Where I share my love of books with reviews, features, giveaways and memes. Family and needlepoint are thrown in from time to time.
Showing posts with label The Thief of Auschwitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Thief of Auschwitz. Show all posts

Monday, February 11, 2013

Interview: Jon Clinch - author of The Thief of Auschwitz




Q & A with Jon Clinch:

(See my review of The Thief of Auschwitz and enter the giveaway!)

Part One: On The Thief of Auschwitz

Q:        Your first two books have been called “among a small handful of the most American novels since Huckleberry Finn.” What moved you to leave that territory behind and write about, of all things, the Holocaust?

A:        Kings of the Earth was in many ways a memorial to central New Yorkers of my parents’ generation—country people whose voices are dying out and whose stories are on the verge of vanishing forever. In The Thief of Auschwitz, I hope to have created a second memorial to that same generation, this time honoring those on my wife’s side of the family of man—the Jewish side—whose stories are likewise in danger of being lost.

Reading and rereading the first-person accounts of Wiesel and Frankl and Nyiszli over a period of a year or two, I had no plan to write a book. But along the way I discovered something within myself that disturbed me to no end: the more closely I studied the raw materials, the more repellent they became and the more difficulty I had in maintaining my focus on them. It was as if the facts themselves, horrible and numberless as they were, were conspiring to drive me away again and again, preventing me from connecting with the people behind them as fully as I needed to.

Supposing that other readers might face the same difficulty, and intent on the preservation of these voices and these stories, I wondered if fiction might provide an answer. I hope that it has, at least a little.

Q:        How much research did you do? Did you visit Auschwitz?

A:        I did most of my research in books. Laurence Rees’ Auschwitz: A New History was enormously helpful, as was the BBC television series made as a companion to it. Mainly, though, I relied on the well-known first-person accounts of Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl and Miklós Nyiszli.

            My aim was always to seek the heart of the experience, rather than to mire myself in technical and spatial detail.

            There are drawbacks to not visiting the scene, of course. I’m sure to have gotten a number of details     wrong, and those details may trouble some readers. That’s always the case, regardless of how well you research anything, if only because the demands of the story sometimes cause writers to take liberties with time and geography. On the other hand, I’m sufficiently aware of my limits as a researcher and as a writer to know that—in my case, at least—growing too intimate with the physical details of a place can get in the way of following the needs of the story.

            Folks have asked me the same question, by the way, about Finn and the Mississippi River—and the answer is the same. A few telling details are sufficient to bring a place to life in the reader’s mind, and that’s what’s important.

Q:        We know from the beginning that certain characters in The Thief of Auschwitz are doomed. How do you go about maintaining interest and narrative momentum in a case like that?

A:        That was an issue in Finn, too—except that it was Mark Twain, not the Third Reich, who had doomed my characters in advance. Either way it adds up to the same thing. In Finn, I played with the presentation of time—twisting and winding the narrative thread to bring the past and present together, just as they met in the mind of the alcoholic protagonist. In The Thief of Auschwitz I rely on Max, the only member of the Rosen family who survives Auschwitz, to provide some perspective. As one of the narrators—the rest of the story is told in the third person—he speaks for himself, reminding us that he’s escaped the horrors of the camp, and causing us to be curious about exactly how that might have happened. His periodic appearances, which bring the New York art world into contrast with the world of the camp, also lighten the book’s mood and provide a separate narrative interest of their own.

Q:        Violence is a steady current in The Thief of Auschwitz—and yet the truth is that violence at Auschwitz was often even worse than you depict it. How do you reconcile that?

