Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 23

The real sport of kings? Outhouse racing.

Today is the last day of June, which means the NBA and NHL finals are (finally) behind us. Yup, we were watching NBA basketball into the third week of June and NHL ice — Ice! — hockey into the fourth. That means we can now turn our attention to the sport that, in my opinion, is America’s real national pastime. The sport that links generations and reminds us of our idyllic past and our pastoral roots. A sport that may be less violent than football, but one that nevertheless demands speed and eye-hand coordination and serious mental toughness.

Yes, it is time once again for the annual Fourth of July Outhouse Races in Bristol, Vermont. They begin this Thursday morning at nine a.m., the opening act for one of the Green Mountain’s longest and most eccentric Fourth of July parades.

I’ve never participated in the Outhouse Races, but I’ve watched them for years. It’s Nascar meets the Olympic one-hundred meter dash. It’s a chariot race with pretend port-a-potties. For those of you unfamiliar with an outhouse race, it is, in my opinion, the real sport of kings. After all, you have someone sitting upon the proverbial throne and you have other people wagering along the side of the racetrack.

Here is what’s involved:

You build a replica of an outhouse. Keep it light, but there should be a hole on which a person can (and will) sit.

Put the outhouse on castors or wheels.

Find a few people willing to race like madmen and women down Bristol’s Main Street, some pulling and some pushing each outhouse.

There are usually four heats, the winner of each being the first outhouse to break the toilet paper tape. These winners compete in one final race for the championship.

Meanwhile, those of us in the crowd can cheer and bet and eat.

This Thursday will mark the 35th running of the runs. There are other outhouse races in other parts of this great land, but none dating back to the Carter Presidential administration and none on the Fourth of July.

Unbelievably diligent readers will recall that I first wrote about the Outhouse Races almost twenty years ago. But things have changed since then. They are no longer managed by the Bristol Rotary Club because the Bristol Rotary Club was disbanded. And the course no longer runs around the Bristol green because the corners meant that the race was fast becoming – to quote Ted Lylis, a race organizer for twenty years and still an eager and experienced assistant – “a blood sport.” He said that parked cars were “getting their vehicle mirrors ripped off. Doug Mack – owner of Mary’s at Baldwin Creek – once fell down and got run over by his own outhouse. There was always a lot of blood and a lot of skin loss.” Consequently, now the course runs in a straight line down Main Street in front of the green, ending at the one traffic light in the village.

Like so many other big ideas, the outhouse races were born late into a New Year’s Eve party. The details now are a little sketchy – this was, after all, a New Year’s Eve party — but a pair of Bristol Rotarians, Larry Gile and Bill Paine, were no doubt having a profound intellectual discussion about the Declaration of Independence. Then they had another drink and the outhouse races were born.

This year the race is managed by Bristol’s Shawn Oxford. “I love the quirkiness and the way it brings the community together,” he told me when I asked him why he took on such a profound responsibility. “In the beginning, people were racing actual outhouses.”

In some parts of this proud nation, people do nothing more than pay homage to the Revolutionary War patriots on the Fourth of July. We certainly do that here in this corner of Addison County; we have our re-enactors on parade. But we also have the courage to begin the big day by racing the restrooms of freedom. Here’s to the fireworks in the sky — and in the thunderbox!

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 30, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 9. Your can learn more about it here.)

My doomed romances -- 20 troubled romances

My new novel, THE LIGHT IN THE RUINS, began as a re-imagining of “Romeo and Juliet.” I was watching my daughter as one of the Shark girlfriends in a Vermont production of WEST SIDE STORY --- Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein’s American musical version of Shakespeare’s classic love story --- and I realized three things:

1) I am seriously drawn to love stories that are transcendent and crazy;

2) I’m not alone. Many of us are drawn to love stories that are (shall we say) ill-advised; and

3) There is something unbelievably hypnotic about romance when the lovers are doomed --- or, at least, when it looks as if their love can’t possibly survive the third act.

