>> From the Library of
Congress, in Washington D.C. >> Ron Charles: Hello,
good afternoon. I'm Ron Charles, editor of the book
section of the Washington Post. Which is a charter sponsor
of The National Book Festival and we are so glad you are here. First word of thanks to our
co-chairman of the festival, David Rubenstein, and
the many other sponsors who have made this possible. And if you would like to
make a financial contribution to the festival there is information
in your program about that. We will have time for questions
afterwards, at these two mics, know that if you come up to the
microphone you will become part of the library's permanent
collection. So if that's not something you
want to do, stay in your seat. I am so delighted to be here
today with Geraldine Brooks, I've known her for years now. Since she wrote one of my
favorite novels, March. [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: The moment I
finished it I boldly called her on the phone out of the blue, a
stranger, choked up, kind of crying, and told her how much I loved it. She has since changed
her phone number. But she still is happy
to get email from fans. Geraldine Brooks was born
and raised in Australia which accounts for
her lovely accent. She came to the US to
complete a masters degree at Columbia University
and soon got a job for the Wall Street Journal
covering conflicts in Africa and the Balkans and the Middle East. That experience provided the
material for her first book, Nine Parts of Desire, The
Hidden World of Islamic Women, which was an international
best seller. Several years later after winning
an overseas press club award for her coverage of the Gulf
War, she took off the journalist and wrote a novel called
Year of Wonders. [ Applause ] >> Somebody in the
audience just told me that was their favorite book ever. [ Background Conversation ] >> Encouraged by the
success of that novel, she published a second one
called March, based on the life of Bronson Alcott and the father
figure of the Little Women and it went on to win the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: Since then she
has published two more celebrated novels, People of the
Book and Caleb's Crossing. Now all of her novels
have been dramatic works of historical reclamation and
imagination, but her upcoming, her new book, The Secret Chord,
is her most ambitious work yet. The Secret Chord is about David,
King David, ruler of Judah, ancestor of Jesus,
Michelangelo's subject for the first Abercrombie
and Fitch model. The story is incredible, I
mean I thought I knew this from my Sunday school days, but wow,
it's got war, intrigue, betrayal, sex, it's one spectacular scandal after another even by
Washington standards. You are in for a treat
for Geraldine Brooks, tells us about her
inspiration, her research, and her work to bring this
ancient hero to new life. Please join me in welcoming her. [ Applause ] >> Geraldine Brooks: Thank you,
Ron, you really are my hero. He is just the best,
and may I just recommend to your attention Ron has another
hat as well being a book reviewer for the Washington Post, he is
also the totally hip book reviewer on YouTube, and those of you
that haven't had the pleasure of seeing his work there, Ron. So I'm the kind of person who
tends to be as Zen as possible about doing events like this. Thank you all for coming. It's hard to be Zen with
this many people in the room. And particularly when I
read the author instructions that the National Book Festival
thoughtfully sends to us, and it said to be personal. So that's okay. So I loaded up a power point
with some slides of my kids, which I will show you soon. And then they said
don't use any notes. And I'm, what do we think we are? We're people who spend 90%
of our lives alone in a room because we're really quite shy. Don't use any notes? As you see, I am flouting
that instruction. I will try to not to refer to
them too much, but like Linus, I need my security blanket. I hope for your understanding. But to try and fulfill the
requirement of being personable, I thought I would share
with you some information about the thing I collect. I think most people, or many
people, have collections. Some people have coins or
stamps or bobble headed dolls, I collect examples
of unhelpful signage. [ Laughter ] >> Geraldine Brooks: Watch for falling rocks is a
perennial favorite of mine. It's the rare ones I treasure, like
bird watcher heading to Antarctica or the Galapagos and such,
there's a blue footed booby that can be seen no where else. I like those signs that
you have to travel to get. And a lot of them are in my
home country of Australia. In far north Queensland where
the roads are often more notional than actual, there's the sign
that says drive according to prevailing conditions. Even better at a place aptly named
Big Hole in the northern territory, accidents can lead
