In part 1 of our first 2-part episode, Linn Ullmann talks about the influences of her parents -- Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman -- on her storytelling process, her subversion of the "Scandinavian crime novel" in The Cold Song (Other Press), the importance of place in her writing, the perils of overthinking the ground rules for an interview (not ours!), how she transposed a character from The Wire from Baltimore to Norway, and how she managed to convince her book club to tackle Proust. We close out with the topic of Karl Ove Knausgard's work and the ethics of explicitly writing fiction from life (which is where part 2 picks up). Ms. Ullmann's a fascinating writer and this is (this first half of) an illuminating conversation about her work and life. Give it a listen!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 17 - Lady with a Dog
[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life. Not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show through the iTunes Store, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Welcome to the first two-part episode of the show. I met with this week's guest, the author and critic, Lynn Ullman, to talk about her new novel, The Cold Song, last Friday, but we rapidly found the conversation just spinning into a lot of different areas, and since she was on a tight schedule that day that we met, we kind of got cut off right in the middle of a good part, and decided to get together a few days later to keep the conversation going. And we did actually record that one too already, so next week is in the bag. And as you'll find out, I may have made the biggest mistake of my life getting together for that second session. Now, The Cold Song, which is Lynn's fifth novel, is a deceptively good book. And I mean deceptively in the Trojan horse sort of way, like using the trappings of one genre to unfold a more interesting and wonderful story, or really set a story, I guess. It's not like that true detective TV show where the murder mystery and the buddy crime drama are used to just collapse on themselves in a mess of bad storytelling. I'm sorry, did I say that out loud? Anyway, The Cold Song, which is published in America by Other Press, is a fairy tale and a domestic drama, and a crime novel, and a family epic, and a love story, and a lot of other things, with a really organic, going to uncontrived structure. It's a weird novel in some respects, but it's very accessible, and it's gorgeous, and luminous, and it really deserves a big readership here in America, so go pick it up. Now, Lynn Ulman is the author of five books of fiction, Before You Sleep, Stella Descending, Grace, A Blessed Child, and The Cold Song. She's the daughter of Liv Ulman and Ingmar Bergman, which I probably should have mentioned earlier, except I didn't know that before I read the novel, so why should you guys? She lives in Oslo with her husband, the novelist, playwright, and poet, Neil's Frederick Dahl, and has two children and two stepchildren, and a dog named Charlie, the dog's important, as you'll find out. And now, part one of the virtual memories conversation with Lynn Ulman. So where did The Cold Song come from? Well, the title or the story, the book, the whole, well, I had just lost my father, and I was writing a book at that time, but then my father died, and I was also not, I didn't only lose him, but I also was losing the place where he had lived all his life, and where I had visited every summer since I was, you know, a baby. And that place was disappearing, that was the island of Fora, because everything was being sold off and becoming an artist, center, and... I didn't try to pronounce it, I'm glad I didn't try to pronounce it. No, Fora? Yeah, I'll leave that to you. It's a small island with some sheep and some farmers, and he made all his films there for 40 years, and all my conversations with him, being with him, was always there. So this was also a very special place for me, and he was someone special in my life. So anyway, I had this sense of loss. I was feeling that things were disappearing, things that had been a big part of my life were disappearing. I was losing something, I was confused about what to do next, how to proceed. And I started writing this story about people much in the same situation, not having lost a father, but being at a point in life where there's a big sense of loss, or a sense of time having passed, and being at a place where you don't really know where to go now, where to go next, what to do. And the word disappearance became an important word for me in the book. So it starts out almost like a thriller because I wanted to play with the thriller genre. I didn't want to write it thriller, but I wanted to play with the thriller genre. So it starts out with a girl who disappears. And the mystery of the novel is not really what happened to her, because you can find that out very early in the book, what actually happened to her, that mystery is sort of solved. But then... Did you leave some red herrings? Or I don't know if they call them red prolux. Absolutely. But then the real mystery is really who did this girl touch and who were they, and how did her disappearance, her violent disappearance, affect the people around her. And I wanted to write about them. I wanted to write about the people who were left and who they are. And so it's a story of a family. But not her family. Not her family. You do it very interestingly in as much as you don't go into immediately the grief of her immediate family, but rather the people for whom she was serving as a nanny. And that world is in a very middle-aged way. You know, it's people who, as you said, are sort of stuck in who they are and don't