Patricia Engel and Rivka Galchen: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities hi everyone and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival my name is kevin larimer i am the editor-in-chief of poets and writers and i am here with patricia engel and rivka gelchen to talk about their novel's infinite country and everyone knows your mother is a witch before we begin i just want to let you know that we'll save the last 10 minutes of this 30 minute live event to respond to audience questions uh you can start submitting your questions on the event page at loc.gov forward slash bookfest now if you'd like in the meantime i want to thank you both revka and patricia for joining me here thank you for having us absolutely absolutely it's a real honor to join you here so these books are so different uh but they are both incredibly accomplished uh you know richly woven tales that center on families uh it's been such a pleasure to read them side by side and i'd like to start with a question for each of you that i hope will give some indication to those audience members who haven't read the books this deeply rewarding reading experience that awaits them uh so patricia if you don't mind i'd love to start with you uh infinite country is this beautiful and heartbreaking story of a colombian family fractured by immigration and deportation and their experiences over a 20-year span beginning in the late 1990s the family is made up of undocumented and citizen family members which you know allows you to explore the whole idea of citizenry you know connections to one's homeland immigration laws and the really the arbitrariness of physical borders as they relate to a family's fierce and enduring love for one another it's such a close look at one specific family but i know their immigration experience is hardly unique in your acknowledgments you thank the families who will likely see aspects of their experience reflected in your novel and i wonder if you could speak to your vision for this book and what real life stories you may have drawn from for inspiration well thank you kevin and thank you to everyone who's joining us today um you're right this is a very typical story the story of this family of five in infinite country they're a mixed status family which is to say that the parents arrive to united states on tourist visas and because of you know life happening just the turn of events they decide to overstay not with the intention of ever being immigrants really just an accumulation of days and months and years and all of a sudden they have an entirely new life in a new country they have a daughter who was born in colombia they have two children who were born in the us and the youngest who was sent back and lives her entire life in colombia um so this this is a family split apart across two countries and who have their lives defined and challenged by paperwork that changes year by year and means different things according to different administrations and it seems so unlikely to some people so complicated to some people but in fact this is a sort of existence that is so typical to so many um so it was not difficult for me i didn't have to reach very far really for inspiration because i am the daughter of colombian immigrants i've been raised among immigrants and in immigrant communities all my life and i've known people very close to me some of the people i love most in this world and admire most in this world from all over the world whose lives have been um challenged for these same reasons and who have been separated from their families for the same reasons so this is a story that is uh very close to me although i have to say this family's immigration story is not my family's immigration story um my parents our immigration story is different although there are some commonalities in terms of a lot of infinite countries set in border and that's my mother's hometown for example um but i wanted to write a story that really reflected what it was like to be a family that's in the active process of immigrating because many of us who are children of immigrants have immigration um as part of our our present reality or in the not so distant past but other people even though this is a country you know made up of uh of uh immigrants um whether they arrived long time ago or recently a lot of people largely disassociated from their immigrant roots and i wanted to write a story that really shows the nuances of it which is that it's often very complex and full of doubt and regret and wondering if you made the right choice and maybe you didn't make the right choice and it's full of profound homesickness and loss almost like a sort of death and that that's what i witnessed um among immigrants my entire life and i wanted to write into that space in a way that showed one family's collective experience but also the private experience of each family member as a result of that experience right yeah and it's just such a uh profound experience to be reading you know a story like this uh in your novel and then see it being played out in real life you know all over of course there's what's happening down in del rio and you know um uh so many real life examples of exactly what you wrote about yeah um turning out to you rivka uh and everyone knows your mother is a witch uh we are placed in 17th century germany uh where we meet katrina kepler comes under suspicion of being a witch and must endure this sort of long protracted trial that threatens not only her life but also the livelihoods of her family which includes her son the imperial mathematician johannes kepler uh and this is in fact a piece of historical fiction uh katarina and johannes were real people um rivka in the acknowledgments of this terrifically you know funny and humane and moving book you write that you've never enjoyed working on a book as much as this one and i'm wondering if you could speak to the experience of researching and writing this book and why it was so enjoyable for you yeah you know i i i never thought i would be a person who would write a book of historical fiction and part of that is is because i i don't know i think i had a gift for it and i really came to this accidentally like it was it sounds like silly and emotional but the book sort of it forced itself on me where i was reading a lot of non-fiction a lot of biographies of scientists and as i was reading this biography of kepler um the best biography of kepler was one from an angle which was actually the story of his mother's witch trial which even like a hundred years later they kept trying to cut it out of his biography and it just seemed so close to me it seemed like i really felt like these were people who had almost an over it's almost had too much faith that what was actually true and that reason and logic and the truth would yield for them and would keep them safe and would it would and would kind of make the strongest arguments and that was not the