to injury and death. Um, there was a sign I saw on
over an expressway in Florida that first looked like
helpful information, texting while driving kills. Fair enough I thought, and
then I noticed at the bottom of the sign it said, for
safety tips, text #safety. But perhaps the prize in
my collection is the sign on the car ferry that goes
back and forth to my home on Martha's Vineyard,
for your safety, please exit the freight deck
while the vessel is underway. I love that sign. Every time I see it, it makes me
laugh because I get this vision of all the vacation SUVs with
their bungee Chorded extrusions of bicycles and kayaks and
spare blankets and pillows and all the holiday paraphernalia, obediently driving off the
freight deck into Vineyard Sound. And I thought, well that's one
way to thin out the August crowds. So why do I like these
signs so much? It's because they remind me how
magnificently complicated our language is and how difficult
it is to convey precise meaning, no matter how well
intentioned you are. Somebody at the Martha's Vineyard
Steamship Authority probably put a lot of thought into that
sign and getting made up in nice high-vis lettering, and
they just wanted to advise people to get out of their cars for
the duration of the trip. And yet they totally blew it. So I keep little sticky notes of
these signs on the desk in my study, and it's to remind me
to be extra careful with this fragile treasure,
our language. But like the Steamship Authority
wiz, I often blow it, too. The difference between the
right word and the wrong word as Mark Twain told
us, is the difference between lightning and
the lightning bug. And when you're writing historical
fiction the stakes here can be quite high because if you
put the wrong word in a character's mouth you can
pull your reader out of the time and place that you're trying to keep
them in and that is unfortunate. So I've done that, I have to admit. In Year of Wonders, my first novel,
I have my 1665 young heroine, waxing eloquently about the
mauve tide of the Heather moving across the mountainside of
her peak district, Home Place. Problem, the first use of the word
mauve as a color wasn't until 1796. I know that because somebody
actually wrote a book titled Mauve, How One Man Invented a Color
that Changed the World. Whoops. So it was not long
after that novel came out, and I think I was speaking
about it in England, and I met a wonderful English
novelist called Jim Crace, who had written a book
set in biblical Israel, called Quarantines,
it's a wonderful novel. And he was telling me about how
he researched that novel and a lot of his research had to do with
camping in the Judean Desert to get the sense of the place
and he said, on the first morning of this camping trip, his
Bedouin guide woke him with a cup of lovely cardamom
scented Arabic coffee and said Mr. Jim, how did you sleep? And he said Ahmed I
slept like a log. >> And then he said
he raised his eyes to the bare rock ribbed hillsides of the Judean Desert,
not a log to be seen. So he turned to his guide and he
said Ahmed, how did you sleep? And Ahmed said, Mr. Jim, I
slept like a dead donkey. So ever since Jim Crace
shared that story with me, I spent a lot of time going over my
manuscripts and trying to find logs and turn them into dead donkeys. So I hope when you read
my books you'll find a lot of dead donkeys in them. It's not always easy. In The Secret Chord for example, which is set in second
iron age Israel, I kept running into a lot of logs. I had to take out the word assassin because the original assassins
were violent Persian sect of the 11th century and that's not
likely my Hebrew tribesman would have been talking about them. I substituted the word
thug, only to realize that that was actually a
violent group of Indian outlaws from the 15th century and my
Hebrews would not have been talking about them either. So I didn't find a really
good dead donkey in that case, but sometimes you can
find them and I think that the effect is
well worth the effort. So in Caleb's Crossing, my
young narrator needs to talk about a foetus and I'm pretty sure
that in Massachusetts in 1660, she's not using the word foetus. And lucky for me there's
a wonderful resource, the Oxford Historical Thesaurus
of the English Language that digs down on every word in use from today
all the way to early Icelandic, and so if you look up foetus you can
go down to mid 17th century and find that the word she probably
would have used is shapeling. If you put the word
shapeling into her mouth, I think you can time travel. So does it really matter? Is it important or is
it just nit picking? An expression, I have to say, that
I've loved for it's aptness ever since my son got head
lice in the third grade. It really is very exacting work. But I think combing