A:        I was definitely sparing with the most brutal violence, but not because I wanted to spare the reader any pain. On the contrary. I wanted to keep readers engaged. It seemed to me that the key to communicating the true evil of Auschwitz was first to help readers commit themselves to a handful of vividly drawn, realistic, living, breathing people. That’s why the novel begins in a resort town in the mountains of Carpathia, where Jacob and Eidel meet and marry and begin their lives. Once readers have committed to the Rosens, I don’t have to punish my characters every second of every day. I can exercise restraint, keeping certain things off-screen and letting various horrors play out at second hand. The real truth, the compounding of wickedness documented in the first-person accounts, would have made the novel unreadable and therefore worthless.

Q:        The Thief of Auschwitz is quite cinematic. Are there plans for a film adaptation?

A:        Not at the moment, although you never know. Hollywood is a funny place. Finn has been optioned for several years now by a first-rate production outfit—I’ve read the screenplay, and it’s terrific—but I haven’t yet had the chance to buy a ticket at the box office.


Part Two: On Publishing

Q:        We hear a lot these days about the death of big publishing. Are the rumors true, or premature?

A:        It’s not over yet, that’s for certain. What becomes of publishing in the months and years ahead will be a matter of making the best use of technology on one hand and humanity on the other. Technology is really good at the physical stuff—at solving manufacturing and distribution problems. Witness e-books, and the electronic marketplace that has sprung up around them. But when you start looking beyond the physicality of the book as an artifact, you begin to see the parts of it that technology can’t touch. Not just the skill that goes into writing it, but the intelligence that goes into vetting it, the insight that goes into marketing it, and the personal connection that goes into getting it into the hands of readers. Big publishers have been fairly competent at those things all along—particularly as regards large, commercial projects—but the distribution side of things has begun falling apart under its own weight.

I believe that the technology-savvy independent who managed to deliver on the human part of the equation—the connecting with readers part—will be the one who thrives.

Q:        What have you given up by going independent? Editorial input? Marketing support? Credibility?

A:        Editing is a very personal thing that varies by the writer. When the time came for a detailed discussion of Finn, for example, my editor had three little Post-It notes stuck to the manuscript. We dispatched them in a couple of minutes.

            Marketing support, of course, is huge. Big publishers create bestsellers by spending energy and money on them. They also create failed books by ignoring them. It’s pretty simple. As a long-time marketing guy myself, I believe that I can make something happen in that department on my own. I can certainly make enough happen on my own. (A big publisher will, of course, define enough very differently than I do.)


Part Three: On Pen Names

Q:        Why did you publish What Came After as Sam Winston, not as Jon Clinch?

A:        To begin with, I wrote the book as an experiment. I was weary of seeing what at that time was a real spate of literary writers crossing over into science fiction and horror, only to bring with them their usual stylistic and structural tics. What was showing up in stores as a result was a bunch of genre books that didn’t feel right to genre audiences, and that literary readers turned away from because they were full of monsters.

            I wanted to go all the way: to write a real science fiction adventure with a real rollercoaster of a plot, about real people facing real problems—problems that aren’t, as it turns out, a very big stretch from where we are today. That’s what sci-fi has always done best, right? And I wanted to write it in a style that was different from my own, with machine-gun sentences that just kind of rat-a-tat along to keep the reader in motion.

            So that’s what I did. And then, to complete the experiment and see how the book did without interference from my name and reputation, I put it out there under a pen name.

            I must say that how nicely it took off came as a surprise. A few weeks in, it was actually Amazon’s #8 bestseller in the category of science fiction adventure. Not just e-books, but printed books as well. George R. R. Martin, watch out.


Q;        Having been published conventionally as a literary writer, and then having published yourself independently as a sci-fi writer, what have you learned?

A:        I’ve learned that the dynamics of literary versus genre writing are nothing compared to the dynamics of conventional versus independent publishing.

            The whole do-it-yourself aspect has set the bar pretty low in self-published books. How low? Low enough that among certain crowds a review on Amazon or Goodreads that says, “This book didn’t actually have too many typos,” is a rave. I know. As Sam Winston, I’ve been proud to be on the receiving end of it.