know where they're going. And there's suddenly this presence and then absence for them. Well, I started out, you know, what I'd started out writing was really a love story between a husband and a wife had been married for a while and had children. And the husband is a writer, and he has his writer's block. He can't finish the third part of his trilogy. He has had a lot of success with part one and part two, and now he cannot write. And his wife, as a restaurateur, she's supporting the whole family. She's trying to pretend that she's not, you know, that he's writing. Everybody's pretending that he's writing, but it's not writing. But they love each other very much. But they're making a lot of weird decisions and choices and, you know, little secrets become bigger secrets. He starts betraying her or cheating on her. And so it becomes, I wanted to write a love story, not so much about the beginning of love and not the end of love, but right in the middle of love where it's broken, and where the little secrets that you thought maybe were harmless are not as harmless as you thought. And look at all the little broken shards. It's much more interesting to look and describe a broken glass than a glass that's perfectly intact. This harmony is more fun to read about and to write about than harmony. Harmony is boring. So I wanted to write about a love story that where the love was broken, but there was still love. So there were these two big themes, you know, disappearance, absence, how when something happens, like the girl disappearing in mysterious way can trigger off other stories. Well, what led you to, given that the quote, unquote, Scandinavian crime novel is a big thing now in the U.S., what led you to sort of pursue, or to use the genre sort of as a Trojan horse? I mean, again, you do reveal, essentially reveal the murderer early enough onwards, although you do, again, leave room for some ambiguity until later in the book. What led to the choice to, again, to introduce crime like that, to introduce such a violent project? Well, first of all, I think I'm getting this question a lot here. I think that the term Scandinavian thriller or Scandinavian crime novel is much more prevalent here in the States than it is in, say, Norway, where I wrote it, where nobody used that term or where we don't, I mean... We classify things an awful lot here. Yeah. So playing with genres, I think in all my books has been something that I want to do. So I play with the thriller genre, because I like thrillers, and I like the mystery, and I wanted to create a mystery, but not exactly the mystery that was the obvious one. But more of the mysteries that were all around, if you draw back with the camera, and you know, only focus on what's the obvious in a story, then you'll find all these other really interesting stories, and those were the ones, the quieter stories, or the scarier stories, or the even nicer stories, they're all around. So it was a matter of sort of drawing back and looking at the corners and the outskirts and seeing what stories were there, but then also playing with the folk tale or the fairy tale that I grew up with as a kid. My grandmother would always be reading to me and always giving me books, and you know, we have these fantastic folk tales in Norway, and, well, they're, you know, you have the H.E. Anderson of Denmark, and you have the Grimm Brothers in Germany, and we have someone called Aspiernssonungmoo, who were these... I'll ask you for spelling for that later. Yeah, and who were these two guys, long time ago, many hundreds of years ago, who went around in the mountains of Norway and collected stories, so this is our oral tradition, wrote them down. And these stories are, you read them as a kid and you don't realize, then you realize it when you grow up, how, you know, how dark these stories are, how erotic they are, how scary they are, how beautiful and poetic they are. You know, there's, you know, the big white bear seducing the young girl, the stories of the princesses being taken by the trolls, you know, and the trolls turning the princess into rocks. I mean, there's just so, and the trolls heart being stuck in an egg, in a well, on an island, you know, and if the prince can get to the egg and the well on the island and squeeze that egg, the troll will explode and he'll save the princess. I mean, these are all pretty, you know, juicy things, so it inspired me, so that's a genre that I like. And I like the family epic and I like the chamber drama, you know, with the close ups. So with the novel, you can do all these things. You can do the thriller and the folktale and the chamber drama and the epic. And it's just a matter of playing with time and form. A particular genre, a tradition, you feel you fall into the most? Well, I'm such a, I do, I hate putting labels on things. I mean, I have writers that I love and it's everything from... Besides the folktales, who else do you read, who else is a big influence? Well, I mean, American literature, American contemporary literature has always been something that I've been reading a lot. I mean, I grew up with Strinberg and Ibsen and the Scandinavian classics, of course, so it's part of me. But then I went, I grew up also partly in the United States, in New York City and, you know, and went to college and studied English literature and graduate school with English literature. So, you know, Philip Roth is one of my favorite writers. Has always been, American pastoral was really important to me when I was writing this book because of the way he describes the father-daughter relationship, which is a really troubled relationship. And there were some scenes there between the father and the daughter that, that, you know, I