through a manuscript looking for bad vocabulary is in some
ways very similar to nit picking, and I think it does matter. And I think it's respectful
to you, the reader. And I'll tell you why. Not that many years ago, I had
a wonderful year as a fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Studies at Harvard, and this is just a
terrific boondoggle, they pay you to do your own work
and to have lunch with other fellows who come from a diversity of fields
across the sciences and the arts and academics, and you
give each other ideas and it's just a great experience,
and your only obligation is to give one talk on what
you're working on and go to the talks of your fellow fellows. So one of my fellow fellows was
a mathematician from Bordeaux, and her talk was entitled
Singularities in Algebraic Plane Curves. And I have to tell you, I
slumped into that lecture room. I took a doodle pad and I thought if
I positioned myself behind a pillow, a short nap might not
be out of the question. Math was my not my strong suit. But on that pad that
I carried that day, I found that my doodles
quickly turned to notations of what she was saying. And here's a couple of things
that I wrote down that she said. A formal power series about the
original is an infinite sum. Homomorphism is an
isomorphism if and only if the matrix is invertible. This is like poetry I thought,
and I leaned in to hear more. She was eloquent and she was
passionate and what she did was, as soon as I gave up the idea I
couldn't understand a word she was saying, she cracked open the airlock and showed me a glimpse
of her world. And I now know that
it's a beautiful world. What she was doing was trying to
find that place in every curve that is singular and she was trying
to express more perfectly the truth about the world, and I
realized that that is what I as a novelist also must do, is
to delve in and find the singular and get as close as possible to
the truth of the world as I can. And so it's a beautiful world
but I can't live in her world because if she's got lungs I've got
gills, I work completely differently and my work is all about words. I didn't start out as a novelist,
I started out as a journalist and I loved every step I
took in that occupation. But when my son was born 20 years
ago I realized I no longer wanted be a foreign correspondent going off
on long, open ended assignments, and so I had to see if I
could do something else. And I wrote Year of
Wonders and lucky for me, many of you wanted to read it. So I got to keep doing that. But I have that son to
thank for the inspiration for my most recent
novel, The Secret Chord because when he was just nine
years old he took the very unusual, I think, decision for
a boy of that age that the one musical
instrument he was interested in learning was the classical harp. I had been braced for drums
so I didn't resist the choice. But, it was watching him dwarfed by his teacher's beautiful concert
instrument, that set me back to thinking about David,
that avid boy harpist, that musician whose
music was so powerful that it could soothe
the mentally ill and even please God in
Heaven so we're told. And I had been a Fine Arts major in
college and I'd been very interested in the various depictions of David in Italian Renaissance
and baroque art. This shepherd, this warrior, this
musician, this complicated man, this man that we know, perhaps
before we know any other human being in full from early
childhood to extreme old age, he's really the first
political biography we have. A man who is very recognizably
human without a lot of supernatural interventions in
his life, and when I went back and read the Books Samuel, I realized that absolutely
everything happens to him in his long life, every good
experience and every bad experience, every powerful emotion that the
human heart could encompass, and I wanted to tell the story. But I like to tell my stories
with a first person narrator, and I wasn't sure who that
should be in this case. I knew it couldn't be David himself because he wouldn't have
enough objectivity to look at his own character and he
certainly wouldn't be able to effectively tell the story
of the women in his life because if he had understood them he
wouldn't have treated them the way he did. And then I came across
two references in the Book of Chronicles, intriguing
references to the Book of Nathan, and those two quotes that tell
us that the life of David, all his acts from first to last, have been set down by the
prophet Nathan, really inspired me because those of you that paid
attention in religious school, will remember that Nathan is
the one man who's brave enough to confront the king
about his moral failings. He's the one who tells David that he's completely
betrayed his own best self, tells him what the
consequences of this will be. And when you read his ferocious