way that it was going to pan out so that something about that was like a bridge for me to a lot of the emotions of being alive in in the past decade and so that that's sort of how the book came to me but it was fun partially because i was res researching it and also because um this family seemed like a wonderful family like i felt like they were put under the most tremendous stress and it was it was not just the stress of your mother being treated in a horrible way but the stain of her being a witch or potentially being a witch cast a paul on all the children and to see the way that they manage it and and in fact historically there's every indication that they managed it quite admirably and so that added this like kind of element of joy to what was a very you know sad story um but it felt like a also a kind of a joyful story to think about because they were such a remarkable emotionally remarkable on top of uh the sending uh one of the greatest mathematicians of all time but it was a family that was poor a family that came from nowhere that had to face a lot of troubles and and that that natural strength was its own kind of joy as were of course like just all the details of a time that was so far away but also so close so you you sort of see the the kinds of arguments that would be settled in courts about that were basically the equivalent of like a bar fight today and someone's ego being hurt and you just thought it just the same like it's just like it was humorous and in like that horrible way where you just thought oh like all this kind of pettiness and bruised ego and kind of wasted energy is just like eternal so it was really fun to work on did you did you find yourself uh straying from the the actual fictional you know facts of the of the case like did you did you feel sort of um like you needed to to stick to exactly how it happened or like how much freedom did you feel like you had with that yeah well so one one thing is katarina kepler herself um was illiterate and so we don't really have really any almost no record of her voice so there was a huge void that kind of needed to be written into and then also like in a funny way i did play with the historical truth in the sense that it was actually even worse than i put it in the book and the reason i i wanted to change that was because i felt that she was actually under trial for six years and although i'm accurate about that in the book i kind of waved my hand so you don't quite notice that six years have gone by and i did that because i was conscious and i know that patricia is also i'm sure conscious of these same issues to avoid that sense of kind of lurid enjoyment of horrible situations i think i thought i know this woman wouldn't tell her story this way her family wouldn't tell her story this way they're all gonna on some level with their voice cover up their suffering even as they reveal it and i just didn't want the book to emphasize in a raw in a morally wrong way like oh my god look how horrible it was it was so horrible it was so horrible so that becomes a kind of pornography of misery i thought like that's not the way these voices are going to tell that story so i did a bit of hand waving even though i did literally stick to the record but in terms of the order i told it and things like that right right that's really interesting um you know one thing i noticed about both of these novels is that the characters use kind of oral stories to convey some of the themes that run throughout um you know rivka katarina kepler and others often reference uh i guess you maybe call it folklore you know stories of the crow who entered a contest to become the king of birds and the the band of animal musicians trying to escape slaughter uh and and patricia in infinite country you use andean myth and traditional knowledge spoken through stories to convey so much about the movements of your characters both you know internally and across physical borders and i'm wondering if you could both speak to the use of these sorts of you know stories within the story and how you compiled them um patricia do you want to start with that like was this something that you you knew these uh the andean myths and you wanted to use them in the story or is it something that you discovered through your research and and the process of writing it it's a bit of a combination of all those things that you mentioned um as i said my mother's from bogota she's from the region and her family's been there for ages so a lot of the stories that are particular to that region which was the the territory of the moistus where one of the the four advanced civilizations of the americas a lot of those stories i grew up with because of my mother and then over the years just spending more time in colombia i learned more my curiosity as a writer just you know one thing leads to another and then uh traveling around the country i learned more of the mythology that's not specific to the region of what is now without but to other regions very distinct regions around the country um so those you know came to me through my my heritage and my curiosity and as i was putting together or figuring out how to tell the story of this family well i realized those are stories that have been important in my you know a migration story and as i've gotten older i've really come to understand in a different way how stories um in the case of immigrants or as i mentioned people who have it in their recent family history your stories are often the only thing that you take with you when you immigrate and they're very quickly lost almost as quick as language is lost from one generation to the next if you don't repeat them if you don't share them constantly we're constantly at our stories are constantly at the threat of extinction and so i have felt much more of a sense of purpose and connection to those stories that we do still have you can imagine we have those but also imagine how much was lost in the way that i just described um but also an interesting parallel for me is always when um your family your parents or maybe your grandparents or maybe you were the one that created that rupture between the country that was left in the new country where your your family is making a life or you are making a life you've disrupted your family history you have changed everything really for the whole course of your family the next generation will be different as a result of that decision or indecision or circumstance that just you know created that that movement uh so that in itself becomes a sort of mythology in a family i know you know that i just i know the story of my my family is my christian story i know it's so well as well as i know a myth you know as well as i know other kinds of history and that becomes a family lore family myth it's the story that you repeat so you understand yourselves so you know how you got here and you know who you are you know who you were because the thing is