the kinds of
harmful cultural frauds like CARTER and NASDIJJ because we don’t
believe the TEXT; we, temporarily at least, believe THEM, and all of
us can be fooled. We should have been wise to CARTER and NASDIJJ
because of the language and images they deployed–all of it
derivative.
* Text is TEXT–mostly. It can be many other things, but first and
foremost it is made out of inherited recycled materials (other texts).
Text is NOT life and it is NOT culture. CULTURE is lived by people.
Books are not alive any more than you can eat a painting of a banana.
* Novels are powerful because they CONVINCE, not because they are
REAL. We are convinced for a number of reasons, some personal and some
communal. Much can be gained by interrogating what we find convincing.
well well what’s new? finished Book I of the new novel. Back to working on the non-fiction book about “rez life.” Have 75pp or so of that. Very different modes to be working in at the same time. But . . . . productive. I wrote APELLES the same time I was writing the USER’S MANUAL and that worked out okay I think. Though, and I find this kind of funny–some joker at a Native Lit conference is “questioning” my USER’S MANUAL. The title of his paper is: “Is Treuer’s ‘User’s Manual’ a User’s Manual for DUMMIES?”
I think I should be offended–sounds like a summary dismissal. But it’s actually not a bad idea. We should have “user’s manuals” for all great literature: Proust, Nabokov, Joyce, Morrison, Marquez, Woolf. We should have monographs that show the inner workings of complicated books that do not dumb them down but ARE written in “everyday” language as opposed to academic jargonese. I do think my next bit of scholarly writing will be on three writers–MORRISON, MARQUEZ, and SARAMAGO and will investigate 1. are they all magical realists? and 2. do they belong together at all? I taught a course on this question with fascinating results. The students were amazing and really helped a lot. Needless to say, it will be a while before I get to it.
Oh–and I have a new author photo. Thank god.
D
It’s official. The release date for the paperback of THE TRANSLATION OF DR APELLES has been moved to the Spring of 2008. We were squeezed in the fall–not enough time for advance publicity and cover design et cetera. But I hear Spring is the new Fall, so all is cool.
New jacket. New Author photo. All that stuff.
After my 3 week blitz on the new novel NEVERLAND I was left standing with 184 pages–the first section of what will most likely be 3 sections. Whew. Now I getting to work on it more slowly, in a more considered fashion while I am also working on the non-fiction project. A more sane approach I think.
That’s it. Hope all is well with everyone.
David