castigation of the king, you wonder, what was the career
path for that guy? Because usually if you say
that kind of a thing to a king, that's the last thing
you get to say. But what's wonderful
about this story is that David accepts
responsibility, accepts the truth of what Nathan has said,
and how unusual is that? >> When have you ever
heard a politician say yep! You got me, I did it! No, it's always, I did not
have sex with that woman. He said, yeah I did and
that was really wrong and I shouldn't have
killed her husband, and then he brings Nathan
closer so that at the end of his life it's not Nathan that
he turns to, to resolve the issues of succession and to make sure
that the king who succeeds him on this throne is the one
son who should do that, because he's Solomon who's
come down to us as the bi-word for wisdom and good governance. So, I knew my narrator
was going to be Nathan, but I wasn't sure what his
voice would sound like. I imagined at first that he
would have a very tough voice, that this would be a power
broker, a mafia consigliere, or maybe a Thomas Cromwell,
Henry the 8th's dark imminence. And then I thought maybe
something really creepy. But Nathan didn't want
to be any of those guys, he refused to speak
in that voice to me. He had something completely
different in mind. He wanted to sound like these guys. He wanted to be unworldly,
he wanted to be idealistic, he wanted to be the light in
the story, and of course he does because he's a Hebrew prophet. And that's what these guys are
like, that is how they roll. They're the ones who bring us to
our best self, so I had to give in and let him be that guy. But then how was I going
to research this book? Usually I dive into archives and
read all the journals and letters and court reChords where
you can hear people in verbatim testimony
speaking in their own voice, so I can get the sound of
the language in my head. That wasn't going to be
possible in this case, so I realized that I would have
to do a more experiential kind of research, and I took a leaf out
of Jim Crace's book and headed off to Israel with my youngest son. I told you there would be
family photos, and here's one. I love exploiting my children
as research assistants. They see things very freshly
and they ask questions that we wouldn't think to ask,
so I thought, what can we do that is similar to
the kinds of things that David might have
done 3,000 years ago? Not the adultery and
the murder so much. Herding sheep was the first one
because of course so many leaders in the bible start off as
shepherds and I was wondering, what is it about the business
about herding sheep that turns out to be a great entry level
position for future CEOs of Israel? And I found in that long
afternoon that my son and I were herding those sheep
on the hillside in Israel, that you have to understand
those that you're trying to lead. We were trying to separate the
sheep from the goats which turns out to be just as hard in real
life as the metaphor suggests. And you can't do it
until you understand that goats react differently
to pressure to sheep. So once we had that insight, I
realized that I was going to use that and let David have that
kind of insight about leadership. So we then did other things,
we stayed in the desert in goat head tents, eating the kinds
of foods mentioned in the bible, and we drew water from ancient
systems to feel the effort involved, and we rode camels only
to find when we got home that we'd got a sore backside for
nothing because there were no camels in Second Iron Age Israel, and
mules were what we should have been focused on. And we went to the places associated
with David, like the Valley of Elah where he battled Goliath, and
the caves of En Gedi where he hid out from King Saul, and we went
into the dig under the old city, where excavations from the
Davidian period are being unearthed, and I have to say that
there's a lot of tension there because Israeli archaeologists
are doing the digging but it actually runs under
a Palestinian neighborhood and that's causing
their houses to collapse and there's tremendous
tension around this site. And it just reminds
you that the battles that David fought are
still going on. So I've only got a few minutes
left and I want to leave time for questions so I'm just
going to go quickly to say that my baby harpist grew
up to be a big harpist. See, I warned you there
would be family photos. And on the way, he was having
his Bar Mitzvah and because of the connection with David and the
harp, he decided to play his harp at his Bar Mitzvah, and he chose
to play a beautiful arrangement of Leonard Cohen's
wonderful song Hallelujah. And so I not only owe him
the idea for the book, I also owe him the title because
the first line of that song of course is, they say
there was a secret chord that David played and
it pleased the lord. But it's the seldom sung later verse
