Guest Post - A bit of a background ramble about One Hundred Years of Vicissitude by Andrez Bergen
It's that time again when I host a very exciting guest post from a writer who is keen to post a little something on my blog (I love it when people guest post on my blog!). Today, I'm joined by Andrez Bergen, the author of Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat.
I mentioned this novel in my Top Five Indie Books You Should Be Reading (original link
HERE
) and I once again am going to suggest that you go out and read this book! It is by far one of the most entertaining and original reads I've read in a long time. If you love a bit of Blade Runner and Mad Max, mixed with some Japanese cinema and Humphrey Bogart - all blended with Australian slang and humour, then you will love this book!
I was recently contacted by the author Andrez Bergen about his upcoming novel, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude and suggested that he drop by some day and do a post on my blog to let my readers know about it. He pretty much sent me one the very same day! Thankfully my schedule was clear for Wednesday so I automatically made plans to post it.
So I present to you today - the guest post of Andrez Bergen, where he talks a little bit about the thought process behind One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. He is a very intelligent writer and geuninely nice guy that has a wealth of knowledge and I am always interesting in hearing the process behind the creation of a novel. Hope you enjoy reading it!!
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A bit of a background ramble about
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF VICISSITUDE
by Andrez Bergen
In around 2007, I was fishing about for a concept for a new novel to get my teeth into, preferably something related to Japan since I'd lived here for six years already by that stage.
That was when I read about identical twin sisters from Nagoya - Kin Narita and Gin Kanie - who were born in 1892 and lived to be over 100. I found myself wondering about the relationship of these two women, mirror-image centenarians, and how they might perceive one another.
I’m an old fan of Shakespeare’s Othello - Frank Finlay’s interpretation of Iago in the 1965 film version rocked my socks in high school - and the thought occurred to me that possibly, just possibly, an identical twin living a hundred years with a sibling may harbour feelings other than love and devotion - perhaps baser emotions like envy or hatred might develop. Being Japanese, however, they’d hardly exhibit these feelings to the outside world. Or would they?
At the time I was still working on my first novel, Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, and there’s a scene in there in which a geisha is involved. Somehow the two threads connected: identical twin geisha beating out a living for a century. I did a small amount of research into the period around World War 2, and then I shelved the concept, instead breaking my back finishing off Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.
Last year I published that novel and began thinking seriously about novel #2.
I’m not sure why, but I picked up the notes I’d made for the twin geisha story, and mixed and matched these with an earlier idea I had for an update of the medieval yarn about Tristan and Iseult. At the same time, I had Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat sitting in my brain, fresh still, perhaps even hard-boiled, and I decided to make one of the twin geisha the grandmother of a central character in that book, Nina ‘Laurel’ Canyon - she was, after all, half Japanese - even though the link is not fully explored and isn’t essential to the elements of the new novel - which I decided to call One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, in a respectful wink at Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
Somewhere along the line over the following months the Iago-Geisha-Medieval potboiler segued into a deeper tale of love, death, redemption, and poor judgment when it comes to marriage partners. I inducted another character from Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat - the antagonist, Wolram E. Deaps - and made him the narrator, with the opportunity to thus flesh him out, rather than the principle twin I was developing.
Along the way I took a much-needed trip to Kyoto thanks to the generosity of a group of wonderful students-cum-mates I teach English to, and the novel became a beast unto itself. Some of its ideas and directions came from listening to music, from long walks through back-streets of Tokyo - as well as, of course, the visit to Kyoto - and I was as inspired by my wife Yoko and daughter Cocoa as I was by the cinema of great Japanese film makers like Akira Kurosawa, Satoshi Kon, Kon Ichikawa, Seijun Suzuki, Masahiro Makino, Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu.
Some manga-ka you might know also get a respectful nod - including Osamu Tezuka - along with actors like Toshiro Mifune, Meiko Kaji and Takashi Shimura.
Thrown into the mix are the Japanese Red Army, the only visit to Tokyo by the Graf Zeppelin, saké, sumo, The Tale of Genji, James Bond, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, the Brothers Grimm, American comics from the '60s, and the 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo by 300 B-29s.
Finally, there's the homage to my grandfather Les, an Australian soldier in New Guinea during World War 2, a man I barely knew but cherish the memory of all the same.
The novel will be published through new publisher Perfect Edge Books in around August this year. The publisher has been incredibly supportive from the moment they got whiff of the project, and this will in fact be their first publication.
Fingers crossed that the whole caboodle works for others outside my own headspace.
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Not sure about you guys but I'm looking forward to reading it already! Anyone who makes references to Kurosawa is ok in my books!
A huge thanks to Andrez for taking the time to post on this blog and I hope you'll all join me in wishing him luck for the new release. Be sure to also check out his blog at this
LINK
. Please do leave a comment
Want to host a guest post on this blog? Send me an email at
PandragonPublishing@gmail.com
to discuss.
Until next time!
Pandragon
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