Rhythm and Books

SOIL: The Compost Interview

Our own Jamie Kornegay's debut novel SOIL has been out for almost two weeks now and it has already taken the country by storm. Of course, we knew it would, but we were delighted to see how much others have enjoyed it. Check out some of the press here: Kirkus, Memphis Flyer, Clarion Ledger, Boston Globe, Mountain Xpress, Publisher's Weekly, Deep South Mag, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jamie was even asked to write a piece for The Daily Beast about one of his favorite...er...amateur hobbies: covering up crimes. Well we thought since he was granting interviews to every hack with a keyboard, why couldn't he spare the time to answer some of OUR questions? After all, we're the ones with the gall to ask the hard-hitting questions no one else will. So here it is: the most exclusive Jamie Kornegay interview you'll read this month!

TR: Where are you right now? Shouldn't you be pushing your book in Shreveport or something?

JK: I’m on the third floor of a hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eavesdropping on the valets talking trash beneath my window.

TR: You've been on the road for over two weeks and you're plowing through the Carolinas. How has the tour treated you so far? What's your most lurid tale from the road?

JK: The tour has been great. I’ve been heartened by the fact that, at every stop, there’s at least one person from Mississippi who has come out to say hello. Virtually all have spent time in Greenwood and a large percentage have been to Turnrow, which is great to hear. Nothing too lurid thus far, although I did compare raccoon penises with George Singleton in South Carolina. Photo attached [editor's note: state law prevents us from publishing this photo].

TR: Let's get personal. In the compost heap of the world, what are you? A worm? Dirty napkin? Coffee filter? Engorged zucchini?

JK: I think an old nasty sweet potato with an eye sprout that refuses to die.

TR: These days everything is getting a film adaptation (children's books, board games, Twitter feeds, etc.) and authors have more control than ever (see Gillian Flynn writing the screenplay for Gone Girl). When SOIL is turned into a movie, is there a way you can use your influence to resurrect Steve Guttenberg's career?

JK: I haven’t seen Steve in a while, so I don’t know how old he looks. I wonder if he can do a convincing Southern accent. Maybe he could play the deputy in charge of the missing persons case, the one relocated from St. Louis. Is it terrible that I don’t remember that character’s name? I’d look it up, but I left the book down in the car.  

TR: Who would do a better job directing the film adaptation of SOIL -- Wes Anderson or Michael Bay?

JK: Anderson. It would lose its regional identity, perhaps, but it would be worth it. Maybe he’d get Owen Wilson to play the deputy and Bill Murray to play Hatcher, the hippie neighbor.

TR: In other interviews with far more reputable publications, you've cited Fyodor Dostoevsky and Barry Hannah as major influences. Cut the crap. Who's the biggest influence on you that no one else could have guessed?

JK: Quentin Tarantino. I wonder if he’s free to direct.

TR: Ben has been your loyal employee for eight years and even played a major role in the creation of this book. Why did you decide to immortalize him as a rotting corpse in SOIL?

JK: The dead guy was from Ohio and died on Ben’s birthday. I know you won’t believe this, but it was totally subconscious. But somehow deserving, don’t you think?

TR: Be honest: how many animals were mutilated, cremated, or otherwise injured in the writing of this book?

JK: At least two, not counting myself.

TR: What's the stupidest question anyone has ever asked an author at a Turnrow appearance?

JK: I can’t remember anyone asking an author a stupid question. Let’s put this one in the running.

TR: Which character in SOIL most deserves a spinoff?

JK: Granger, supposed guru of Danny Shoals. Sam Jackson can play him if Tarantino directs.

TR: Which autobiographical part of the book would readers be most surprised by? Please keep it mildly tasteful.

JK: Someone really took a dump in my compost. I was so mad about it, but now I’m grateful. It was the impetus for the story.

TR: In your experience as a writer, which of these pieces of furniture is most conducive to imaginative writing: swivel chair, barstool, beanbag, bamboo mat, pile of goo, wicker chair?