that when you come to a new country there are no reminders you leave everything you leave your home you leave your family you leave your friends you leave everything that told you who you were you know as if you could forget but of course in a new country there's no one to tell you who you are except your stories that's a beautiful i i love that the sort of through line across generations is the one thing that sort of the connects everyone right that's that's great rivka do you what about the the stories that you're that your characters tell yeah you know i mean as you know when i was reading patricia's book i also was like very moved by those stories because it's not it's it's the story and it's also you think to yourself who were the people that were telling this story and not another story and why did they tell it this way and not another way and which details become prominent and which are subdued and how do they get retold and changed is like a kind of like message from the past and from the past storytellers and somehow like a more durable message than a straightforward non-fiction account of what happened they have like different powers and there's like a very special power kind of density and reduction in um in myths and folk tales and fairy tales and that that density i think is quite amazing and in my book my one of my main narrators is katarina kepler who is herself like about 70 years old for most of the book and um and illiterate but of course like the more i learned i understood that it was generally older women who were telling stories and and all those stories all those stories like the grimm's fairy tales or even hans christian anderson they were writing down the stories that the old women in their life had told them so that was basically how it went in fact there's a beautiful story about how the grimm brothers were kind of staked outside of the old age home and they were trying they knew there was a woman there who had a lot of great stories and she didn't want to tell them basically because the stories were in her mind for girls like almost like a secret feminine line of transmission and she knew these guys were trying to collect these stories they shouldn't want to do it so they they paid like a young girl who was a maid in the old age home and basically asked her to listen to stories and try and remember as much as she could and share them and and i had that in mind with with katerine because i thought well it just seemed clear to me that this was a woman who was very intelligent very capable she was she was widowed early on she had to make her own money at a time when it wasn't really appropriate for there were a lot of ways in which women's earning their own money was itself suspicious um and being a vulnerable woman who others needed to care for also made it more suspicious so i just thought like it's a very exceptional woman who who did these things and it seemed natural to me that her stories would be a way of passing on her advice because that was like more the way that things were told rather than directly because i feel part of what's so special about stories is there are things that for whatever reason are very difficult to tell directly maybe because they're painful maybe because they're forbidden maybe because they're subconscious and so the story does this amazing transformative magic and i felt that a lot when i was reading patricia's book as well and you sort of see like how that how the reality was transformed into this more durable form that could travel across time and be told and retold and people could add their own way of relating to the story when they retold the story so it just was very clear to me all right this older woman is going to be a person who relates her experiences in this way right that's great um and it's a nice transition to the next question which is you know has to do with the theme of the national book festival this year which is open a book open the world uh so the question is how have books open the world for you patricia do you want to maybe start yeah sure um well you know in the old days i was just a colombian girl growing up in new jersey and i felt a bit isolated and i certainly didn't see any colombian girls from new jersey in any books that i read so i was a big reader and i loved books but there were a lot of books that spoke to me in different ways but there was never sort of like the book you know that reflected any kind of reality that i identified with but there are some of these books that you know spoke to me in very profound ways and are that are probably still the books that are the most um part of my writerly dna and because they opened the world to me um and showed me a world much bigger than the ones that i knew um were writers who were writing in some form of exile were writing as outsiders in one way or another so some of those writers were like albert camus marguerite zura [Music] and so a lot of these writers were sort of displaced in one way or another and of course i was too young to you know recognize that i just felt something i just connected to some sort of quality in their in their prose or in their point of view that i connected to and that in itself just opened the world of possibilities to me in what what could exist and not only what existed in humanity but what existed in art and what could be done and uh what sort of voice could claim a space for itself on the page oh that's that's great thank you so much for sharing that rivka do you have a an answer to how books have opened the world for you um i mean i feel like very similar to patricia um i actually grew up not in a bookish household not with like a lot of books but like pictures i was a child of immigrants i grew up in norman oklahoma my parents um my mother was born in egypt my father was born in palestine and israel and he i i just like i didn't articulate it but i did have this sense that that i was hungry to like know more of the world even though i actually think i had like a an idyllic childhood in norman in many ways and and actually for me like in a funny way like i remember some of the books that were most meaningful to me when my brother was six years older than me and not really a reader not someone who processes the world through books has like a totally different way of expanding out into the world uh so basically when he went to college and they sort of forced him to take at least one class where he read books as opposed to manipulated numbers uh he just sent them to me and said can you just summarize these for me and let me know what happened in them and so for some reason those books seemed especially charged because i felt like i was like out of my age group and had access and i remember specifically the copies he gave me this kind of like um great kind of mass-market paperback malcolm x great mass market paperback uh madame bovary and those it's not like they were the only books that opened the world