We talked to Michael Zapata about his novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It was the winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Boston Globe and The Millions, and his debut novel. Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine as well as on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. This book is a wholly satisfying romp through the history of science fiction (even for the uninitiated!) with a healthy side-portion of theoretical physics. But please don’t be intimidated. Zapata’s prose is whimsical and yet gloriously skillful, encouraging us to “challenge our most potent ideologies.” Isn’t that what good art is supposed to do? Honorable Mentions: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom We by Yevgeny Zamyatin Chilean author Roberto Bolaño Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai

Published Date: February 1, 2023

Transcription

Intro/outro:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare. Recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on.

As always, please subscribe, rate and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers.

Kate Martin Williams:

For writers.

So, Michael Zapata is in the virtual studio with us now, and we are so excited to talk with him about his novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It was the winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for fiction, it was an NPR Best Book of the Year, a most anticipated book of 2020 from the Boston Globe, and the Millions, which is one of my favorite lists. And, it was his debut novel, people.

Michael, we have too many questions to ask you and not enough time, but we're so happy to have you. Welcome.

Michael Zapata:

Thank you. Thank you so much for the invite. I'm really excited.

Kate Martin Williams:

First of all, can you just tell us a little bit about this book which I still am not sure how you kept it to the few number of pages that did, because it's not a huge book, but it does so many things. So, can you give us maybe a thumbnail sketch of this meta and parallel narrative book?

Michael Zapata:

Yes, absolutely. So, at it's core, I always thought this was a novel of exile. So, it's sort of what it is, it sort of intertwines and coalesces all the sort of multiple characters, and the multiple generations that sort of inhabit it. In short, it's about a Dominican woman who is exiled when the American marines invade in 1916. She ends up in New Orleans married to self-proclaimed last pirate of the new world, in New Orleans. She writes a cult classic science fiction novel, she tragically passes away before her second can be published.

And then, so what ends up happening is a literary mystery in which 70 plus years later, an exile himself from Israel in Chicago, who is working as a hotel concierge finds in his grandfather's things, after his grandfather became diseased, the sequel. 900-page sequel to Adana Moreau's sort of cult classic masterpiece.

So, it unfolds across generations. Inhabits the Russian Revolution, Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and certainly New Orleans. But, what tethers it all-

Kate Martin Williams:

Just a couple things.

Michael Zapata:

Just a couple places. But, what I always like to think is what tethers it all is the experience of exile.

Kate Martin Williams:

So, why exile? For you was this a thing you're needing to want to write about or...? I'm always fascinated when I talk to writers about whether it's the characters who tell you what this is about, or if you knew what it was about and then told the characters what they were going to do?

Michael Zapata:

Yeah, I think for me it was always place and characters, and living in that liminal space. I grew up, my father's from Ecuador, he's... I'm first generation, and he's immigrant from Ecuador, and my mother's family is from Lithuania Jewish... They came to Lithuania, Jewish heritage. And they came to this country 100 years ago.

So, I was trapped, very happily, between stories of exile from both South America, and also Europe. And very fortunate to know, for example, my great grandmother who passed when I was 13, and she'd sit at the dinner table and I tend to say, literature for me... I was first introduced to literature at the diner table, in sort of these long oral traditions, and stories of exile. And sort of the happiness, and pain, and tragedy and liminal spaces that come with that.

So, when I sat down to really try to figure out what my first novel could be, I almost... It wasn't in the process of choosing topics. This was, the stories that were initially found in my original experience as a kid sort of just came out.

Kate Martin Williams:

Mm-hmm. Can you read some of it for us?

Michael Zapata:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to read a section in which Maxwell Moreau, son of the titular character, he wanders. He has this tendency to wander as a three-and-a-half-year-old. I wrote this when I didn't have a three-and-a-half-year-old, and now I do. So, it here were are.

Jessica Cole:

Fiction is magic.