JK: Probably a bar stool and all that comes with it. You can make a spark at the bar, really sit there and soak up stories. I’ve scribbled ideas on plenty of bar napkins. I don’t think I could sit at a bar and drink and write. There’s a fast dulling effect that comes after that quick spark, at least for me.

TR: When will you let your children read your work?

JK: I’ve thought about preparing a redacted manuscript, with certain words and lines crossed-out CIA style. My legion of young fans is dying to read it, but I tell them, it’s about adult problems and you’ll just be bored.

TR: There are internet rumors that Simon & Schuster is planning to release a limited edition 'Scratch-n-Sniff' SOIL, for true fans. Did you actually approve this?

JK: I didn’t approve it, per se, but I certainly approve of it. I could even help wrangle the scents.

TR: If Larry Brown were alive today, what would you want to hear him say about SOIL?

JK: “Damn, dude, that was pretty cool.”

TR: If Eudora Welty were alive today, what would you want to hear her say about SOIL?

JK: “Damn, dude, that was pretty cool.”

TR: Which stop on your whirlwind tour are you most looking forward to?

JK: I’m anxious to hit them all, but at this moment in my day, Greenwood is looking pretty nice.

Preview: Skip Horack & Michael Kardos

On March 26 at 5:30 we'll be hosting two of our favorite Southern authors working today. Skip Horack and Michael Kardos will return to Turnrow for a spring doubleheader, and both writers will sign and speak about their new books out this month. Skip's The Other Joseph (HarperCollins) has been earning rave reviews from loyal customers who have been enthralled with his work ever since The Southern Cross in 2009. Michael's Before He Finds Her (Perseus) is surging in popularity here in Greenwood, where our customers are steeped in the rich background of brilliant Mississippi mystery writers: Grisham and Iles fans have been loving it.

Roy Joseph splits time between an Airstream trailer in Grand Isle, Louisiana and an oil rig in the Gulf. But his inner existence is punctured with unspeakable grief and the consequences of impulsive mistakes. His older brother Tommy jumped off a chopper into the Persian Gulf in 1991 and disappeared. The Navy presumed him dead. Still grappling with the unknown fate of their son, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph are killed in a car accident shortly afterward. Teenaged Roy is left alone in the shadow of these dual tragedies, and he deals with it about as successfully as you'd expect. Now Roy receives an email from a 15-year-old girl in San Francisco claiming to be Tommy's daughter. Attempting to answer the lingering questions of his cursed family and seeking a future in which he can drop anchor, Roy sets out for the West Coast. His encounters and misadventures along the way (which include backyard llama-raising, hunting endangered fowl in the Rockies, and shopping for a Russian bride) reminded us why we fell in love with Skip's writing in the first place.

And when others speak of Louisiana as a backwater or third-world they usually mean places like these, places that are falling, sinking, eroding into the suck of slinking salt waters, and nowhere as badly or as quickly as this fading fifteen crow-fly miles between my island and the harder ground that finally appeared after the Bayou Lafourche lift bridge. All that was behind me would one day be gone. But I was safe now.... Homes and businesses and solid ground, yes, but now that dark bayou to follow as well. Diesel rainbows, eddies of foamed trash. Ahead: Golden Meadow, Galliano, Cut Off, Larose, then another big bridge. The crossing of the Intracoastal. Agriculture, sugarcane. The backwater becoming a banana republic here. Some of the farmers burning their fields preharvest. The land all around me on fire and smoking.

