Big treat for you today! I have an interview with Katharina Hagena, author of The Taste of Apple Seeds, plus a giveaway and an except of the book. You get it all today!
I was initially attracted to The Taste of Apple Seeds, because the main character has the same name as my beloved great-grandmother, Iris, and because Iris is a librarian. I thought this was fate! Only after a little digging did I find out that The Taste of Apple Seeds was originally published in German and has been making a splash all over Europe! Also, look at the beautiful cover! I have also been a big fan on contrast in photographs and the image of the young girl's blue coat and stockings against the brown is absolutely stunning to me. Ok, enough about the cover and on to the interview.
Interview with Katharina Hagena
1.The
Taste of Apple Seeds is a beautifully written book full of
love and loss - what originally sparked your interest in writing?
My interest in writing has been sparked by reading.
I don't think I am one of these writers who feel that their life has been so
interesting that others have to know about it, too. But I have always had an
insatiable greed for stories. However, sometimes there are stories that I
urgently want to read but, unfortunately, they don't exist. And so I have to
make them myself.
2. Can you tell us a little about your average
writing day?
It takes me a long time, years in fact, to finish a
book. The writing stage comes last and since I don't want it to be interrupted
by further research, by major changes of maybe the structure or the ending, I
have to be very well prepared before I start writing. Indeed, I only allow
myself to write when the pressure has become so high that it will push me
through the whole book in one go. This means that after all the research is
done and the narrating voices are chosen, the characters and the plot have been
sketched and the net of images spread out I need a certain amount of time all
by myself so I can do nothing but write. I write from morning until the early
afternoon. In the late afternoon I prepare for the next day's writing. It is
wonderful, torturing, intoxicating, dead boring, exhilarating, hard work. I can only do this during the school holidays
when I can throw the whole family out of the house for a week or so. It is
quite amazing what one gets done when one knows that one's unfragmented time is
so limited! After this intense beginning I have usually found my stride and can
or have to adapt my writing hours to the school hours of my children. I won't
write when there are people in the house.
3.
This book is full of many different
female characters with a wide range of personalities. Was there any inspiration
from any women in your life?
Yes, of course. The story-telling in my family has
always been undertaken by women - at least the stories one wanted to hear.
There are usually several versions of family stories, one official one and one
or two other ones.
In this particular novel, the grandmother Bertha looks
a little like my own grandmother. In the book Bertha gradually loses her memory
- so maybe as a writer I am also something of an archivist. Only a deeply
unreliable one - after all, I invent things, I don't write " true
stories" with "real people" in them - indeed nothing would bore
me more. I do try to write truthful stories though.
4.
Could you give readers a closer glimpse
into Iris Berger?
Iris is a young librarian who does no longer read.
She has lost her faith in the written word. She thinks that what you write down
is what you no longer need to remember. Like a shopping list: You write it down
so you can forget about it. And Iris is afraid of all that not-remembering that
has gone on in her family for decades.
Every character in the book has his or her own
individual story of forgetting. But it
is Iris who inherits the big old family house and all the stories that come
with it. And while Bertha is slowly losing her memories Iris, in the course of
the story, is forced to confront hers.
5. Do
you find solace in the country, the main setting of the novel, or does a big
city capture your heart?
Well, I live in Hamburg and it is a big city and it
seems that I will stay here for a while. But I was brought up in a more rural
part of the country and I cannot deny that I miss it. We used to play in the
woods and swim in the lakes at night, climbed on derelict buildings, ran
through cornfields and went everywhere on our bikes. But I fear I might just be
nostalgic about my childhood. And I push aside how infinetely bored I sometimes
was. How oppressive the neverchanging
rituals, people and routines of a village can be. So I shouldn't get too
soppy here. But I still miss it.
- What advice would you give aspiring writers looking to get into the publishing industry?
I have NO advice to any aspiring writer in the United States! The
publishing industry in your country is different from ours. I don't even have
an agent - unthinkable in England and probably in the USA , too. To me it seems
harsh that a writer has to find an agent, who, of course, has his own interest
in mind, before he can find a publisher. I wonder if excellent texts that might
not have great economic success, will ever find their readers. Would James
Joyce have ever found an agent? Strangely,
I do think he would always have found a publisher. But maybe it is the
other way round? As I said, I don't know the American system at all. But I do
know this: Parts of Joyce's Ulysses
were first published in the United States and the whole book (minus some
"obscene" passages) was first published in Paris - by Sylvia Beach
from Baltimore, Maryland.
