Audrey Niffenegger
by Nicky Pellegrino

Even setting up an interview with Audrey Niffenegger is interesting. No one knows what time zone she’s in or how many minutes she’ll have free to chat on the phone. The author of the mega bestselling The Time Traveler’s Wife is in hot demand right now, particularly with the recent release of the movie based on her novel. But when I reach her in her Seattle hotel room she seems quite unhurried and rather philosophical about the phenomenon Time Traveler has become.

“I know it sounds like an odd thing to say but the movie has made the audience for Time Traveler far bigger than it should have been,” she says. “I haven’t seen it myself but from what I understand its sentimentality quota is quite high. I’ve had e-mails from people who’ve read the book after seeing the film and they’ve written to chastise me because it’s not what they’d expected.”

Niffenegger herself has absolutely no intention of seeing the movie. “I’m the opposite of curious about it,” she tells me. “I have difficulty forgetting stuff once I’ve seen it so forever after Rachel McAdam and Eric Bana would be how my characters looked to me in my brain. And they’re not how I see my characters. How could they be, they’re real. So I decided it’s probably better to leave it alone.”

She does, however, have to live with the weight of expectation created by the success of the book and film. “A lot of people who loved it wanted another hit of the same thing,” she admits.

Niffenegger’s not sure she could have written another Time Traveler even if she’d wanted to. That book took five years to complete and more time to edit and publicise. “By the time I sat down to write again my head was in a different place,” she says. “I think you just have to write what you’re writing. If you try to write the same book over and over again you become Dan Brown.”

The result of setting out to write something different was Her Fearful Symmetry (Jonathon Cape, NZ$38.99), a contemporary version of a classic Victorian gothic novel. It’s a very quirky ghost story about two mirror-image twins, set in and around London’s Highgate cemetery and it took some of her fans by surprise.

“In Her Fearful Symmetry sentimentality is absent,” explains Niffenegger. “It’s an astringent book, it’s meant to be that way. I’m not trying to tug at people’s heartstrings. But the movie of Time Traveler might have led them to expect something more sentimental from me.”

While it was released to patchy reviews, Her Fearful Symmetry is exactly what Niffenegger wanted it to be. “I was very happy with it. I think it’s a better book than Time Traveler.” she says. “And the people who like it, really like it. Then there are those who are disappointed because it’s so different and others who are just mad at me and they tend to hop onto Amazon and write mean things. I find it fascinating. I don’t feel it’s about me or my book in a way.”

It might be easier for Niffenegger to retain some perspective given that her creativity extends far beyond writing. She is also an acclaimed artist, print-maker and bookmaker and still teaches at the Chicago Centre for Book and Paper Arts she helped to found.

Once she has finished on the publicity trail for Her Fearful Symmetry (she’s in New Zealand next month for the NZ Post Writers and Readers Week) Niffenegger will be heading home to get ready for an exhibition of her work at Chicago’s Printworks Gallery. Her artworks are filled with images of death and driven by the same fascination with the bizarre that fuels her writing. “Ideas and themes run back and forth,” she says. “In terms of subject matter I don’t think, that’s a ‘novel’ idea or that’s a ‘painting’ idea.”

She’s been fascinated by the dark and the peculiar ever since she was a tiny child. “I think when you’ve had a normal suburban upbringing you have the luxury of being fascinated by violence and oddity,” she explains. “For me it must have started off with The Red Shoes where she gets her feet cut off, the bloody versions of all those old fairytales. Even when things were benign I’d think of them in ways that were disturbing.”

The novel she’s currently working on sounds especially bizarre. Called The Chinchilla Girl in Exile it’s about a nine-year-old girl with hypertrichosis – she’s covered in hair – and what happens when she goes to school. At least that’s what it’s about at the moment.

Niffenegger says mainly she’s thinking about differences, and what it feels like to look really different. These are things she’s thought about for a long time and, since she’s only 25 pages into writing the book, may be thinking about for quite some time to come.

“One of the reasons I’m so slow is I don’t like to begin, I really like the middle and I’m sad when it’s over,” she says, “so I can be in the middle for a long time.”

*Audrey Niffenegger will be appearing in Wellington during the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week which runs from 26 February to 21 March. The full programme can be found at www.festival.nzpost.co.nz. Tickets are available from Ticketek.


The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
Text Publishing, $38
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

The Imperfectionists is likely to be on lots of people’s must-read lists this year as Tom Rachman is generating his share of heat on the literary scene. The book is a series of linked short stories, rather than a novel proper, about a group of people who work on a declining international newspaper in Rome.

Rachman makes his way through the newsroom, not so much drawing his characters as skewering them mercilessly. The book opens with Lloyd Burko, the washed up Paris correspondent desperate for a story and so outdated he doesn’t even have e-mail, and he pretty much sets the tone for the rest. There’s Arthur Gopal the lazy obituary writer who discovers ambition after a family tragedy, Hardy Benjamin the business reporter whose weakness turns out to be a man, hapless Winston Cheung and his ill-fated bid to be the Cairo stringer, and lonely, obsessive copy editor Ruby Zaga. There’s even a portrait of the newspaper’s most devoted reader, who still devours every single word of every issue even though she’s fallen a decade behind in her reading.

A former editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Rachman knows his newspapers and the staff he’s dreamt up for this one is well imagined and carefully drawn. What he’s most concerned with, as the title makes clear, are imperfections, the flaws, failures and secret shames of his characters, and he is utterly pitiless as he strips away their veneer and lays them bare. There are no cheap tricks here to make the reader feel sorry for these people, no poignancy to speak of. Rachman gives the paper and its staff the same clear-eyed treatment any hard-nosed news reporter worth their salt would give a story.

This is an elegant and sometimes uncomfortable piece of writing. It’s an assured debut and I’d be amazed if Rachman’s name doesn’t turn up on an awards shortlist somewhere. I’m not entirely sure I liked it though…possibly because I found it so hard to like anybody in it.

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino, in addition to being a succcesful author of popular fiction, (her latest The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her next, Recipe for Life is due from Orion in April), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above reviews were first published on January 31.