Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a writer, coder and storyteller living and working in Silicon Valley. I’ve written 12 novels to date, a few non-fiction technical works, plays, and short fiction over the years.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Reykjavik: A Novel is my latest work.
Passion always dictates form. My passion for this narrative took shape over a period of years. The seeds were planted a long time ago, drawing on my memories of Reykjavik back in the 1980s and the Summit in 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev met to decide the fate of the world.
At the time, the world was teetering on the brink of Armageddon, a dangerous and perverse period in history, with nuclear missiles from the US and Soviet Union pointed at each other, within a time window of 30 minutes from launch. Can you really believe that kind of madness? It still boggles my mind. I mean, we had reached the point where mutually assured destruction (MAD) was the order of the day. Once launched, the missiles could not be stopped or return from their targets, the gravity’s rainbow of their paths impossible to change. Millions would be dead within minutes, the world literally blown to pieces. I’d been living with that for years as a young writer, and even now it stuns when I think about it. I knew something about Reagan, had followed his rise to power, and applauded his willingness to meet with Gorbachev and end this nuclear statement. As it happened, I had come to California in the 1960s for graduate school at Berkeley when Reagan was governor and lived through the Dr. Strangelove period depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s movie with Peter Sellers. I had grown up with The Bomb, but not by any means loving it. Anything was possible, the world gone mad. And Reagan, to his credit, wanted to rid the planet of these weapons. He and Gorbachev met a number of times, culminating in the Reykjavik Summit, when they knocked heads to figure out a way to reduce, and ultimately eliminate these monstrous nuclear arsenals on both sides. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was coming apart. Under the yoke of Soviet rule, people in Eastern Europe – in countries like Poland, the Baltics, East Germany – were growing more and more dissatisfied with the quality of their lives, restless now, hungry for freedom, resistant to the forces of oppression, all of that. Against this backdrop, the elements of my novel began to come together.
How did it come about? You try to dig deep into the wellsprings of feeling and imagination, and trust your instincts when you sit down to compose. As a young writer and journalist, I spent much of my time traveling, writing and reporting, stretching myself and learning my craft, and as it happened, my travels took me to various cities and countries depicted in the narrative. I tapped into those streams of memory and and drew on my experiences back in Berkeley, California during the 1980s, a turbulent time, much anxiety in the air, tensions between East and West, and in Reykjavik, which became the center of my novel, and in Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I grew up speaking a half-dozen languages as a typical polyglot, like the central character in the novel, Nathalie Campbell, who teaches Russian in Berkeley and is enticed to work as a “translator,” if you will, at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. How was she enticed? And by whom? And were their consequences? Yes, those are questions that novel attempts to answer, although the reader must ultimately decide for themselves.
The novel moves beyond the 1980s. Quite a bit further, as matter of fact. We as readers land in Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Wall, in November 1989 (as I did personally), then beyond to the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapses and a new class of oligarchs emerges to rule and take power and grab the wealth of the country, which was enormous and ripe for the pickings. In the story we return to Reykjavik in 1996 to hear David Bowie perform, then later in the 2000s to visit the gravesite of Bobby Fischer, the extraordinary chess master who is buried in Iceland, and who beat Boris Spassky in 1972 in the chess match of century, and finally, we taste the consequences of revenge all the way up to the present. The consequences, well, can be quite bad, as the younger generation, the youth of today, emerge and take power and control away from their elders, and set things right. That’s how we evolve, how history plays out.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Writing habits? What happened during the composition of the novel? Well, before too long, the seeds broke through the fertile garden of memory and started to grow into what the novel was to become. And then, seemingly on their own, the characters in the narrative began to haunt my dreams. One night Nathalie Campbell appeared, then Andrei Heilemann, both professionals in their respective fields, one a teacher of literature and the other a nuclear scientist, pulled together by the forces of nature, or history, or some combination, their lives intersecting at precisely the moment in time when it mattered the most, when each had to give up something of themselves and change direction in life.
Nathalie Campbell is the central character in the narrative, and as she came to me in my dreams, I began to see her as a kind of everywoman, an anima type, a woman you could not easily forget, a woman who kept you spellbound, a woman whom you could love yet not ever truly know, being somehow elusive, fleeting, magical, a woman with great depth and feeling, a woman of the world with many stories to tell. Does that make sense? Probably not. Even now, having written the book, I still can’t figure her out. Andrei Heilemann, the Soviet scientist who defects to the West, was my neighbor down the street, the colleague at work, the man whom I knew, not as a brilliant nuclear scientist, but simply a fellow I could depend on in a crisis, a good man, perhaps even a great man, yet a man with a past, a man with a vengeful brother, a man swept up in the torrents of history, caught in its dangerous cross-currents and multiplying dark forces.
For me, novels take on a life all their own if the characters won’t let go, and in this case, Nathalie and Andrei did just that. They wouldn’t let go. I began living and breathing the lives of these characters, writing about them as if they were part of my family, sharing their lives with my wife, who later worked hard and brilliantly to edit the book and understand these characters, what made them tick, what motivated their actions, what made them real in the best sense of the word.