So, when Bookreporter.com asked me to curate a bookshelf, I decided this corner of the library is for the Doomed Lovers --- or, at least, for those lovers who will need a whole lot of luck for their romance to survive. In most of these tales, the lovers have little in common. They’re from different backgrounds. Sometimes they’re not even the same species. In one of these books, the romance is between a golem and a jinni. In another, he’s human and she’s an angel. And in a third, he’s a male porn star who’s had most of his skin burned away and she’s...crazy. Or not.

In some cases, not even we as readers are rooting for them. (Raise your hand if you really want Humbert Humbert and Lolita to walk off into the sunset together. Yeah, not a lot of takers.)

Are all of these classics? Far from it.

Some had me laughing out loud, some merely smiling a little wistfully. Some are poignant and powerful and deeply moving.

For one reason or another, I enjoyed them all. And, in some cases, I can see how they influenced THE LIGHT IN THE RUINS --- a love story and literary thriller set in Florence and Tuscany in the waning days of World War II and the 1950s.

So, this summer, I raise my glass to the doomed lovers everywhere who sometimes --- against all odds --- actually make it.

To see the full list of 20, click here:

http://www.bookreporter.com/bookshelv...

(Chris's new novel, THE LIGHT IN THE RUINS, arrives on July 9.)

Dread

From an interview I did last week with a Middle Eastern men's magazine:

Q: Writing is always an act of discovery. What have you discovered about yourself, in particular, through your writing?

A: My books are all about dread. They really are. I think that is the overarching theme. And yet I am not especially depressed or morose. So, I think I have discovered I'm very good at compartmentalizing emotions.

Young love? Never grows old.

Here is the definition of dogs in heat. Penny Lydecker, a female yellow lab, is locked safely inside her house on McIntosh Court in Stamford, Connecticut in 1969, while her owners are off at work. Buffy Fenton, a male golden retriever, thinks Penny is seriously hot – hottest dog on the block. So hot, that one afternoon he digs a hole under the Lydecker house, emerges through the mud floor basement inside, and he and Penny then proceed to do what dogs in heat do when you leave them unattended with a fireplace, a thick living room rug, and a refrigerator full of beer. The result? A beautiful litter of puppies, one of which my family adopted when I was a little boy. We named the dog Elmer.

Here is the definition of teenagers in heat. Vaneasa Norton and Dan Stearns in 1983. No, Dan didn’t dig a hole into the Norton’s house here in Lincoln thirty years ago. And Vaneasa wasn’t locked inside. She was 17 years old and didn’t have a car at her disposal. This mattered because her boyfriend, Dan, lived 19 miles away in Middlebury. Dan had recently gotten a speeding ticket, and so his parents had revoked his driving privileges – which meant that he couldn’t drive, either. The solution? Vaneasa left Lincoln on foot a little before lunchtime one hot summer day, and walked to Dan’s home on Weybridge Street. Arrived there at dusk. She wasn’t allowed to hitchhike, so she walked every single inch of every single mile.

“It might have been a little easier if I had brought water,” she recalled, “but I didn’t. I also didn’t bring any money. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Or, she was thinking exactly like a 17-year-old in heat.

But here’s what I love about this story. This Tuesday, June 25, she and Dan will be celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. They married in 1988, soon after they had each finished college. Together they own the Lincoln General Store and raised two daughters, now young women.

I’m always a little moved when young love survives into middle age. I know how wonderful that can be firsthand, since my lovely bride and I have been together since February of our freshman year of college. I didn’t walk 19 miles to see her one summer day when we were teenagers, but one winter day I hitchhiked from Massachusetts to Manhattan to surprise her – and it turned out, her mom. I am honestly not sure who was more incredulous when I showed up at the family’s apartment in New York City: Mother or daughter.

Vaneasa clearly has that heat gene, but whether she got it from her mom or her dad is unclear. Her parents, Bill and Linda Norton, celebrated their fifty-first wedding anniversary last week, and both may have it. When they were teenagers, he lived in the banana belt of Bristol and Linda lived six miles up the Lincoln Gap from Vermont 116. One day when Bill and Linda were both without cars, he biked all the way up to her house. And, just for the record, this was no road bike. This was one of those tanks that posed as bicycles in the late-1950s. I have biked up the gap often and, trust me, what Bill did is mighty impressive. A sign of true love.

