She's been a little off balance her whole life in Minnesota.
Why did you make that choice?ĪP: I wanted her to already be versed in the feeling of foreignness, of otherness. GR: Your protagonist in State of Wonder is Marina Singh, whose mother is a Caucasian American and father is a Hindi. I wanted to do the whole bait and switch, meaning have people focus on something very lucrative and then replace that with something that could make a real difference, a moral difference, not simply an ethical one. That's great, that's just deep novelist territory. It's a political and moral kind of disease. If you've got enough money for an antimalarial, you can survive. GR: One of the big subjects of this book is malaria.ĪP: Malaria is curable-it will kill you unless you have a little bit of money. In Run I was writing about an ichthyologist and started reading a lot of evolutionary biology. My books are very inspired by my books, meaning that things I'm interested in during research for one book spill over into others. So I learned about it first while working on Bel Canto.
Manaus has this amazing opera house built by one of the "rubber barons" of the 19th century. GR: What inspired you to write about the Amazon in State of Wonder?ĪP: I was supposed to go to Manaus with Renée Fleming to see her sing there, but the event was cancelled and we couldn't go. The book I was obsessed with during adolescence was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. They can't get to the rest of normal society. I think that's why I love to write books about people who are cut off in some way. I can throw 300 balls up in the air and catch 'em at the end. Around the time I was writing Bel Canto I thought, if everyone thinks I'm writing fairy tales, I'm going to write fairy tales! I think I did sort of turn in that direction.ĪP: What would it really mean to write fairy tales? Oddly, the way in which I think I write fairy tales I'm such a heavily plotted writer. Back when I was young, I thought I was writing these straight-up, realistic books, but the New York Times book review for The Patron Saint of Liars by Alice McDermott said that it was "a fairy tale, a delight." Since then, every book I published got viewed through that lens.
Goodreads: State of Wonder reads like a fairy tale in some ways.
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