brought with me and then it must have inspired or somehow are there with, you know, the father-and-daughter relationship in this book. Alice Monroe is another favorite writer. I, you know, she's a fantastic short story writer who, she does something very interesting when you read her. She has this voice that you're immediately drawn to, so you see the importance of voice right away. And then you're, she sort of takes you into her story and you think, "Okay, I know where I'm going. I, I know this. I want to, I want to follow this voice, but I, I sort of know where I am. I can recognize this." And then suddenly and you have no idea how she does it, you are standing on the edge of a cliff and there's real danger there or there's something extremely unexpected or something very scary and you have no idea how she did it. How did she bring you to this unexpected place where life can't, cannot be explained? Unless kind of, you know. Have you ever tried to work in short fiction like that or you pretty much settled up the novel for your main fiction writing? I think first for, well, I've written five novels, but I've always been intrigued by the idea of doing short fiction. And what's amazing with someone like Ellis Monroe, I mean, it's, it's, you feel like you've read a whole novel when you read a short story by her. For now it's probably the novel, but again, you know, playing with the genres, I did a novella, one's called Grace, which is short, shorter novel, but, you know, not being limited to one thing. And I think, you know, I grew up with Strinberg on one side, but then I'm, I have a love of Woody Allen, old Woody Allen films, so I read a lot, but I love American television. I mean, I think the, not dancing with the stars, right? I'm kidding. Well, you know, but I was thinking more of the wire, which I think is, you know, brilliant, brilliant storytelling. And there's a character in the wire, a young, a little girl, very violent girl. And I think she's called Snoop, Snoop, yeah. And she has this, she has this little voice and she's really violent and she has that vulnerability about her too. And I thought, okay, is it possible to take this little girl out of the streets of Baltimore and put her in a, you know, bourgeois social democratic Scandinavian or Norwegian home and take that anger and that anarchism and that vulnerability and put her into, you know, the character of Alma. The character of Alma. And so she was, I know that that was a direct link. What's the, well, your experience is publishing in Norway versus publishing in the US. How do you contrast those? What do you see here that we don't necessarily, or that you don't necessarily do in Norway? How is the book culture or the publishing culture differ? Well, it's, it's very different in, in that, in Norway, we still actually, there's, there's a law, for example, that all books are to cost the same. It's called the same price law. So there's no, there should be no competition between books in price and that books, independent bookstores can have a way of surviving. There's also a, another law that libraries have the funds to pretty much buy 1500 copies of any work that is published, which means that publishers can take the risk of publishing is, you know, a small book of poetry that nobody will probably buy, but if it's good, it'll still get, you know, bought in 1500 copies. So there's, there's a lot of laws, it's, it's being threatened now a little bit because times are changing, but there's a lot of, you know, institutions that are there to protect the book. And I think that that's, the reason for that is that Norwegian is a, is a small language. And so the thought behind it was very idealistic that you want to protect the, you want to protect the language and the heritage with, with different kinds of institutions to. So that makes a whole difference in how, how the publishing works, yeah, but that's changing. So these are sort of the final days of this beautiful world. And publishing is in such, I mean, it's so huge what's happening. You know, you don't even know if we're going to have books, actual, you know, books that look like books. I'm still hoping that we'll keep the book because I think it is a good technical invention. It's a technology that no one's improved on in 500 years. And I, I, I have, you know, iPads and kindles and all kinds of things. And I, I think it's cool when you can sort of buy a book and it sort of just downloads right there. But I never, I never finish a book. So I still want the real thing because I want to take the book with me, you know, to weird places. I don't want to. I'll take the Kindle for travel because otherwise I go through three or four books over the course of a weekend or a weekend and carrying everything and get a little, little. Yeah, I even, but I even ended up, I, for this trip, I'm here in New York for eight days and I actually packed an ex-suitcase with some books which became heavy and then I packed my Kindle, but I haven't touched it. But I like putting the books and they're also the bookstores left in Manhattan. So you know, it's just as well that you brought, you know, an extra suitcase because I, I love visiting those. Yeah. And the pen and bookstores. I know. And it's just wonderful. And it's just nice. You can make, what do you call them? Do you call them ear? Ear marks. You can, you can make those notes, dog ears, dog ears and you can, you know, make notes and you can take it with you to the bath, the book, you know, can, to the bathroom or to the bathtub, it can get wet. You don't have to charge it. And I think that's what, what pissed me at, you know, off the first time when my Kindle actually ran out. Yeah, there's a sense that when