But equally as amazing is that he then brought Linda back down the hill to his house on the back of that bike. Yup: Linda balanced on the thin metal carrier behind the seat all the way down the Lincoln Gap road.

Which brings me back to Dan and Vaneasa. Thirty years after her Bataan Death March to Middlebury – and after a quarter century of marriage – she and Dan are as infatuated with each other as they were as teenagers. “Oh, I’d still walk to Middlebury for him,” Vaneasa told me. “I’d just bring a little money this time.”

Happy anniversary.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 23, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 9.)

The Light in the Ruins -- the first 27 pages

Greetings!

Some of you have asked me where you can find a longer excerpt from "The Light in the Ruins," arriving on July 9.

The answer?

Right here, at this link -- the first 27 pages:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chris-B...

Fingers crossed you're not disappointed. Thank you, as always, for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.

Hope is the tie rack with feathers

It wasn’t the worst Father’s Day present ever: Children everywhere have given their fathers gifts that are far more troubling. Exhibit A? Anything at all from the Sky Mall catalog. Nothing says love quite like a Hobbit chess set or tan thru swim trunks. But this gift was up there.

I was a 10-year-old Webelo. Webelos, generally, are fifth-graders transitioning from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. The term is shorthand for “We’ll be loyal scouts,” not the Native American word for “boys who don’t bathe.” That May and June our den was working with little jigsaws, small sheets of plywood, and wooden pegs. One of my friend’s fathers was helping us craft tie racks shaped like ducks for our dads, because Father’s Day was nearing and every dad in the 1970s wanted nothing more in the world than a badly made tie rack shaped like a duck.

I have never been good at crafts or any project that involves a tool with a serrated edge. My friends know this. The other day, I was in my yard trimming dead branches from the bottom of an evergreen with a handsaw, and my next-door neighbor, Judy Brown, walked by and asked, “Do you have a permit to use one of those?” She said that her 81-year-old mother-in-law, Bev Brown, has an electric chainsaw that she loves. That evening when I asked my wife if I should get an electric chainsaw, she burst out laughing and reminded me that I am not Bev Brown.

It’s true.

I should also admit that I was never one of those kids who could ever color between the lines. It wasn’t that I was so creative; it was that I was so inept.

Which brings me back to my duck. I did a spectacularly bad job of cutting it and a worse job of painting it. It looked nothing like a duck. It looked like an amoeba. My duck was, far and away, the worst duck in the den. We’d finished painting our ducks on a Friday afternoon, and the plan was to let them dry overnight in our den leader’s garage and then pick them up on Saturday morning. We would present them to our dads on Sunday.

I had warned my mom as we went to retrieve my duck that it was kind of a train wreck. I was embarrassed by it and, in truth, disgusted with myself. The self-loathing meter was off the charts.

When we arrived, however, the first thing my mother said when she saw my duck was that she liked it and my dad would love it. This wasn’t a mother’s love; my mother always called it exactly as she saw it. Something had happened to my duck overnight and it actually looked pretty good. It was even recognizably a duck. Instantly I understood what had occurred: The night before, my friend’s dad had performed some serious plastic surgery on the amoeba. Meticulously he had shaped a duck’s bill and wings and webbed feet. He had repainted it so that the colors on the feathers didn’t run into the colors on the face. He had given the creature back its eyes.

I was furious. Looking back, it was clear that this father thought he was doing me a favor. It’s possible that what began as a tiny touch-up simply grew into a full fashion makeover. But his work was a ringing indictment of mine.

It would be three years before I would tell my dad that his Father’s Day duck was largely the den leader’s work. I confessed this when we were packing up the house to move from Connecticut to Florida. I said he didn’t really need to bring the duck with him.

But he did. He pointed to my badly painted “Happy Father’s Day” on the front and my nearly illegible signature on the back. “Those were the only parts I cared about,” he said.

Happy Father’s Day.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 16, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins" a re-imagining of "Romeo and Juliet" set in Tuscany at the end of World War 2, goes on sale on July 9.)

