Lidia
asked
Chris Bohjalian:
Hello Chris! I loved The Light of the Ruins! It was such a great book! :) My first one of your books too! I will buy your next books too! How do you find inspiration to write these books?
Chris Bohjalian
Thanks, Lidia. I appreciate your kind words immensely.
And that's a great question. Of course, it's also one of those classic, absolutely reasonable questions that is, alas, as impossible to answer briefly as the meaning of life. But I am asked it often. All novelists are.
The reality is that each of my 17 novels sprang from a very different seed and grew in a very different fashion. A conversation. An anecdote. A memory.
“The Light in the Ruins” began as a re-imagining of “Romeo and Juliet.” (I have always savored love stories – especially epic love stories set in war. Books such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘The English Patient.’) I was inspired while watching my daughter as a Shark girlfriend in a production of “West Side Story,” another re-imaging of Shakespeare’s beloved romance.
And while the love story is instrumental to the novel, the tale grew beyond that. It grew into a tale of two young women, one of whom was a partisan battling the Nazis and Blackshirts. The other was a Tuscan nobleman’s daughter who falls in love with a German lieutenant. The book would end up moving back and forth in time between the cataclysm that was Tuscany in 1944 and Florence in 1955 – when a serial killer is murdering the remnants of the nobleman’s family one by one.
It’s set in one of my favorite parts of the world: That part of Italy called the Crete Senesi – the hills and woods and the eerily lunar-like landscape south of Siena. I bike there and do some of my best writing in a medieval granary that figures prominently in the tale.
I hope this helps. Thanks again!
And that's a great question. Of course, it's also one of those classic, absolutely reasonable questions that is, alas, as impossible to answer briefly as the meaning of life. But I am asked it often. All novelists are.
The reality is that each of my 17 novels sprang from a very different seed and grew in a very different fashion. A conversation. An anecdote. A memory.
“The Light in the Ruins” began as a re-imagining of “Romeo and Juliet.” (I have always savored love stories – especially epic love stories set in war. Books such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘The English Patient.’) I was inspired while watching my daughter as a Shark girlfriend in a production of “West Side Story,” another re-imaging of Shakespeare’s beloved romance.
And while the love story is instrumental to the novel, the tale grew beyond that. It grew into a tale of two young women, one of whom was a partisan battling the Nazis and Blackshirts. The other was a Tuscan nobleman’s daughter who falls in love with a German lieutenant. The book would end up moving back and forth in time between the cataclysm that was Tuscany in 1944 and Florence in 1955 – when a serial killer is murdering the remnants of the nobleman’s family one by one.
It’s set in one of my favorite parts of the world: That part of Italy called the Crete Senesi – the hills and woods and the eerily lunar-like landscape south of Siena. I bike there and do some of my best writing in a medieval granary that figures prominently in the tale.
I hope this helps. Thanks again!
More Answered Questions
Mark
asked
Chris Bohjalian:
I enjoy your work and I am always amazed at the quality of writing, story telling and research. I'm also amazed at the rapidity of releases. How do you conduct your research? Do you have a team collecting the information? Or, with access to unlimited on the internet, do you collect your own research? Thanks, and continued success.
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