            On the other hand, folks whose expectations can be satisfied by one good round with a spell checker can bring other limiting expectations to a book. I have a feeling that if I had published What Came After as Jon Clinch, literary novelist crossing over into sci-fi, its highly stylized and telegraphic prose style would have been recognized (at least by some folks, and for better or worse) as an interesting experiment. Coming from a total unknown, on the other hand, it seemed to a certain percentage of readers as if poor Sam Winston simply lacked the basics of a third-grade education. Was that a miscalculation on my part? Should I have established a different and more conventional narrative voice? Hard to say, and what’s done is done.

            Pricing is strange in the world of independent e-books, too. Amazon encourages giveaways, and Kindle owners seem to be overloading on the endless stream of free and nearly-free books. That means the market’s understanding of a book’s value is changing, and not entirely for the better. Still, readers are readers. And when one of them writes your alter ego on Facebook to say, “I love your book; please don’t yield to the pressure to give it away,” you know you’ve made a connection.

Q:        Do people respond to Sam Winston differently than they respond to Jon Clinch?

A:        Oh, for sure. We’re talking about public response on the internet, of course—since that’s the only kind of response Sam can get, given that he doesn’t exist in the real world.

            Total strangers seem a little more eager to “friend” and “follow” Sam than to do the same to me. (That could be because I’ve been around for longer, or it could also be just that I’m amazed when anybody wants to connect with a nonexistent individual. I can’t say for sure. I think they’re a little  bit faster to write Sam an email, too.) Regardless, I suppose the reason gets back to that literary-versus-genre divide. Genre writers are more approachable than super-serious literary guys, even when they’re not real. Perhaps especially when they’re not real.


            On the other hand, Sam behaves himself a little bit differently out there than I do. He’ll never fail to respond to a kind note from a reader by suggesting that he go write a review online someplace when he gets the chance. I’d never think of doing that. But it does let readers know how they can do you a favor that adds up to something tangible.

Q:        How much fun has it been, keeping Sam a secret?

A:        Tons. And it’s been eye-opening, too. The best thing is that you can get a square and unbiased response to your work from people you know. For example—my wife and I were having supper a couple of months back with a friend who asked what I’d been writing lately. I told her I’d done this science fiction book, but had ended up publishing it independently under a pen name, Sam Winston. She just about dropped her fork. “You’re Sam Winston?” she said. “My husband bought that book, and he loved it! He told me I absolutely had to read it, and I loved it too!” So that was cool.

            Another cool moment was when the novelist and critic Caroline Leavitt sent Sam an email, saying that she was crazy about the book and would like to interview him for her blog. Now it was my turn to drop my fork. I confessed right up front, of course. There would have been no honor in keeping up the charade. But I went ahead and did the interview as Sam, since I wasn’t ready to show my hand to the wide world.

            Here’s the resulting story: http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/2012/01/sam-winston-talks-about-his.html 


(This interview was provided to me by Kelley and Hall Book Publicity.)

Book Review: The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch (w/Excerpt and Giveaway!)

Title: The Thief of Auschwitz
Author: Jon Clinch

About the Book: "The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four."

So begins The Thief of Auschwitz, the much-anticipated new novel from Jon Clinch, award-winning author of Finn and Kings of the Earth.

In The Thief of Auschwitz, Clinch steps for the first time beyond the deeply American roots of his earlier books to explore one of the darkest moments in mankind’s history—and to do so with the sympathy, vision, and heart that are the hallmarks of his work.

Told in two intertwining narratives, The Thief of Auschwitz takes readers on a dual journey: one into the death camp at Auschwitz with Jacob, Eidel, Max, and Lydia Rosen; the other into the heart of Max himself, now an aged but extremely vital—and outspoken—survivor. Max is a renowned painter, and he’s about to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. The truth, though, is that he’s been keeping a crucial secret from the art world—indeed from the world at large, and perhaps even from himself—all his life long.