Michael Zapata:

"As Maxwell's tendency to wander, his parents grew more and more worried and they decided to frighten him. They went to the library, and since only the pirate could read, he found a book called 'Dinosaurs and Flying Reptiles of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Eras.' Maxwell sat on his mother's lap while his father read out loud to him and showed him illustrations of pteranodons, and pterodactyls, and pterosaurs."

"In hushed tones they told their son that when he wandered monstrous creatures with sword-like beaks and black wings would take to the sky and search for him. If they found him, they would devour him. When they told Maxwell this, his eyes lit up, he squirmed and laughed, and his parents realized that they had made a terrible mistake. Yet, one thing did seem to work. Maxwell's mother noticed that when Maxwell had a book directly in front of him, he was less prone to wander."

"He took him back to the library. At the library she met a librarian named Afrah, or Afraa, or Anna, depending on who was speaking to her. For example, visitors to the library or city officials called her Anna. But, family members and friends, of whom she had many, called her Afrah. Her husband was the only person who called her Afraa, which was really the same as Afraá, but her husband pronounced the A with the lilt that can only be described as the lilt of someone who is deeply in love."

"She was half Persian and half Haitian, and she made it a point to tell the Dominicana that she lived in the Mariani, which in the 19th century was full of Haitian refugees, and which is now full of mixed families, musicians and writers."

"Afrah spoke of Haiti in the same way other people spoke of violent love affairs. And more than a few times, she said that Saint Peter would never let her through the gates of heaven on account that she'd be incredibly bored there. Heaven would be like a very boring Port-au-Prince, she would say. One without the madness of survival, one without the sea. One without women like her mama whose curves swelled with the seasons."

"The Dominicana and Afrah quickly became close friends. She called Maxwell a little island mestizo, and she called his mother the kindest Dominicana she had ever met, which was the truth. At first, Afrah gave the Dominicana spoken English lessons at the library each Wednesday and Friday afternoon. Later, in addition to the library lessons, Afrah would visit the Dominicana each Monday night at her home at Melpómene Avenue. They would eat red beans and rice, and then Afrah would read out loud for the Dominicana and her son."

"Translated into Spanish, she read Persian poetry, Assyrian myths, Greek myths and African myths. She read the poetry of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and the fables of José Núñez de Cáceres, the Dominican revolutionary. She read Latin-American pastorals, modern poetry, indigenous novels which the librarian said were all simichromes of Don Quijote. That book, she explained, was the one from which all others were endlessly replicated. So, of course, she also joyfully read Don Quijote for the Dominicana and her son."

"Translated into English, she read a slim Russian novel titled We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. She read British plays and American short stories. She read the horrifying and elegant works of Edgar Allan Poe. She also read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, which the librarian suggested would help the Dominicana make sense out of the American character."

"The American character, the librarian theorized, was obsessed with movement and tyranny, like a madman, and different from the European character, which was obsessed with systems and order like a lieutenant. And also very different from the Latin American character which was obsessed with the abyss of time, Aztec labyrinths, and the Minotaur who wandered both. The madman, the lieutenant and the Minotaur, the librarian said, constituted the entire history of the new world."

"In time, by listening to each word, and following along with Afrah's smiling eyes, the Dominicana learned how to read." I'll stop right there.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's so good.

Michael Zapata:

Thank you.

Kate Martin Williams:

Okay, so my next question is tongue in cheek, but I need to know. Are you a theoretical physicist nerd with a writing habit, or are you a writer with a theoretical physics habit?

Michael Zapata:

I think a writer with a theoretical physics habit, because... I actually studied evolutionary biology in my undergrad, and it's kind of been... science has been sort of core. I want to write about scientists for quite a long time if I can and if people will allow me to continue to do that. But, I found out very early on when talking with theoretical physicists that they're the smartest people in the galaxy, and that's just like almost an impossible thing to traverse both for me. So, really the only approach into the world is through fiction.

Jessica Cole:

I found the same thing.