In a Turkish town that had 10,000 Armenians, now there is only one

A woman I met last month in southeastern Turkey is going to die, probably sometime soon. Asiya’s death will not be covered by any news service, and for all but a few people in her small village of Chunkush, she will not be missed. Even the relatives who love her will probably think to themselves, well, she was 98 years old. Or 99. Or, if she survives until 2015, somewhere in the neighborhood of a century. She will have lived a long life.

When I met Asiya in May, her daughter brought me strong Kurdish tea and fresh strawberries from their yard, and when I return to her village someday and find that she has indeed passed away, I suspect I’m going to weep.

Why cry for a woman I met but once, who lived a long life and who couldn’t understand a word I said? Who spoke only Turkish, a language in which I know how to say only “please” and “thank you”?

Because Asiya is what some people call a hidden Armenian, and she is the last surviving Armenian in Chunkush.

I met her when I was traveling with six Armenian American friends through a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to as Historic Armenia. We were in a region that today is largely Kurdish but as recently as 98 years ago was a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Assyrians and Armenians. We were making a pilgrimage to view the ruins of Armenian churches and monasteries, the remnants of a culture obliterated from this corner of the Earth in the Armenian genocide. During the First World War, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically annihilated — three out of every four living in the Ottoman Empire.

On our fifth day, we visited Chunkush, where until 1915 there was a thriving community of 10,000 Armenians. The ruins of the church loom over you. The town was almost entirely Armenian. Over a few nightmarish days that summer, Turkish gendarmes and Kurdish chetes — killing parties — descended on the village and marched almost every Armenian two hours away to a ravine called Dudan, where they shot, bayoneted or simply threw them into a chasm of several hundred feet. One of the gendarmes pulled Asiya’s mother from the line at the edge of the ravine, however, because he thought she was pretty. He decided he’d marry her. And so she was spared — one of the very few Armenians who were saved that summer day in 1915.

My companions and I hadn’t expected to find Asiya when we journeyed to Chunkush. We simply wanted to see the ruins of the church. Most of the villagers acknowledged that once upon a time Armenians had lived in Chunkush, but they were quick to add — whenever we asked what had happened to them — that at some point they had all “moved away.”

The truth was, they were still there, whatever remained of their bones deteriorating at the bottom of the Dudan chasm. We didn’t think there were any living Armenians in the town.

But as we were leaving, a thin fellow in his 60s, with a deeply weathered face and a ball cap, raced up to our van and banged on the door. We had been there an hour, and word had spread that Americans were in town. We had to meet his mother-in-law, he said.

Our Kurdish driver worried that this was the beginning of a nasty international incident: Seven Americans kidnapped or killed. But the fellow was desperate, so we agreed to come meet Asiya. My friend Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the Armenian Weekly in the United States, speaks Turkish and translated.

I have met survivors of the Armenian genocide before, including my grandparents. But meeting Asiya was different. She wasn’t in Washington or Paris or Beirut. She wasn’t a part of the Armenian diaspora, where we usually find the few remaining survivors of the genocide. Here was someone whose mother had been at the edge of the gorge — and who was still living where, more than likely, her grandparents and her father had been executed. Where her ancestral culture had been exterminated.

After the massacre, the town of 10,000 Armenians was reinvented as a town of 10,000 Kurds. Here was someone whose mother had heard the endless gunshots. The crash of the bodies on the rocks. The wails of the children.

She and her mother had grown up and grown old, aware of who and what they were — Armenian — but forced to conform and remain silent. That was the price of survival in the days after the genocide, and it’s a custom that, in small villages such as Chunkush, endures today. That is, perhaps, the very definition of a hidden Armenian.

Whenever we asked Asiya about being Armenian, she would shake her head ruefully and grow silent. One time her daughter chimed in: “No. We can’t talk about that.”

Whenever we asked what her mother had told her of the chasm, she would look down and murmur: “I was too young. I don’t remember.” Sometimes she would begin a sentence, “My mother said . . .” but then her voice would trail off.

At one of those moments when she paused, I took her hand. It was a reflex, and I had no idea if this was a cultural faux pas. But she wrapped my fingers in hers; her grip was powerful. She looked at me from beneath her headdress with eyes that were at once among the saddest and the strongest I’ve ever seen. I understood instantly why her son-in-law, a very good man, wanted us to meet her: It was because she wanted to meet us. She wanted to meet other Armenians.