The Thief of Auschwitz reveals that secret, along with others that lie in the heart of a family that’s called upon to endure—together and separately—the unendurable.



My Thoughts: This is one of those books that I don't know where to begin in trying to review it.  The subject matter is of such significance, that my meager words will pale greatly in comparison.  

Max is only 14 years old when his family is taken to Auschwitz.  They had been moving from place to place for awhile, only putting off what I believe they knew was inevitable.  They lose Lydia the first day there, as children aren't consider viable.  Max is only saved due to his size - he is able to pass for 18 and so gets to live. The men are split from the women, so Eidel is sent to one side of the camp and Max and Jacob to the other.  Jacob realizes that Lydia has been killed, and so Eidel also thinks the same fate has befallen Max.  It isn't until she is able to bribe some information from a delivery man that she discovers that Max is alive.

The story is told by Max, when he is an old man living in America, and also by Jacob, Eidel and others in the death camp.  At once we understand the futility of the life they are living, but at the same time we are given hope because we know that Max has survived.  This story tells what Max's family endures in order for him to survive, and how much a family is willing to go through, with only hope to go on, that one of them might outlast the atrocities that they face day to day.

~I received a complimentary ecopy of The Thief of Auschwitz from Kelley and Hall Book Publicity in exchange for my unbiased review.~


About this author

:  Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York, Jon Clinch has been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter, and an advertising executive.

His new novel, The Thief of Auschwitz, is due on January 15, 2013 on his own imprint, unmediated ink.Howard Frank Mosher, author of Walking to Gatlinburg, calls the book "the best and most powerful work of fiction ever written about the Holocaust.”

Clinch's first novel, Finn—the secret history of Huckleberry Finn’s father—was named an American Library Association Notable Book and was chosen as one of the year's best books by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor. It won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Sargent First Novel Prize.

His second novel, Kings of the Earth—a powerful tale of life, death, and family in rural America, based on a true story—was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and led the 2010 Summer Reading List at O, The Oprah Magazine.

Clinch has lectured and taught widely, in settings as varied as the National Council of Teachers of English, Williams College, the Mark Twain House and Museum, and Pennsylvania State University. In 2008 he organized a benefit reading for the financially-ailing Twain House—enlisting such authors as Tom Perrotta, Stewart O’Nan, and Robert Hicks—an event that literally saved the house from bankruptcy. A native of upstate New York, Jon lives with his wife in the Green Mountains of Vermont. They have one daughter.




Excerpt from The Thief of Auschwitz
Max
The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.

This was 1942. I was fourteen years old but tall for my age, and I’d spent a lot of time outdoors, so I lied and I got away with it. My father and I passed through that barbed wire gate and presto, I was eighteen. It was his idea, and if I hadn’t followed through on it they’d have been done with me in an hour, not a year. Maybe less than that. I was just a boy, after all. I was too young to be of any use.

That little white lie makes me eighty-eight years old now. I don’t mind. My Social Security card lies and so does my driver’s license, not that I drive anymore. You don’t drive in New York unless you’re some kind of a nut.
The last time one of the art magazines came around and asked me what I thought about some young Turk—it doesn’t matter who; I don’t even remember myself—what showed up in print sounded a whole lot like you ought to forgive old Rosen, since he’ll be turning ninety in a couple of years after all. Maybe he’s going blind.

Old Max Rosen.

Sympathetic, cantankerous, worn-out old Max.

King of the old-school representationalists.

The last believer in looking at things the way they are, and reporting back.

One
The clock built high into the station wall is painted on, a clumsy and heartless trompe-l’oeil that under ordinary circumstances wouldn’t fool a soul, but those who pass beneath it have too much on their minds to look closely. If any one of them so much as glances up, some mother raising her eyes above the scuffle and the crowd for just an instant, she sees an ordinary railroad station clock and is reassured by it—reassured the same way that she is reassured by the crisply lettered signs hanging overhead and by the gaily painted flower boxes bursting with pansies beneath each station window. Reassured that all is well. That the train has stopped at an ordinary station and that she and her family have arrived at an ordinary village. That the rumors she has heard can’t possibly be true.