Michael Zapata:

I had the greatest pleasure to talk and interview a few theoretical physicists who decided to waste their very special time with me early on in writing this book. And I just found them the most fascinating, absolutely brilliant humans.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah. Oh, man. Well, it shows in your book. There's such a love for it and care that you take. It was really satisfying. This is against the podcast rules, but I'm going to break it. So, I have to tell a short story, and then I'll ask my question, which my producer Phuc is rolling his eyes.

Michael Zapata:

Yeah, I'm ready to [inaudible 00:09:25] into podcast prison.

Kate Martin Williams:

We just had this talk. Like, "It's got to be shorter, Kate, we don't have a lot of time." But, I'm sorry. I have to.

Michael Zapata:

Let's do it.

Kate Martin Williams:

Okay. So here's the story: When I'm prepping for podcast guests, specially for AWP, there's a bunch of plates in the air, and I'm reading a bunch of books at the same time. And, a lot of times, it happens that the books I'm reading are in conversation with each other, right? So, I was reading your book, I happened to be listening to Floodlines, which is the Atlantic's Vann Newkirk did a beautiful podcast series on Katrina. So, I was listening to that. I was reading Sarah Broom's The Yellow House.

Michael Zapata:

Oh, wonderful.

Kate Martin Williams:

Which is fantastic.

Michael Zapata:

It's so good.

Kate Martin Williams:

And then we just got done interviewing Jeffrey Colvin, who wrote a book called Africville, which is in part about people's land getting stolen right out from underneath them, which also happened to the homes at the end of Katrina, where people did not have permission, and hadn't even come back home yet, and things were being torn down and ripped out from underneath them. And then, we're going to talk to Vanessa Garcia, who wrote a play about the family who manufactures Habana Club Rum, and that whole thing was taken over by the Castro regime.

So, all these things are talking to each other. And I'm here in the middle, and now your story is about these parallel worlds existing, layered on top of each other or parallel, and I feel like I'm the Dominicana touching a portal and shifting in between all of these stories. So, I guess the question is, are you comfortable with people... I'm really re-interpreting the way that works interact with each other, that art and artists interact with one another.

Michael Zapata:

I love that you brought. Number one, because there's this pattern I think that happens in any given current time, and I've always... I've been thinking a lot lately about how so much literature, right now in particular, is about the end of empires. So, we're in this stage of sort of... whether people say decline, or end, or this transformation, whatever it might be, of the American Empire. There's this global, catastrophic effects sort of affecting people similarly, regardless of where they're from, right? So, it makes sense to me that books and writers are responding to that, and trying to get ahead of it. I'm a big proponent of thinking of the way history works where it's this sort of... the past and the future collide in the present. So, I think writers, fundamentally, even if they're science fiction writers, even if they're historical fiction writers, they're writing of the present.

So, I think we have this patternicity in history, and the sort of speculative ideas about what the future might entail when we're at the end of empire, we have ecological collapse, and we're sort of forced to respond to it in ways that feel like a multiplicity. All these various writers are inhabiting different versions of what they project, think might happen, and how they interpret how the past influences the present. I just think that's absolutely astounding and fun that those connections can be made.

And, I think in the course of writing this book, I did think a lot about how sort of these... The big question of what if? At what point... It's not a call to action. Novels aren't a call to action. So, at the very least, they're speculative, and trying to force us to think about what our lives might entail. But, on the other hand, I think science fiction, which is explored, the history of science fiction in this novel is an attack on the empire. It is a way to understand the what ifs. It's a direct sort of assault on our most potent ideologies.

So, I wouldn't be... Surely that's in science fiction literature now, and has been for decades. But, I find I'm astoundingly happy to see plays, and literary fiction, and podcasts sort of inhabit that same space now.

Jessica Cole:

It's the multiverse. Back to theoretical physics.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's right.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:13:41].

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah. And it's not just like "Little me in my podcast journey", it's every person who comes to the text is having those conversations with their entire histories, as we said.

Michael Zapata:

Yeah. And I think we're entering sort of a time period that humans have felt for most of our history. We're de-centering the human. Ecological collapse forces us to re-evaluate the ways we tell stories. We're not in a position to center the individual as much when... which is sort of the romanticism of sort of contemporary literature. Centering individual regarding this narrative arc in which we follow the path of the hero, or the antihero.

A lot of that is being de-centered, I think. Not only because of some of the brilliance of so many writers today, but because of they're responding to the crises. They're responding to collapse of empire and ecology. And I think it forces us, truly, to consider narrative in a way that was considered before the industrial revolution, in which nature was not this controllable phantom substance, it was the overreaching effect. It was the most powerful force in people's lives every day for... like what? Like a million years before...?

Kate Martin Williams:

Before this tiny little-

Michael Zapata:

Before this tiny little..

Jessica Cole:

Like a hundred.

Michael Zapata:

Yeah.

Jessica Cole:

I love that you mentioned "We" in the list. I'm not very well-versed in science fiction, but my ex-husband said, "If there's one book from my [inaudible 00:15:12] that you have to read is We."

Michael Zapata:

Oh, yeah.

Jessica Cole:

It's amazing how often I think about it. Speaking of de-centering humans.

Michael Zapata:

It's so good. And I think it's such a foundational text to all modern science fiction. Of course, through the minds of exile Russian.

Kate Martin Williams:

Right.

Jessica Cole:

Of course.

Kate Martin Williams:

How do you hope that this book will add to that conversation? That sort of legacy that's been rooting its way through sci-fi, and into literary fiction for a long time?

Michael Zapata:

I hope people read it this year. As far as legacy, I hope they continue to read it, at least, in 2021. But I'm such a fan of science fiction, and I always thought that... So much in popular American media gets science fiction and fans of science fiction wrong, they sort of put a quote around this idea of nerd culture, or they put this idea of future casting, or what is entertaining? But, the true reality is the people I know who love science fiction the most truly view the world through the lens of what if. They tend to be the most political people I know. They tend to be the people who are most engaged on a street level with organizing.

I was, before I was a writer, I taught high school drop-outs for 10 years in Chicago. So, a lot of organization through immigration rights, and a lot of sort of socialist justice organizing. And, that's where I found so many science fiction writers. Not only in my youth and quote-unquote sort of the nerd tables in junior high or high school, but those people who started to really activate and organize in their own lives.

So, I wasn't going to tell a science fiction story. I also really love science, and history. But, I wanted to hopefully portray a history of science fiction that didn't omit those people, and didn't omit people of color, and surely Latinas and Latinos who have been writing science fiction for decades and decades. And Roberto Bolaño, who I just adore his work, I know touches upon a lot of that stuff. And when I read some of his works where he touched upon the science fiction writers of Latin America, there was like this explosion in my brain like, "This is what I want to research. This is what I want to read." And surely, I hope, at least a little bit, to offer that version of the science fiction history in here.

Kate Martin Williams:

Will your next book have a similar obsession in this vein? Because I could see you building an entire career writing all the imaginary books that you've mentioned in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. I read an article that actually counted... I forget. I mean, you probably know. Is it 98 fake books that are mentioned, or something?

Michael Zapata:

It was a lot that counted... Yeah, it was the review for the New York Times, he counted the number. And I'm forgetting the number right now, but I love-

Kate Martin Williams:

It was a lot.

Michael Zapata:

It was a lot. And I found-

Kate Martin Williams:

So you could just write all those books, and I would be perfectly happy reading all of those. And it could be a set, and you could make millions of dollars because you could just sell it as a box set at Christmas.

Michael Zapata:

There's this writer I adore who emailed me and said, "So, when can I read Adana Moreau's novels? You have to write those." And I was like, "No, I want to so bad. I just don't know..." but, I love, also, the idea of the summaries. It's a very [inaudible 00:18:33] kind of game, almost. Summaries of novels you'll never write just because time is finite, and these are sort of the books you want to...

But, I love exploring that idea. I think there's similar... I'm working on another novel, and for sure, for whatever obsessive reason, there's ideas about science fiction in history. But, primarily, it's about someone who is in the future, in the year 2050, but it's just absolutely trapped in ancient history, and sort of this... So, this concept of "I don't think the future will feel very sci-fi." It's like day-to-day. Our day-to-day experience doesn't feel sci-fi, so I think one of the sci-fi tropes that I like to explore is how there's this illusion of normalcy that happens even regarding terrible circumstances in the future.

Almost like a boring, domestic... That's not what the book's going to be, but I'm really obsessed with the idea of, "What does the domestic sci-fi feel like?"

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, I love it.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:19:37] All of our devices and electronics are already crackable. We're getting there.

Michael Zapata:

There's this concept, I think it was Isaac Asimov who was saying, "The point of technology is make itself invisible", which is terrifying. But also it's very present.

Jessica Cole:

Yes.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, I'm thinking of when we're part android, and it's like normal people situation where it's a domestic passive dispute between two androids. So, it's like...

Michael Zapata:

I love it. There's also this idea, I think the internet will be kind of fleeting, and people get... I had one friend who was annoyed with me saying that all the time. But, this is very fragile, when you look at ecological collapse, and you look at this brief modernity, what do we do without the internet? I don't think my great, great grandkids will have the internet. I just don't think that's a plausible future. Whatever. That's future casting. But, I think it's a strange thing to think about how the future sort of projects in the present in that way.

Kate Martin Williams:

Mm-hmm. Oh, my gosh. Well, we can't wait to read what comes next.

Michael Zapata:

Thank you.

Kate Martin Williams:

We like to ask, just in parting, although I really don't want to... I don't want to let you go. But, we like to ask what thing, animal, vegetable, mineral, podcast, series, movie, how did you get through the last year? So we can provide a survival kit for the next few months, because it's going to get better soon. But, until then, what do you recommend?

Michael Zapata:

My wife's a public school teacher, and she's in the process of getting her vaccinations, and it feels like this existential weight, for so many of us, being lifted, at least slightly. What got me through the year? You know, this is going to be a pretty straight-forward thing. I have two kids. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old, and being in home during the pandemic with children was just stunningly difficult and challenging. Specially in a country that largely abandons parents, regardless of pandemic or not.

But, for as difficult as that was, there's this period of time where I had some intimacy and exchanges with them that I think I'll think about for the rest of my life. So, I don't know that it got me through the pandemic, because there was so much stress through it. It surely will get me through the memories as the hard and rough things sort of fade away. I think having that time with them, and being at home, is something I'll never forget. Like long walks with the three-year-old along the Chicago River. Yelling a talking to ducks. And just very sort of sentimental things that I think will mean a lot to me as I get older. Yeah.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, I bet.

Michael Zapata:

It's literally the hardest thing, and equally the nicest thing.

Kate Martin Williams:

Which is a lot of parenting, I find, right?

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:22:43].

Kate Martin Williams:

[inaudible 00:22:42] as time, as they say.

Michael Zapata:

I will say this, if there's a writer who helped get me through this it was László Krasznahorkai, in these endless, beautiful, magnificent, complicated sentences. Because he forced me to put away... I don't think you can read him while having the internet close to you. It's sort of this temporal longness. I think he slowed time for me when, instead of obsessively reading tweets like it's some sort of mega novel, or something.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, well, it was such a pleasure to talk to you, Michael. I hope we can stay in touch, and we're going to be waiting with bated breath for the next...

Michael Zapata:

Thank you so much. I had a such a great joy to talk to you today.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you so much.

Michael Zapata:

Bye-bye.

Intro/outro:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair.

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole. And produced by me Phuc Luu.

Our trusty and hardworking intern is Santiti Ceta. Please, subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.