Authors shape their work one calendar page at a time.
By Jenna Schnuer
Already fretting over all those to-dos you're planning for
2007? Take a break from your life and check out one of our favorite
trends in publishing: "year of" books. Ever since Peter Mayle first
published A Year in Provence back in 1990 (yes, it was that long
ago), authors aplenty have used that handy-dandy unit of time as
their framework of choice for books about their doings. We checked
in with three "year of" authors to see why this time frame is such
a useful literary device and what made their year in question
memorable.
This is your second "year of" book, and you're
working on your third. What is it about a year that works for
you? It took me a long time to figure out it was a suitable
framework. I tend to be rather impulsive, and I do love travel.
Then my wife said, "You know, I don't get to join you on enough of
these trips. Why can't we try a different rhythm altogether? Why
can't we pick one place and go and live there for a good chunk of
the year and focus a lot more on its authenticity, on its heritage,
on why it's important, and bring back more resonance, bring back
the deeper story about the people who live there, about their
customs, about the way they see life?"
How far into your first "year of" title,
Seasons in Basilicata: A Year in a Southern
Italian Hill Village, did you realize the
difference between the kind of reporting you've done in the past
and what you were doing then? All the way along. I [knew how
to] do a big piece with many layers and levels on a region in a
month or six weeks. I kind of knew how to touch the bases, but I
hadn't been able to express the authenticity of places in depth.
What I was looking for was, "What can we learn from these places
before we lose them?" [The places I write about in these books] all
have the seed of their own decline already fermenting.
A decade ago, Princeton professor Leonard Barkan spent time in Rome
for a book about ancient sculpture. The academic revisited that
year in a more personal way in his book Satyr Square: A Year, a
Life in
Rome (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24). "I got to Rome and
didn't know a single human being," says Barkan. "I very easily
could have been utterly solitary. My Italian at that point was not
so very good. At the end of that year, I had a farewell party with
45 people. It was a year in which I had to invent a new life - and
succeeded."
How did you reconstruct that year? I had
written a lot of letters that year. So I had this wad of writing
that already was the kind of writing I was trying to do. In the
end, it was interesting how very little of those letters came into
the book. I never wrote a single word of it in Rome. I always
seemed to be writing it in
America. That partly informs the kind of
book it is. The story is very much recollected and remembered,
reinterpreted. [I] discovered … that memory is like other
faculties; it really gets better if you exercise it. I discovered
when I had some sort of cue, whether it was a picture or something
I had said in a letter, I would have extraordinary memory
discoveries of things that had happened to me.
What does a year mean to you? If you're an
academic, it's overwhelmingly characteristic to measure one's life
in years. It's now interesting, being back in Rome and talking to
many of the people who are in the book, that they don't remember
what year it was that we all met; hardly any of them can remember.
To a person, they think it was longer ago than it was. But I always
remember what year things happen because I have this academic
calendar. I never left school. The year is a very powerful marker
to me.
Most writers don’t really retire — they dream up a big project and write a book about it. That’s just what Barry Golson did for Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in
Mexico (Scribner, $26).
Why is a year such a handy tool for a writer? The honest truth is that I didn’t go down there with the idea that this was going to take a year. My wife and I set out in November of ’04 to try out retirement and to buy a lot and build a house in Mexico that would be our dream house — because I had fallen in love with a little village on the coast. I really didn’t know how long it was going to be before I started writing, before I understood what the time frame of the book would be. By the following November, just before
Thanksgiving, in a rush of craziness, we finished our house and, at the same time, invited my entire family down [for] Thanksgiving. We were nuts; our bank account was depleted, but we’d had the adventure of our lives. It couldn’t have been a better ending. It couldn’t have been more perfect. This is a long way of saying it was serendipity. I didn’t plan the year, but it sure worked out.
Did you write throughout the year? There’s an old saying that good poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” My prose was emotion recollected two weeks later.