7.
Is
there a particular author or book that has influenced your writing?
Oh
yes, many, many books and authors. I believe that reading is the only kind of
education you need in order to become a writer. It is tiresome to read books by
authors who haven't read much and thus think they have just re-invented the
wheel, or modernism or whatever. But before I sound too much like Waldorf and
Statler I'd rather list the ones I love: I do hope I have been influenced by
Virginia Woolf and by Heinrich Kleist, by Jane Austen and James Joyce, by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez and by W. G. Sebald - but influenced not in the sense of
imitation but of an attention to language, to sound, rhythm and expression.
- Tell
us about you - what do you like to do when you're not writing?
I read. I answer questionnaires. I love
being outdoors. My mother was a sports teacher so not doing one's sports is
like not brushing one's teeth. I am still trying to get some scholarly work
done but it is hard not to lose touch - I used to teach English literature
before I became a writer. And I have two children, 11 and 14 years old. So I do
all that mothers' stuff like cooking and baking and screaming and applying sun
screen lotion onto anything that isn't fast enough on the trees.
9.
What can fans of The Taste of Apple
Seeds look forward to next?
I hope very much that my second novel "On
Sleeping and Disappearing" will be translated into English.
Here is a brief excerpt of The Taste of Apple Seeds
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Great-aunt Anna died from pneumonia when she
was sixteen. They couldn’t cure it because her heart was broken and
penicillin hadn’t yet been invented. It happened late one July afternoon.
Anna’s younger sister, Bertha, ran howling into the garden and saw that with
Anna’s rattling, dying breath all the red currants in the garden had turned
white. It was a large garden; the scores of old currant bushes groaned under
the heavy weight of the fruit. They should have been picked long before, but
when Anna fell ill nobody gave a thought to the berries. My grandmother often
told me this story, because it was she who had discovered the currants in
mourning. Since that time there had only ever been black currants and white
currants in my grandmother’s garden, and every attempt to plant a red bush
had failed—only white berries would grow on the stems. But nobody minded: the
white ones tasted almost as sweet as the red, when you juiced them they
didn’t ruin your apron, and the jelly they made
had a
mysteriously pale translucent shimmer. “Preserved tears,” my grandmother
called it. The shelves in her cellar still housed jars of all sizes with the
currant jelly from 1981, a summer
particularly rich in tears, Rosmarie’s final one. Once when my mother was
looking for some pickled cucumbers she came across a jar from 1945: the first postwar tears. She donated
it to the windmill association, and when I asked her why on earth she was
giving away Granny’s wonderful jelly to a local museum she said that those
tears were too bitter. My grandmother Bertha Lünschen, née Deelwater, died long after
Great-Aunt Anna, but for many years she hadn’t known who her sister was, what
her own name was, or whether it was winter or summer. She had forgotten what
shoes, wool, or spoons were for. Over a decade she cast off her memories with
the same fidgety ease with which she plucked at the
short
white locks of hair at the nape of her neck or swept invisible crumbs from
the table. I had a clearer recollection of the noise the hard, dry skin of
her hand made on the wooden kitchen table than of the features of her face.
Also of the way her ringed fingers always closed tightly around the invisible
crumbs, as if trying to catch the shadows of her spirit drifting by; but maybe
Bertha just wanted to cover the floor with crumbs, or feed the sparrows that
in early summer loved taking dust baths in the garden and were forever
uprooting the radishes. The table she later had in the care home was plastic,
and her hand fell silent. Before her memory went completely, Bertha
remembered us in her will. My mother, Christa, inherited the land, Aunt Inga
the stocks and shares, Aunt Harriet the money. I, the final descendant,
inherited the house. The jewelry and furniture, the linen and the silver were
to be divided up between my mother and aunts. Bertha’s will was as clear as
springwater—and just as sobering. The stocks and shares were not particularly
valuable, nobody except cows wanted to live on the pasture of the north
German lowlands, there wasn’t much money left, and the house was old.
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