Today there are but a handful of living survivors of the Armenian genocide. When the centennial arrives in 2015, there will be fewer still. I hope that Asiya will be with us, because I plan to return to Chunkush that year. No one from the village is going to commemorate the 10,000 who died in that chasm, so it will be up to people like me to make that effort — and, yes, to embrace the Asiyas of the world who were there.

(This essay appeared originally in the Washington Post on June 8, 2013. Chris's new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," goes on sale on July 8.)

Doubleday is giving away 50 copies of "The Light in the Ruins"

That's right.

Big thanks to Doubleday Books and to Goodreads.

Enter this Goodreads link below between now and June 15

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

and you might win one of 50 copies of my new novel.

Here is what the critics have said so far about the book:


"Thoroughly gripping, beautiful, and astonishingly vengeful, this novel is a heartbreaker. Bohjalian's latest turn to historical fiction is immensely rewarding."
-- Julie Kane, Library Journal -- starred review

"Mastering matters subtle and grotesque, Bohjalian combines intricate plotting and bewitching sensuality with historical insight and a profound sense of place to create an exceptional work of suspense rooted in the tragic aberrations of war."
-- Donna Seaman, Booklist -- starred review

"A literary thriller. . .a soulful why-done-it."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"An exploration of post-WWII Italy doubles as a murder mystery in this well-crafted novel. . .an entertaining historical whodunit."
-- Publishers Weekly

So, take a moment and enter. Fifty people will be among the first on their block to dive in.

As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.

It's summer! Time to buckle up for redcoats and crummy joints!

Back in the day, we here in the Champlain Valley often made the redcoats’ lives hell – the breakfast brawl at Hubbardton notwithstanding. But my parents always had a soft spot in their hearts for one particular redcoat stationed at Fort Ticonderoga in the 1960s.

Okay, he wasn’t a real redcoat. He was, perhaps, a college kid on summer break earning a little money and sweating off a semester’s worth of keg beer beneath his regulation British Army uniform. But here is, more or less, what happened.

My parents had put my older brother and me in the backseat of the station wagon – a blue woodie – and driven four or five hours north from our home in Westchester County. (I should note that my brother and I probably weren’t always in the backseat. We were just as likely to have been hanging out in the cargo area. Seat belts back then were viewed as a serious inconvenience. The last thing anyone wanted was to be buckled into the seat if you smashed into a tanker truck and had to get out fast. Besides, how could my brother and I wrestle in a moving vehicle if we were strapped into our seats?) It was one of those classic summer vacation car trips, where we went north to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, and then west to Niagara Falls.

And while I don’t remember much, I remember two moments: The redcoat. And the brothel. More on the brothel in a moment.

I was three and my brother was eight. Based on the photos from the trip that remain, we looked like we were pulled straight from an episode of “Mad Men:” Crew cuts and short pants. We are always posed in front of Revolutionary War era cannons. Among my annoying habits (and, apparently, I had plenty), was that I used to suck my fingers. Not my thumb, which normal, screwed-up three-year-olds depended on, but fingers. I used to suck the ring and middle fingers. Simultaneously. It drove my parents wild, but they seemed incapable of stopping me.

But one summer afternoon, the redcoat accomplished in nine words what my parents had been trying to make happen for months. For years, for all I know. As we were passing the redcoat at Fort Ticonderoga, he said to me in the voice of a drill sergeant, “Soldier! Get those fingers out of your mouth – now!” According to family lore, I was awed. I listened. And I never put my fingers in my mouth again.

The next day we motored on to Niagara Falls. Just before we arrived there, however, the station wagon’s transmission died. The woodie was towed to a garage near Buffalo and we went to the motel across the street from the garage to spend the night. It was – and here I am being kind – a dump. The fellow behind the counter begged my parents not to stay there when he saw they had their children with them. I weighed in with one of those remarks mothers memorialize in baby books: “What a crummy joint.” And, yes, if it wasn’t actually a brothel, it was what we euphemistically call a “hot sheets motel.” My mother made us sleep in our cloths on the bedspreads. (Given what we now know about motel bedspreads, this may in reality have been the far more disgusting solution. The sheets are at least washed.)

