IDEAS // AMERICAN DYSTOPIA, REAL AND IMAGINED
Damn/ed Yankees
Notes On
Ken Kalfus’ 2 A.M. in Little America, Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles, and Ada Trillo’s La Caravana del Diablo
words by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
images by Ada Trillo
EXCERPT //
He told me that a major part of his thinking for the novel was based on the year that he and Saffron lived in Yugoslavia and the civil war there that scattered people throughout Europe. “And we connected with each other—or not—in Berlin, or in Paris, or Prague. But I was also thinking of my grandparents, [who] emigrated from what is now the Ukraine, like many Jews of the 20th century, and they came to New York.” He described how they would meet people from their country in unexpected corners of the city. “In the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, people are always running into each other on Upper Broadway. ‘Oh! You’re from the shtetl someplace!’” said Kalfus, feigning surprise and delight. “I wanted to generalize that and talk a little bit about encountering our neighbors, or family, or friends, in places that no longer make sense.”
Much of our lives are contingent upon circumstance, Kalfus said, and we should think more about that. “The role of fiction in general is to help readers imagine their lives as something different,” he said. “Imagine the lives of other people. Imagine their own lives in different circumstances. ... A lot of the love and compassion that novelists try to convey to their readers ... is [so] they can imagine their own lives and the lives of others differently.”
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