Those who actually check the time are men, mainly. Two or three of them per car and no more, individuals who pride themselves on leading lives of regularity and precision. Shipping agents and clerks and shopkeepers, men of commerce, each fingering his vest pocket or raising his wrist to compare this public information with his own private store. Half past three says the station clock. Half past three will have to do, for these orderly men are surprised once again to remember that they’ve bartered away their watches in recent weeks or sewn them into the linings of their overcoats or otherwise set them aside. They shake their heads—what slow learners they’ve become!—and they move on. Keeping up. The clock says half past three. There is no time to waste.

Among those who don’t look up at all are the four members of the Rosen family. The parents, Jacob and Eidel. The children, Max and Lydia. Like everyone else in their car, they’ve been under way for three days or perhaps four. Not really traveling so much as waiting to travel, locked in the cars and anticipating movement and dreading it at the same time, for with each lurch forward the train has taken them another step toward a destination known only to itself.

*
Their journey began eighteen months prior and barely a hundred miles away, high among the highest ranges of the Carpathian mountains, in the resort town of Zakopane. It was the place of Jacob’s birth, which meant that he’d be a long time seeing how very beautiful it was. He’d need help, in fact. The help of a girl, which is often the way these things go. Beauty of any sort had never been much in his line to begin with. He’d been a hiker during his youth and early manhood, but strictly for the exercise. Although his friends knew the name of every peak and the song of every bird and the chatter of every squirrel, Jacob Rosen cataloged only the most difficult routes from one destination to the next. It was never a walk in the woods for him. It was always a test.

At home he’d stand in the corner of his father’s shop, drinking the last of the water from his canteen and watching the old man’s hands as he trimmed the hair of a vacationer from Warsaw or Krakow. Listening to the stranger rhapsodize about the fields of undulating crocuses that he and his wife had discovered blooming in some alpine valley just this very morning. Thinking that this great lump of a tourist, sitting beneath a crisp white sheet as if masquerading as a mountain himself, sounded like a man who’d never seen a crocus before. Worse than that. Like the man who’d invented them.

As years went by, Jacob’s father taught him what he needed to know about running the shop, including how best to endure men like these. He said you don’t want word getting out that young Rosen has no respect for the people who constitute his trade. A reputation like that would be trouble enough right there in the town, but imagine if people began telling tales back in Warsaw. Saying, visit Zakopane if you must, but get your hair trimmed before you go! Young Rosen would just as soon take your ears off! It would be the end of everything that his father had built in this life.

More years had gone by and the old man had passed away and the shop was in Jacob’s hands when Eidel arrived, Eidel Mankowicz from Warsaw, here for a month’s skiing with her parents and her three younger sisters. She’d never seen a place even half so beautiful. She couldn’t get enough of it. The truth was that she could barely bring herself to come indoors, and late one afternoon as Jacob trimmed her father’s hair she waited outside the shop, utterly rapt and completely indifferent to what was going on inside, caught up in the gathering of clouds over the high peaks, her face illuminated by the last rays of the fading light.

Inside, Jacob slipped and nicked her father’s cheek and Mankowicz said, “Perhaps you ought to turn on a light, the evening comes so early here in the mountains.” He was a hard man by the look of him, worldly but tough-minded, a lawyer perhaps. Someone with the means to bring a large family here to the limits of the Carpathians on an extended holiday. He was a hard man but he could see that this barber wasn’t going to turn on a lamp until the last possible minute, not while pretty young Eidel was standing outside his window with her face tilted up into the dying light. Not as long as he could still see her. Mankowicz was a man who understood the world, and he resigned himself to enduring another nick or two.

What was the harm? They were children. They wouldn’t be young forever.

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