I share these two Wonder Bread memories with you because many of you are finalizing your own summer vacation plans. Your car trips to great destinations. Your roadside adventures for July and August.

My advice? Think big. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.

And, yes, check your transmission.

Now buckle up and take your fingers out of your mouth. It’s already June and those hot sheets motels fill up fast.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 2. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in five weeks.)

The gods must be crazy after all

HERE’S THE setup: A Coca-Cola bottle falls from a low-flying airplane over an undeveloped corner of Africa. How undeveloped? The local tribesman who finds it — as well as the rest of the villagers — have no idea what it is and presume it’s a gift from the gods. Unfortunately, the empty bottle, with its myriad uses, unleashes almost everyone’s baser instincts.

I am referring to a 1984 movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” a comedy that much of the world loved and I loathed. Seriously. I nearly walked out. I was even a little offended by what I perceived as its Orientalism: Its Western condescension toward a culture that’s less developed.

So, why am I citing a nearly three-decade old movie that I detested? Because I learned last month that the gods indeed might be crazy.

I was traveling with companions through Turkey’s easternmost provinces, a part of the world that is very different from cosmopolitan Istanbul or such popular Turkish tourist destinations as Ephesus and Nemrut. The regions are largely Kurdish, but as recently as 98 years ago they were a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Assyrians, and Armenians. It is a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to as Historic Armenia.

While driving from Van to Diyarbakir, we detoured to a small Kurdish village near Bitlis to see the ruins of an old Armenian church. What remains is now a barn. As we were leaving, one of village elders pulled aside my friend, Khatchig Mouradian, who speaks Turkish, and said he had a relic the Armenians had left behind when they’d moved away, and he wanted to know how valuable it was. He was hoping that Khatchig could translate for him the mysterious Armenian writing on the bottom.

Khatchig could indeed read it. But so could I. So could have most any third or fourth grader in any elementary school in Boston — because it wasn’t Armenian. It was English.

The relic was a run-of-the-mill porcelain plate from the 1960s. It was a Currier and Ives sort of print of a horse carriage approaching a post office. The wording on the bottom? “Royal Tudor Ware. Staffordshire, England.” I found this very plate — or one just like it — going for a few dollars on eBay. I think anyone who brought the plate to the “Antiques Roadshow’’ would have been laughed off the set. It wasn’t valuable. It wasn’t a relic. And it sure as heck wasn’t Armenian. Trust me: The Armenian alphabet looks as much like the Latin alphabet as a Picasso looks like a Monet. We’re talking apples and oranges.

But it was clear that the elder and the community members who crowded around Khatchig as he translated the few words on the bottom revered this plate. This was — forgive me — their Coca-Cola bottle. Sure, it wasn’t a gift from the gods, but in the eyes of this village, it was an item of totemic importance that might have serious commercial value.

Now, it would be easy to focus on the reality that there are parts of this globe that can’t distinguish between a piece of mass-produced 1960s porcelain and a relic. But that’s not newsworthy. That’s a bad movie from 1984. Moreover, this village had cars and electricity and at least one dude with rock ‘n’ roll as the ringtone on his cellphone.

Here, however, is what fascinated me — what made this comedy in reality a tragedy. The Armenians of the village didn’t just “move away.” At least most of them didn’t. Most of them, in all likelihood, were among the 1.5 million Armenians systematically annihilated during the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915. Three out of every four Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed, sometimes by their own Kurdish or Turkish neighbors.

I have no idea how that plate wound up in that village. For all I know, it fell from a plane like a Coke bottle and managed somehow not to shatter. Obviously it never belonged to the Armenians.

But even if the Kurds had shown us an actual plate from 1915, it would not have been worth dying for. It would not have been worth killing for.

The real value of that Staffordshire dinner plate from the 1960s? A symbol of the ignorance and misunderstanding that can drive a wedge between people who, once upon a time, might have managed to live together in peace.

* * *

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 16 books. His new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” comes out on July 9.

This column appeared originally in the Boston Globe on May 31, 2013.