that I think really sums up David, the verse that goes, there's a
blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard,
the holy or the broken, Hallelujah. And David is holy and broken, and
I think we all are to some extent, and I think that that geniality and
that complexity is what makes him such a fascinating figure and
keeps drawing us back to him. Thank you [ Applause ] >> And we've got microphones here. And I urge you to all become a
part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. I'm happy to take questions,
comments, abuse, of any kind. And don't be shy. No. No. Yes. >> So I just want to say,
first, I love your books, I've read all of your fiction. And one of the things I love
about the historical fiction is that you take a subject about which
there's very little or nothing, like The Year of Wonders, and
you weave this whole story and so you're not really messing with history, because
I love history. So I love that about your books. That and many things. And I've read The Secret Chord,
and the minute I finished it, I felt bereaved because I'm going
to have to wait for your next book and I would just like to know how
long are you going to make us wait? >> Geraldine Brooks: Well thank you
very much, and I love what you said because I do try and follow the
line of fact as far as it leads, so I sort of need two
things for a book, I need an intriguing true story
from the historical records, something that you wouldn't make up,
because you know, I love Mark Twain, and Mark Twain said fiction must
be plausible and truth needn't be. So I'm always looking for those
implausible truths like the fact that a village quarantined itself
voluntarily during the plague or that a Native American
raised in his own language and culture mastered Latin and
Greek and graduated Harvard in 1665. If I made them up it wouldn't
be so exciting and the fact is that those things happened, but
then the second thing I need is that there not be too
much known about them because if Caleb the Native American
had kept a journal of his time at Harvard, there would be
no space for me and it's because we don't know much about his
experience, the only way to engage with it is through imagination. So, I need the void as well as
the skeleton of intriguing facts, so yes, thank you for that. But I do like to make sure
that as far as we can know, I go to a lot of trouble
to know before I start. It's one diving off into invention. And how long until the next book? I wish it was going to be quicker. It does seem to take me about
the same amount of time to do all of them, which seems to
be about three years, so. >> Thank you. >> Geraldine Brooks: Thank you. >> I just wanted to say
thank you for coming. As a hopeful Australian
writer of historical fiction, I very much enjoy listening to you. You talked a little bit about
what you need for your inspiration to write, and I was curious
to hear about how you choose? You know, you write about all
these quite diverse subjects and there's just so much out there,
like there's stories everywhere. How do you choose what
to write about? >> Geraldine Brooks: So, it
just seems, sometimes, you know, I think Ernest Hemingway had
it right, and he said an idea for a novel can be something
you're lucky enough to overhear or the wreck of your
whole damn life. And luckily for me it's been in
the former rather than the latter. And the novel I'm working on now, actually literally was something
I overheard at a lunch table. I was at Plymouth Plantation,
they had invited me because they like Caleb's Crossing and they
had it mind to pitch me an idea for a novel about somebody
from the plantation, and they knew a lot about her. And it doesn't usually work very
well if somebody brings you an idea, because they're giving you
that idea because it's just like something you already did
and I don't want to do that again, and I've exhausted my, you
know, enough Calvinists already. So, but while I was at this lunch I
started overhearing the conversation at the other end of the table and it
was an incredibly intriguing story about a horse from the 1860s. >> And I found myself not even
pretending to pay attention to the nice people from
Plymouth Plantation and wanting to say could you shut up? I need to hear what he's saying. So I will be writing that book next. But they do just seem to sort
of, flutter in the window like lost birds sometimes. Thank you. >> Hi. Thanks for being here and
thanks for re-Tweeting my Tweets. I've never missed you
at The Book Festival and I've ready every
single one of your books. >> Geraldine Brooks: Well thank you. >> So in the three years that
we wait until the next novel, what authors or subjects
inspire you, and what authors would you recommend that we maybe pick
up in the interim? >> Geraldine Brooks: Oh, well I think my favorite living