***

In Before He Finds Her, Kardos crafts a classic Hitchcockian thriller. One beautiful September day on the Jersey Shore, Ramsey Miller throws a massive block party and invites all the neighbors. After the bash he apparently snaps, strangling his wife to death and fleeing into the Atlantic with his 3-year-old daughter. Police and the FBI never find him and the daughter is presumed dead. But everyone's wrong. The daughter was whisked away into witness protection and has been raised for fifteen years with an aunt and uncle in West Virginia. Now new evidence indicates that Ramsey is back -- and he's coming for the daughter he left behind that fateful night. Kardos skillfully weaves between dual narratives: what was Ramsey thinking the night he ended his world? And will his daughter uncover the truth before her father tracks her down?  Every customer we've teased with that synopsis hasn't been able to resist this book, and we're sure you'll enjoy it too.

Standing over her -- she was so, so pretty -- he wanted to wake her, to lie wordlessly beside her at the beginning of their last day together. But the curtains were open, and the light would wake her soon enough. How incredible, he thought, moving toward the window and looking out above the rooftops across the way, that this morning look exactly like every other. There was no way to see those eight other planets dragging themselves mindlessly into position. But they were. He could already feel it, the inevitability.

 

So drop in with us tomorrow night for a reception and book signing with these two greats at 5:30. Afterward we'll ask them to read a bit and speak on their craft. We'll also ask them about the eerie connection between their two new books: characters presumed dead who nevertheless survived. If that's our theme, you never know who might walk through the door. Don't miss it.

Turnrow 20 Spotlight: Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers / Ernst Haffner, tr. by Michael Hofmann / Other Press

Like so many visions from that time, the nightmarish spectacle of Nazi public book burnings is hard to forget. It's not just the sight of thousands of books in flames -- it's the thunder of the brass and drums, the pageantry of the uniforms and flags, the maniacal glee on the faces of the young men hurling books into the inferno. But a question continues to worm away: which books are they burning? What texts are so incendiary (no pun intended) that they need to be not just banned or redacted, but ceremoniously destroyed? An answer of sorts arrives in Blood Brothers, Ernst Haffner's 1932 novel now being republished in a translation by Michael Hofmann (who also gave us 2013 favorite Every Man Dies Alone) for Other Press. In fact, we know this to be a book that the Nazis banned and burned. But it also answers a more disturbing question about that scene: who are those boys throwing the books? Why are they laughing? And where do they fit in the story of Hitler's Germany?

Blood Brothers is a strange little book, even before Chapter 1 begins. Haffner was a social worker and journalist in the shaky peace of 1920s and 30s Weimar Germany. Blood Brothers was published in 1932 as Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin [Youth on the road to Berlin] and banned by the ascendant National Socialist Party one year later. All traces of Haffner vanish in 1940. As far as we know, this is his only work. (Read more about Haffner and the background of Blood Brothers in this great New York Times piece). And yet there are hundreds of journalists and writers who would have killed to write this book. It is passionately, angrily partisan but avoids the soapbox, promoting plot over pamphleteering. It's hyper-realistic and somehow anti-cynical. Even 80 years later, it remains fresh and startling to read, maybe because of its unique prose style, or because its lessons still need to be learned. It's decidedly of its time and place and yet shockingly relevant to urban America in 2015.

It's telling that a book so swift -- constantly moving, running, shaking, catching fire -- begins with its title characters waiting in line. The Blood Brothers are a loosely associated gang of Berlin boys between 10 and 20 who are orphaned and homeless, drifting from odd job to petty theft to bar to brothel to warehouse floor. In these opening lines they are among the thousands standing in the welfare queue. But watch how Haffner illustrates this scene of societal ennui:

"Eight Blood Brothers -- tiny individual links of an exhausted human chain stretching across the factory yard and winding up two flights of stairs -- stand and wait among hundreds of others to be admitted from the awful damp cold into the warm waiting rooms. Just three or four minutes to go now. Then, on the dot of eight, the heavy iron door on the second floor will be unlocked...the coiled line jerks into life."

It is with this restless tone that Haffner unspools the entire tale. For the Blood Brothers, life is tedious, uncertain, gray, cold, and hungry. The only comfort is from each other and the only excitement comes from bursts of feverish activity. Thus, even when they are waiting in line, sleeping on the floor of an abandoned train station, or grinding their teeth in an institutional cot, Haffner keeps the language recklessly brisk. In this book there are no recollections, no scene-setting, no lengthy descriptions, no meditations on motive, character, purpose, or the greater world. It's all action all the time, and the effect on the reader is intense and dizzying.