The story of Nathalie and Andrei’s personal lives seemed important and needed to be filled in. Another character appeared, much later. Dylan Rose, the probing, inquisitive journalist, appeared to tell their story, the story of a family caught in the crosswinds of huge geopolitical changes. And of course, there had to be the resentment of the younger brother in the old Soviet Union, whose anger at the fall of Empire could not be underestimated or denied, the embodiment of all that happened when the Soviet Union crumbled and fell apart, and a new class of oligarchs emerged. He would not rest. He would go after his older brother who defected to the West, and do it with a vengeance.
Once the characters and narrative began to take shape, I was able find the unclassified documents from the Summit, released in 2004 by the State Department into the public, and then review the many books and articles written on Reagan, Gorbachev and the Summit. It gave me some understanding of the “official” version of events, but nothing really below the surface. I kept digging and digging to find the missing pieces, the backstory, the untold events. My novel was an attempt to get to the “truth” of the Summit and how it affected the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of a new class of ruthless oligarchs in the new Soviet Federation, oligarchs with global reach and command, why the new leadership in Russia felt the way they did when the Empire collapsed, the degree of resentment toward the West, toward the US as the lone global superpower, and why that mattered, why it was part of the motivation by the current leadership to divide the West, restore the Russian Federation to its former glory, all that retribution, moral equivalence, what-about-ism that you get hit with in the news today. Reykjavik puts it all in perspective, so you can see where it came from, how it evolved and morphed into our present situation in relations between East and West. That’s probably why I had to write the book. No, not probably. That’s why I wrote the book.
Reykjavik relies on a confessional technique as a way of telling the story of Nathalie and Andrei’s lives.
The way a story is told has a major impact on how the reader experiences the narrative and whether it comes to life, whether it breathes and rings true. As a writer, you have a few choices, like third-person omniscient, second-person (the you narrative, I call it), and first-person, as you find in most novels these days. But to me, the first-person technique can get boring very fast, because you have a limited field of view, the story is told through the eyes of single person. It’s much more interesting to tell a story in the first-person as it’s told to that person, with multiple voices, and greater depth of character. In effect, there are many characters, as in real life, with first-person stories, all woven together in the narrative. It’s a technique that Sebald uses brilliantly in Austerlitz because it takes you inside the mind and experience of not just the narrator but the main character who tells his story to the narrator.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Roberto Bolano.
What are you working on now?
A sequel to an earlier novel I wrote.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
My own website at
www.tommaremaa.com
That’s where I do blog postings, novel excerpts, pointers to my work.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Experiment with different storytelling techniques in your novels. That’s what I do, although I don’t recommend it to other writers necessarily.
It just happens for me. In the course of writing many novels, I’ve experimented with different techniques. My novel Metal Heads was about the Iraq and vets who were suffering from traumatic brain injuries in a hospital that was like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a bit of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange thrown in for good measure. A kind of looney bit where soldiers were being used for medical testing and body repairs in hopes of creating some hybrid and more advanced kind of warrior. The technique I used was a combination of first and second person, but always focused on how the main character, in this case, Spoon, a Marine missing an eye and a limb from an explosion in Iraq during the war, would tell the story. His voice and language had to be all its own, unique to him, yet convincing to the reader. In other novels, like Of Gods, Royals and Superman, I’ve used the third-person, which was appropriate to the characters and story that I wanted to tell, a coming of age narrative like Fielding’s Tom Jones, with chapters headings, comic characters, the typical father-son conflict, episodic scenes, wild flight of language and voices.
So my work doesn’t fall into any particular genre. Is that a problem?
I don’t think it’s a problem, though. Maybe literary fiction is the best way to describe each novel. Literary fiction is almost a lost genre if you can all it a genre at all. Literary fiction is always about language, about its power and mystery to evoke emotion. You’ll see it in the works of Coetzee, Pamuk, Franzen: every word carefully chosen, loved and hated, played like musical notes. There are pluses to working without genres. Because I don’t produce genre fiction, it frees me up to focus on the inner and outer lives of my characters and allow the narrative to unfold over time in whatever style or technique works best for the storytelling. I’m not bound by formulas or conventions. I don’t have a publisher who demands that I product the same book over and over again because that is what my readers want and expect. I can write works that defy categories, that liberate the reader from manufactured formulas or predictable plots and cardboard characters. You know a form, like the novel, is really dead, as Gertrude Stein once said, when everything in it has to be made a certain way. Again, passion dictates form. And passion doesn’t always answer to its name. You can’t turn it on and off like a spigot. It comes when it’s ready to come, when you allow it to come, when it takes hold of you and won’t let go.
Novels used to make news in their own right. Novels used to give us another version of history, deeper and more profound than what we got in college textbooks. Novels used to be more than entertainment fodder for movies to be made. Novels used to change people’s lives, and I think they still do if we give them half a chance.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Listen to all the advice you can get, but then toss it out the window.
What are you reading now?
A half dozen books, mostly non-fiction. When I read fiction I do so in order to learn how others plot, structure, shape their narratives. I read Borges, for example, to see how great fiction lives on, survives beyond one or two generations. I read Bolano to be dazzled, Coetzee to see the world through a dark lens, Pynchon to see the world satirized, Kundera to understand the complexities of love in the modern age (see The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
What’s next for you as a writer?
Whatever, wherever my characters take me.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
I doubt that I’d take any book at all to a desert island. I’d be too busy trying to survive the heat, lack of drinking water, the loneliness. Every novel I’d ever read would surface from memory, be with me and help me survive.
Author Websites and Profiles
Tom Maremaa Website
Tom Maremaa Amazon Profile