writer is here this weekend, and that's Marilyn Robinson. I'm completely in awe of her. I think Gilead and
the Gilead trilogy in fact is just an
amazing work of art. And similarly, I think
Hilary Mantel, I wish she would stop doing screen
play adaptions and plays and get on with finishing that
trilogy about Cromwell because I cannot wait to read it. I read a tremendous amount of
fiction, I just gobble it up. And I like nonfiction, also memoirs. I just read a book that might
not have crossed the transom of many people here,
it's the first novel by a New Zealand novelist called
Anna Smaill called The Chimes. It's dystopian future, where
the world is organized by music. And I thought it was one of the
most remarkably inventive things I've read. She's a poet and a violinist, so she knows what she's doing
with language and music. So I loved that. And then a little memoir
called The Point of Vanishing, which is a true story of
a young man at Harvard who has a horrible accident that
destroys his sight in one eye and sends him into a tailspin,
and he goes off to live in the woods, a bit like Thoreau. And he's a worthy successor
to Thoreau. >> Thank you. >> Geraldine Brooks: So, yeah. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Your books have been a thread
throughout the four different generations of my family, and
we really enjoy reading them, and each of us our favorite. >> Geraldine Brooks:
Oh, that's lovely. >> And I was curious, I imagine
writing a book, each is so distinct, but if in the different processes
of writing your different novels, if there was one novel that
you enjoyed writing the most? And if there's one you enjoyed
the final product the most? >> Geraldine Brooks: You
know, it sounds like a cliché but they really are like your
children, and it's really hard to pick a favorite of them, because
they're bound up with that time in your life, and you remember
exactly where you were, what room you were in when
you were writing them, and how old your children
were, and the various struggles that you had around writing them. And you know, you always love your
first novel, I have to love March because it brought
me the Pulitzer Prize and there's nothing wrong with that. You know, people sometimes
say doesn't it put a lot of pressure on you? And I go, hell no. And you know, so it was
so outside of anything that I even would have
imagined was possible. I was so shocked the day the phone
rang and it was an old colleague of mine actually, from the
newspaper I used to work at, The Wall Street Journal, and
he thought I already knew, and he's like this is so great. This is so wonderful. And I thought, it's three o'clock
and Ken's been out to a long lunch. What is he talking about? And he said, you don't know
you got the Pulitzer Prize? And I said don't be so ridiculous,
I haven't done any journalism. And I hung up on him. And then you know, of course,
everything explodes and I realize that as unlikely as it seemed, this
was true, and somebody's coming to the door with flowers, and I'm
on the phone to a newspaper reporter and my son, who is eight at
the time, opened the door and said mom can't
come, she's really busy. She just got the Pulitzer Surprise! [ Laughter ] >> So I'm sorry, I can't
really narrow it down to one. Okay, so I'm getting the wind up. Can we just take one more question? >> Sure. >> Geraldine Brooks: Okay. >> I've loved your
writing, all your books, but one I recently finished was
Caleb's Crossing and I love the part where the scholars are all so skinny because they can't afford
anything at Harvard. They can't afford to feed them even. >> Geraldine Brooks: Yes. >> I just wondered how they
did not have an endowment? >> Geraldine Brooks:
No, not at that time. >> I just wondered what was the
overheard conversation or the. >> Geraldine Brooks: That
was a notation on a map of the island of Martha's Vineyard. We had just moved there as year
round residents and I was intrigued to have Native American
neighbors for the first time, so I went to the tribal headquarters
and got all the materials, and that's a fantastic
tribe you know, because they've never been
displaced from their land and they're fantastic
custodians of their culture. And they had this map of the
island with all the notations of the place names in
the Wampanoag language, and places of significance,
and right near where we were living it
said birthplace of Caleb, first Native American
graduate of Harvard. And my eye couldn't actually
accept that the next bit was 1665. I had to read it as
1965 because it was so beyond what I would
have considered possible. And then when I found
out it really was 1665, I was, how did that happen? And what was it like? And then I was off to the races. And that's generally how it does. >> Thank you. >> Geraldine Brooks:
Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.