for me but i remember that sense of like graduating out of what was available right next to me and into these you know like telegram they almost feel like telegrams of kind of other interiorities and other ways they just felt enormous like that thing about a book i love is that it feels like you drop it in water and it reveals that it's like actually enormous once you sort of hydrate it so that that was just it's still the way i relate to the world best and i you know i think often well there's this sense of like oh is that somehow is that like a scream am i like basically spending my time in a screen and but i think but but instead it sort of feels like a passport i guess like it feels like you get permission to go places that are otherwise like not necessarily available to you right a passport i love that passport to the world uh thank you um so i think we'll move over to audience questions now uh we may not get to all of the great questions submitted but we will certainly try our best um we have one from robert uh who asks uh how important is it for your stories and characters to have relatable experiences uh and then he goes on to say immigration today is relatable but witchcraft is not as much is this important you know i do think that you know i do think like a book opens up if you feel there's some bridge into it and i think that's so so personal in a weird way although it's true i've like never been persecuted as a witch i felt like i related to her more than i related to other people around me just because that sense of of being in in perilous trouble and and you don't really feel very hopeful about how to get out of it so like i just think that's so that's so personal um and it i actually did start writing that book because of people close to me in situations that seemed like logic reason and facts were not on their side i mean what even though they had logic reasons and facts on their side that was like insufficient and that experience watching people suffer in that way was i think why i connected to this story right well and that's the whole reason we read books right or read novels is you may not relate exactly to the specific experiences of the characters but you're looking for that sort of universal human connection that will allow you to you know feel empathy and that's that's the whole that's the whole point right i mean patricia it seems to me like um you know when i was when i was uh reading your novel um you know it's it's the human experience of these people who are you know the family is torn apart and you know based on these sort of art somewhat arbitrary laws that all of a sudden like no you can't reconnect with your family member and um i don't know i just you know there is a human element to that that anyone could connect with i mean i don't know if you want to speak to that well you would be surprised kevin because a lot of people can't um you know and i think the thing about relatability is a lot of that doesn't fall on the writer a lot of that falls on the reader and um sometimes there's things that i would think or anyone would think how could you not relate in some way or just on a human level or something and and some people don't uh some people have a harder time you know looking beyond their sphere of experience i think something that certainly i never expected or never could have predicted is that my book was released during pandemic when most american families got a taste for the first time of what it's like to be separated from their loved ones for reasons beyond their control and not because of laws or paperwork per se but because of you know things like quarantines and and uh risks of infecting them and death and all sorts of things that we were not prepared for and um that a lot of people just didn't know how to cope with and those are things that a lot of families like the family might not will live with year after year after year of not being able to see your dear ones for special occasions to celebrate holidays to be there when they are ill when they're in the hospital to attend funerals um to say goodbye and a lot of americans experienced that um in the past year and a half and uh i think maybe that for some people that shifted something and how they uh you know can read a story like an infinite country um but but really that's that's um that's entirely up to the reader right of course um i have a question from anna um i'm a huge fan of you both uh are you working on anything new you can share what's next uh in my case i have a short story collection coming out next year called uh the far away world and then i'm in the very very early early um steps of a new novel wonderful it's exciting i'll be excited for that um i'm actually working on a non-fiction non-fiction book um about the lives of scientists which was what i was working on before i i interrupted it to write this novel so if it hopefully hopefully i will be interrupted again but um my plan is is to keep working on that okay um you know i wanted to ask as long as this is you know the the national book festival uh you know we'd be remiss if maybe we didn't talk about reading a little bit too and i wanted to ask you know what are you both reading these days and and do you have any recommendations for our audience maybe you know the last last book that really blew you away i just finished uh when we ceased to understand the world by ben lavitutes i'm not sure i'm saying his name correctly um anyway it did blow me away it was one of those books that you thought is this an essay is this a novel i don't know but the voice is overwhelming and compelling and even though it doesn't quote unquote have a plot in the way that i often relate to in like a victorian novel or or all sorts of novels uh you know i read it in one big dolphs that was something i loved recently and what was the title again when we cease to understand the world okay all right patricia how about you uh one that i read recently was carolina de robertis's new book the president and the frog i loved it and i'm currently reading lauren groff's new one and enjoying it very much as well excellent matrix the matrix right i believe it is i'm not sure if it's matrix or matrix okay i'm not sure all right uh standing corrected um i'm not sure okay okay i'll just put a little uh shout out to anthony doerr's uh forthcoming novel i think comes out in about a week um cloud cuckoo land really really great uh really great novel um so i'm really sorry but we're out of time um thank you so so much patricia and rivka for sharing your time with us generously and and uh thanks to the entire audience for your questions um you can learn more about our authors and keep enjoying the national book festival at loc.gov forward slash book fest thanks so much thank you thank you both thank you everyone who's here [Music] you

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Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021