In the early chapters, Haffner follows the gang's misadventures with a detached, objective eye that nevertheless provokes empathy. Soon, however (nothing in this book happens slowly), it becomes the story of two boys in particular: Ludwig and Willi. Ludwig is a younger member of the gang who follows Jonny, the de facto leader, with the same dogged loyalty as the other boys. We first meet Willi as he's scheming to break out of the juvenile detention center where he's been imprisoned for several months. His escape is breathtakingly suspenseful, and he hops a freight train hoping to make it back to his comrades in Berlin. Realizing to his horror that he's heading in the wrong direction, he heeds the advice of another tramp in the boxcar. Obviously, Willi is on the lam and can't buy a ticket or be seen by the guards, so the tramp urges him to ride a passenger express line hundreds of miles back to the capital - by clinging to the axles underneath the carriage. What follows is the most unforgettable sequence you've read in a long time:

"The icy wind drills deeper and deeper into his clothes, bites under the strips of material wound round his trunk. The body hanging there, stock still, loses its flexibility, becomes numb. Willi can no longer feel his hands cramping in their handholds, he can no longer move his fingers. He can't even feel himself hanging on the axle. All he feels is his body hurtling along at incredible speed, as though shot from a gun. He feels the occasional dull thump of a stone hitting him, but it's not a pain as such. He is released from his physical self, from time and space. How long has he been hanging like this? Is it one hour, is it four?"

Does it need to be restated? The whole book is like this! The only reason to stop reading before you finish it is to take a breath.

This stylistic feat would be enough to recommend the book, but its greater implications are what push it over the top. It seems like this period - 1930s Germany - is repeatedly invoked to warn people about the insidious evil they are blindly submitting to, as if comparing anything to the advent of World War II has ever been accurate or appropriate. The work that comes quickly to mind is Tony Kushner's 1985 A Bright Room Called Day. Also set in Berlin in 1932, Kushner's play centers on an upper class coterie of artists and actors who feebly attempt to maintain their way of life in the gathering storm of the Weimar Republic. By switching between 1932 and then-present-day America, Kushner (not very subtly) suggests that the Reagan administration is an echo of that chaotic time of misplaced idealism. Where Bright Room falters is in attempting the comparison.

Blood Brothers, in contrast, never tries to make itself bigger than the boys themselves, and this is exactly what makes it so frighteningly relevant. The Brothers are not so much cogs in a system as the clods of dirt that are crushed by its gears. There are no adults in the book. Indeed, there are welfare workers, cops, guards, and citizens, but they are only the faceless, inhuman tools of bureaucracy. When Willi and Ludwig are finally reunited, they make one last desperate attempt at the straight-and-narrow life. Since they're under 21 and without documentation or guardians, it's nearly impossible. And near the end, the smallest slip-up spells disaster for them. The horrifying similarity to today's America is not in the suggestion that we are living in some new dawn of evil Fascism, but that our own dispassionate bureaucracy is the same machine that threatens to crush the Blood Brothers. Who knows -- Haffner himself may have been one of its victims.

And so it is obvious now why the Nazis destroyed this book. It completely upended their assertion that organizations like the Hitler Youth and Labor Service eradicated inner city crime and gave purpose to shiftless young men. But the Blood Brothers were swallowed up by these groups -- the same institutions they knew but covered in a different shade of cheap paint. They were still there as the machine rumbled toward a new kind of war. And they are the same boys whose laughing faces seem so haunting in those scenes of public burning. We'd be wrong to think their exhilarated grins come from the gleeful destruction of literature. Rather, their gleaming eyes in those mountains of flame reflect the same elation they once chased in the streets of Berlin.