I travel, I'll take the Kindle or an iPad along, but you know, at home, right now I'm working my way through Dante in this giant print edition, each volume and it's, it's, you know, I'm convinced it's just driving a wedge into my hand, which is probably some punishment he has in, in hell somewhere, if not for the paper cuts or something like that, but, but I just couldn't imagine trying to read it on the Kindle. It's, you know, being able to just, you know, open it and keep moving back and forth and that. And having getting that whole sort of physical experience, I'm doing the same that you're doing with Dante, we're doing Proust with the reading group and no one's doing it on our reading or on our Kindle. It's just, you know, we need to sit there with our, you know, it's just, yeah. How on earth does that process work? Because we have a joke in America, at least about what you do to derail a book club and it usually involves middle March, but, you know, Proust has got to be even more daunting. Do you have a good group of readers together? Yeah, we have a good, we had a good group. I was in an extremely good mood about a year ago and I had, you know, slept for eight hours. I was, you know, and when I'm in a good mood like that and, you know, slept all night and feeling very energetic, I have all these wonderful ideas and one of them was to text a bunch of people and say, "Let's start a reading group for Proust. We'll do it once a month and it'll take about, you know, one and a half year and one sensible woman broke back and said, "Okay, let's do it." But, you know, think maybe once every other month and anyway, we're about five volumes in. Congratulations. There's a little tiredness in the group right now, but we're championing in and it's a lot of fun. It's just actually Proust does demand. It's not a book that you read just before you go to sleep. You have to actually take work days. The irony being, of course, that the first book begins with what happens when you read before going to sleep. Exactly. Exactly. And you have to, you have to basically take days off or, you know, you have to schedule in the reading because it demands that you sit down and that you stay awake and that you. Or what you did. That you remember, you know, and you can follow the whole sentence that goes maybe from one page to another. But then, wonderful things happen when you read Proust because especially if you have those days where you only do that, where your whole life surrounds, you know, is scheduled around your Proust reading and everything becomes very Proustian. So, you know, you start describing the people you meet in your head in a very Proustian manner. The two-page long paragraph description. Yeah. Exactly. And you start remembering things from your childhood and you become very sort of Proustian in your own life. And everything becomes interesting because you get these, these eyes or these gaze or these glasses that sees everything through, you know, the Proustian. Prism. Yes, lens. How's it affected your writing? Or have you not noticed that? Well, I'm writing it right now. Would you just say what are you working on now? Now, I thought I was writing on a memoir about the last days of my father's life. Because, well, it started with that he wanted me to come to this island of Fora and, and that we would write a book together because he felt that his memory was slipping and he thought, well, I should write down or we should, I should write down his, you know, things that he remembered. And we would talk about memory and we would talk about things he remembered. But as we spent so much time, because we're both extremely structured people and very controlling people, that we spent so much time, almost a year, talking about how we would conduct the interviews about memories and what kind of, you know, tape recorder would we use? And should we have an extra person in there just to make sure the tape recorder worked? And should we meet at 11 and at 1 or should we end at 2 o'clock? And how should we can, you know, when should we have lunch? Because everything had to be timed and everything had to be, you know, a certain way. And so we had lots of wonderful discussions about how to do these interviews and how to, you know, how we should proceed. So by the time we were there in his office, he had started losing his memory. And so the last few weeks when we did meet, it became a different kind of story. And so we lost the book that I was going to write, but maybe, and I'm thinking now, because it's six years ago, that it became something else. So that's what I started reading or writing. But then I started reading probably maybe because it's my whole post reading and everything, you know, everything then writing about memory and loss of memory and the last days of life and being there, you know, other things come up, you know, and I don't know if this is a memoir or a novel or some kind of hybrid, because I don't completely trust my memory of everything. So does it then, does it then, does it then become a novel? Because I'm not, I'm not one of those writers who will say, well, this actually happened exactly this way, I was there because I don't, I have a mind who works discursively. Yes. And so it's, it's a book, it's a memoir that might be a novel about the last days of my father's life, but it might be a novel. Okay. We'll go with a say ball sort of thing. It's a sort of... Except I won't have pictures in it. That's what I was going to say. If you just put a couple of blurry, black and white pictures, boom, you're, you know, they'll pigeonhole you, but we may as well, I, I told myself beforehand, I'm not going to ask her about her parents, you know, I figured she hears this