Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Interview with Peter Carey


Peter Carey Good Reads

Australian writer Peter Carey performs literary alchemy, combining seemingly disparate themes and plotlines to form a cohesive whole. His Booker Prize-winning novel, Oscar and Lucinda, pairs compulsive gambling with glassmaking; Parrot and Olivier in America recounts the unlikely friendship between a French aristocrat and his scrappy servant; and Carey's latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, brings together two narrators from different time periods. Catherine Gehrig, a modern-day conservator of clocks and all manner of wind-up engines at a London museum, is secretly mourning the sudden death of her married lover. While restoring a mid-19th-century automaton, she discovers the crumbling diaries of the man who had commissioned this bizarre mechanical artifact, Henry Brandling. Gehrig bears out her grief by reading Brandling's account, which provides the novel with the parallel narration of his journey into Germany's Black Forest to find a craftsman for his pet project. Carey, a New York City transplant and professor of creative writing at Hunter College, shares with Goodreads his thoughts on writing historical fiction and the role of the artist.

Goodreads: Reading about something mechanical feels refreshing in our digital world. Your 19th-century character Henry seeks to build his ailing son a mechanical duck, fashioned from real-life, 18th-century plans by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. What drew you to this subject?

Peter Carey: I was searching for a miraculous 19th-century machine, which would be a fantastical wooden horse that carried the seeds of the planet's destruction. I found Vaucanson's duck, which, firstly, made me smile and then led me to trip over what would be my novel's greatest concern: the nature of life itself.

GR: When you started writing The Chemistry of Tears, did you begin with a plot, a character, or something more abstract?

PC: We are living in the 21st century, where our industrial growth is overheating our planet to such a degree that it now seems likely to destroy us. Yet all our economic forecasts are seen through the lens of the 19th century. To read the business news you would think that growth was good, not lethal. So that is how I started.

In The Chemistry of Tears I was generally interested in how all the bright inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries led us to our present crisis, and in the internal combustion engine in particular. My brother and sister are the third generation of Careys who have sold cars.

GR: Henry Brandling and Catherine Gehrig are two characters in different times and places, and yet they grapple with some of the same fears and questions. How did you discover their two very distinct voices as a means to tell this story?

PC: The characters are initially determined by the actions I want them to perform and, most importantly, by my constant question: What sort of person would really do a thing like that? And why? So character is born, so voice emerges.

No comments: