Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds: A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser

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Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser by Roberta Trapè Q&A A ustralian novelist Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. She worked for many years as an editor at Lonely Planet and was responsible for setting up their French series as well as a travel literature series, Journeys. The author of several award-winning novels, de Kretser published her most recent, The Life to Come, in 2017. It won the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2019 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. A short monograph, On Shirley Hazzard, was published in 2019. De Kretser lives in Sydney, where she is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is both vividly grounded in place and transnational. Her settings include Australia, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, France, Italy, and India. A. S. Byatt has described de Kretser as “a master storyteller who writes quickly and lightly of wonderful and terrible things.” Neel Mukherjee called her “preternaturally attuned to the patient rage of history,” while Hilary Mantel notes de Kretser’s “formidable technique.” In this conversation, de Kretser and Roberta Trapè discuss tourism as privilege, casual racism, Australian politics, Shirley Hazzard, and the role of clothes in fiction. 28 WLT SUMMER 2020 DE KRETSER PHOTO: MAYU KANAMORI I’m interested in complexity. Travel is a large phenomenon, and some of its facets are directly contradictory. Roberta Trapè: Your writing is deeply connected with the idea of movement, translation from one place to another, often migration. And with history, I would say. Are there particular reasons for these interests? Michelle de Kretser: The twentieth century saw mass movements of people in unprecedented numbers: tourists , refugees, guest workers, migrants, students, troops deployed in war and peace. These movements continue apace today. I’m interested in exploring this phenomenon because as a novelist I’m interested in how the world works and trying to figure out how we have ended up here. On a personal level, travel of various kinds has played a significant role in my life. I migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia; I spent several years studying and later working in France; I worked for a publisher of travel guides for many years; I moved from Melbourne to Sydney; and I continue to travel for both pleasure and work. My family left Sri Lanka because of language politics occasioned by the rise of nationalism in the aftermath of empire. Consequently, I had a sense from early on of the enormous impact that large, historical events can have on small, individual lives. So yes, I’m definitely interested in history, in the intersection of the self and the historical moment. Trapè: Your fourth novel is titled Questions of Travel after Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name, which you quote as one of two epigraphs, the second being from E. M. Forster’s Howards End. The epigraphs question each other. The Forster quote, which comes first, is: “Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle.” The lines you used from the Bishop poem are: “But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road / really exaggerated in their beauty.” Why did you choose them? de Kretser: I’m interested in complexity. Travel is a large phenomenon, and some of its facets are directly contradictory. I chose the epigraphs to suggest the sense of drift, the loss of historical and emotional connection that can come with travel, as well as the joyful revelations that it can bring. Trapè: Questions of Travel charts two very different lives, separated by time and space—Laura, born in Australia in the 1960s, and Ravi, born in Sri Lanka, first seen as a child in the 1970s. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney; Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is forced to leave his country. Laura and Ravi each have near-alternating chapters through forty years of separate travels, restlessness, and movement. The counterpointing of Laura’s story with Ravi’s throws a particular critical light...