enough in, in interviews, but your parents are Liv Holman and, and Ingmar Bergman. What influence do they have at all on your, your storytelling in particular? Do you feel that their artwork impacted the way you approach how you tell a story? Well, probably my, well, first of all, they were, they are, my mother is, is and my father was. I mean, great storytellers, both in their work, but also in their, you know, privately. Just, just everything was often turned. I mean, most things were turned into stories very quickly if I, I mean, ever since I was a very little girl, you know, I'd have these conversations with my father. And you know, I remember being eight and telling him about a boy that I liked and I asked the boy, you know, if he'd be my, you know, if I could be his girlfriend and the boy said, well, okay, if you don't tell anybody, but then he changed his mind and, you know, a couple of hours later, he said, I, I really don't want to be your boyfriend. And so I would tell my father about this and he always took everything I told him very seriously. He listened. And he, I remember that I think that was the first time he would say the phrase, oh, this sounds like something brief that Chekhov would write. And I had no idea at that time who Chekhov was, but it, it made my little, you know, sad love story. And very often when I was, you know, a young girl, a grown woman, a young woman, more, you know, married life before I was married after my first divorce, you know, he would often say this phrase, oh, it sounds like something brief that Chekhov would write about. And things, so things were always experience was very quickly turned into story or something that could be a story. And that's also how I think he, and also my mother treated their lives, you know, experience is something you had, and then it, it could be used somehow. And the Cold Song comes from your, your life. Your grandmother was a bookseller, much like Jenny, the grandmother in the Cold Song. And also more complicatedly, Milla, the girl who's killed was photographed, you know, incessantly by her mother, an artist. And I remember reading an interview with your mother who sort of, I guess was apologizing for, you know, kind of pushing you forward the way she did in your youth at a time that you didn't have a decision-making apparatus. And writer's blog also from what I gather. And the writer who has a dog, I believe, is another book of it so much. Well, the dog in the book is very autobiographical. I can say I have, the dog in the book is a dog that is trying to figure out how to be a dog. And John, who has writer's blog, feels very exposed when he's out with the dog because writer's blog, you can, as a writer, you can hide it for a long time. You know, you can sort of say, "Well, I'm thinking it's taking its time." What Jack Nicholson? You know, yes. And even if you're not as crazy, just sitting in a room, I mean, you're out there with journalists and you're saying, "Oh, I'm almost done with my new book now and, you know, it's about this and this." And really, but it takes a little time. And it's interesting. You can hide writer's blog, but you cannot hide that you have no control of your dog. Because if the dog is tugging and you're saying, "Come here, come here." And the dog is just, "Oh, you know, this is the situation with my dog." So the dog situation, you know, I've never, I've had a little bit of writer's blog, so I put that into the character of John. I have been out with my dog, you know, the dog tugging and straining and how embarrassing it is because everyone can see that you have no control. And that's really what writer's blog is all about. You have no control. You've lost all control, but everyone can see it when you're out with your dog. So my dog is very confused about what it is to be a dog and I was confused about what it is to be a dog owner and I love my dog dearly. It's just, we have issues to work out. So I put that in the book. When you asked about autobiography, well, it's certainly elements, of course, I put myself into all the characters. I put my grandmother, there's parts of her and the character of Jenny, the matriarch in the story, the bookseller, the strictness. My grandmother was a very sassy woman, she was very strict. She was a woman who was a great reader. She was the one who gave me all the books. So I think thanks to her, I became a reader and you can't become a writer if you're not a reader. So I'm very grateful to her. My grandma was not a drinker, Jenny in the book, is a drinker as a recovering alcoholic who decides to start drinking again. Cleaning her recovery. Well, because everybody, she's turning 75 years old and her daughter, Siri, wants to throw her a party. She doesn't want to have a party. Nobody wants to have this party, but Siri has so much to make up for. And I recognize that in myself, when I wrote about Siri, this idea that you want to make everything good, you're insisting on doing something to sort of make it all okay again, everything that you've messed up. And in Siri's case, nobody wants her party. Nobody wants this grand gesture. But she insists on doing it anyway. So Jenny's response to that is to start drinking again after 20 years, which one could understand. Was writing a book achieved that sense of fixing something? No, no, I don't think writing books can fix things. I think you have to write. I mean, if that's your job, I think you feel awful if you don't write, which is the case for John, who has writer's block. And you know, he starts creating shadow worlds because his whole creativity is turning against him. That's what happens, I think, when you give in to writer's block. You continue being creative, but in a very destructive way because you're not doing your job, you're not writing the book or the piece or whatever you're supposed to do, but you start creating. So he starts, you know, having affairs and creating worlds and stories with other women. And well, anyone who's seen films about writer's block, they're always very violent and destructive, shining, of course, being the number one example of that, but there are others too. Coen brothers have made a couple of films about writer's block, and well, adaptation isn't it? Well, anyway, no, but elements of my life, of course, but then as every writer will say, you take a little bit of that, and you take a little bit of that, I mean, I can look at your face now and think, well... That dashing schlub from New Jersey? That's great. Well, I think more of the nice, you know, the eyes, no, I could put that in the book or, you know, it's, you pick up a tones of voice or something with the person's eyes or face or movements and you use it, and you maybe put it together with something that's very close to you or someone who's close to you, but you mix and match. And where experience leaves off and where imagination begins, those lines are very blurred. We all, you know, play act. We do that also in life. There's this wonderful Philip Roth quote. It's a long quote from his, I think it was one of his last entries that he did, and I think it was in Paris Review, where he talked about, you know, autobiography and how everyone, why do people get surprised at authors, you know, use, but sort of use and abuse their own experience and who they are. And it is a nice piece on uptake in the same vein in the New York magazine about the book about him that also shows, once you start digging, you realize how many themes were mined directly out of his childhood and life in this little Pennsylvania town. Yeah. Yeah. But then you mix and match and you would twist it and you, you, you make something's bigger, you make something smaller, and that's what writers do, and they, but, you know, it's all about getting at another truth, not to what exactly happened, but something that is true for that particular story in that voice, and it's really about following the voice, because without a voice and a book and a novel, you have nothing. You can have a great plot or you can say, oh, this really happened, but if there's no voice there, who cares? It seems within the cold song that, that location and place are also absolutely critical, not just for the sake of the plot, but for the tone of the whole book, it's, I guess, like you said, kind of touching on the folk tales and fairy tales of youth in Norway. How important is that sense of location and, and, you know, place setting, I suppose, in terms of your fiction? I think, I think if, you know, I'm thinking, when I start a book, I mean, I need, I need the voice, obviously, but I also need to have a place, you know, what is this place, what is the lighting there? What does it look like where these characters are going to move around? You can have someone moving around if you don't have that very specific, that's, oh, I can't-- Specificity? Thank you. Specificity of place, you cannot, you know, you need to be--writing is all about being specific. And this little village south of Oslo in the, in this, in the cold song, it says, it's a fictional place. So I took a little bit from, from the island of Foro, which is where I grew up, and then I took a little bit from other places that I knew, and I kind of created this sort of desolate summer baron, but so, you know, beautiful, but not, but with some ugly houses. You know, I sort of started imagining this house with the, with this place with a long road and all the houses there, and on the long, long road from the big house of Jenny, where the whole family stays down to the little village where something horrible happens to Mila, you know, things would--so the geography and the place and the structure of how they are and the lighting of the place is so important. You know, you can't, I can't write a book without sort of lighting the scenes, because how we light some, how the light is, it just affects how the characters will move and what they'll see and what they won't see. >> Is this room for a Sven Nickviz joke, the great set of photographers who worked with your father? >> Yeah, you have one. >> Light keeps me company. Well, that was the title of the documentary about him. Light keeps me company, which is just an absolutely wonderful piece. >> Well, my father, I mean, I grew up, and I mean, I think lighting is important, probably because I grew up in Scandinavia, but I also grew up with a father. I mean, we would watch the most beautiful late night sun, there's no midnight sun there, but sort of late night sort of dim gray light of summer evenings at four, and he said, you know, this is almost as good as Sven Nickviz. So. >> Man, you had a lighter room, made it look like Rembrandt, but you were here, by the way, for the Pan-America week, and yesterday, as far as I know, you were doing a piece on contemporary writers on the classics. What classic did you choose to talk about and what influence did it have on you? >> I chose Lady with the Dog by Chekhov. And I've read that story a million times. I think, and I have that edition of Chekhov, the American edition, edited by Richard Ford, another great author, and he writes beautifully. He writes two wonderful things in the introduction, one that he surprised that before he read Chekhov, he was very influenced by Chekhov because of all the writers, he was influenced by who were influenced by Chekhov, like Cheever and Carver. I don't know if you remember if he mentions Alice Monroe, but she's obviously influenced by Chekhov. And he also writes something interesting that Chekhov is a writer for adults. You can read Chekhov, maybe as a 20-year-old, and I think it's great, and I'm talking about the stories now, not the place. But then you read them again maybe 20 years later, when you've lived longer, and you notice things that you didn't notice when you were younger, probably because he was just so good at noticing those little weird things that people do, and there's this scene, and it was the author, Claire Massoud, who, because we were talking about Chekhov, and we were talking about the Lady with the Dog, and she said, "I had read that story like 20 times and I never noticed that right after the seduction, because it's the story of an affair between an older man and a younger woman, and he seduced her, and they're both married." And she's upset, and she's saying, "Oh, you're going to despise me now. You won't respect me in the morning, basically." And then Chekhov says, "And Guruv, the man, eats a watermelon, and they don't say anything for half an hour." So I'm thinking, or Claire Massoud was the one who pointed this out, but there's this wonderful scene how he's not talking. She wants to talk about it. She wants to hear that he's not going to despise her, and he's just seduced her, and he's eating a watermelon, and not saying anything for half an hour. That's 20, that doesn't hold up, but older, you recognize both his eating the watermelon, you get what he's doing it, and not saying anything, and you get her wanting to talk about it. So it's this wonderful, and he's full of those little details. So that's why I chose Lady with the Dog, also because I grew up watching the film, Lady with the Dog which was made in 1960, it's a Russian, and it's a very true adaptation, and it's so wonderful, and it has the woman who plays the young woman who has the affair. She's dressed in white, and she has this beautiful little mustache that just makes her even lovelier, and a very, very high pitched voice in Russian, and it's just a lovely, lovely film. And what books did you bring with you for this trip? Is it all going to be Norwegian authors I don't know? No, I brought the check off, edited by Richard Ford. I brought Out of Sheer Rage by Jeff Dyer, just because I love this book. I did remember to bring a copy of my own book because I'm doing readings here. And then I brought a small book of poetry by a Norwegian poet. And because it's a huge literary sensation here, I need to find out from your end how things are perceived over there. You know, Norwegian authors resent Karl of Nausgård, is that a... Karl of Nausgård? Yeah, he's just a huge wave here now among the literati, and I have no idea how he's perceived back there. Well, I mean, he's obviously, he's a sensation, literary sensation. I mean, he's written six volumes about his life. I think it's something close to 4,000 pages. We're in the third volume here, I haven't read him yet, but the third book came out. I mean, it's both brilliant and at times boring, but also brilliant and it's ethically questionable because he writes about his family, his father who's dead and can't say anything, but also his wife and children. But also, it raises the interesting question, what responsibilities do you have as a writer to the people around you? Can you write anything as long as it's good? I mean, it's the ethical question. You can do anything as an artist as long as it's good, or can't you? I mean, so it raises a lot of interesting questions. I think he's a wonderful writer, and then I have all these questions about what can you and what can't you do as a writer and how do we negotiate those questions? And that was part one of Lynn Ellman's conversation. Like I said, we had to cut things short because of her schedule that day, but we agreed that we left plenty on the table, including that idea about the ethics of writing from life and the whole Karl O'Vec Nausgaard. I know I'm not pronouncing that correctly issue in Norway and here in the US. So we recorded a second conversation a few days later, and you can check back next week for that one. It also includes the dreaded answer to what happens when I let an interviewee ask me a question. Well, it goes off the rails in a hurry is all I can say. Until then, you should go get Lynn's new book, The Cold Song, which was published by other press. I can attest, it's a wonderful and strange novel. I think you get a flavor of it from the conversation this time around, and I really had no idea what to expect when I started reading it and was just flat out amazed by so many elements in it. I was gratified to see it on the new fiction table in a local Barnes and Noble last week, so it's definitely out there. You should go pick it up and give it a read. So visit Lynn's website, Lynn Ullman.no/en to learn more about her work. That's L-I-N-N-U-L-L-M-A-N-N dot N-O slash E-N. Now, if you don't add that slash E-N, you'll get the Norwegian version of the site. Maybe that's the sort of thing you'd want to check out, but to me, that's a language. I just don't think I'm going to make a dent in at this point. And that's it for this week's virtual memory show. Thank you so much for listening. Check in next week for part two of this conversation, and also hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. You can also get on the show's email list from there and look for back episodes. If you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraobscura.com, or VMS pod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And be nice and go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memory show, and leave me a review and rating sometime. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]