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A Wall of Light Interview

Essay

Quill and Quire Interview


Interview from the U.S. edition of
A Wall of Light (PS section)
November 2005


Why and when did you start writing?

When my father read stories to me on the kibbutz, I always identified with the writers and thought about how they wrote the story. I told my father I would be a writer, and that has been a part of my identity ever since. It’s not something I ever decided or thought about - it was simply part of who I was.

The first full-length book my father read to me was Alice in Wonderland. I’ve noticed that echoes of Alice in Wonderland often appear in my writing, though this is not something I have ever planned. Another early literary experience was The Little Matchgirl. I would beg my father to read it to me, and he would refuse, because I would burst out weeping each time. Finally he’d relent and I would cry for about half an hour at the end of the story.

I identified with the matchgirl, because even though I was part of a close-knit community on the kibbutz, I was isolated from my parents at night and during most of the day, which was difficult for us. As an adult I tried to read the story to my daughter in the library one day, and had to disappear behind a shelf, as I was crying helplessly again. I was at the same time laughing at myself, and my daughter was also quite amused, but I couldn't stop.

I guess it was also empathy that made me cry when I was little. I could not bear that this matchgirl had so little, and that no one cared about her, and as a good little Marxist, I already knew that this was not mere fiction.

My first attempt at fiction, though, was far from compassionate! I wrote a short novel when I was twelve, which bears some slight resemblance to Stephen King's Carrie. An unpopular girl takes revenge... needless to say I was an outsider at school in Montreal. As a friend of mine once said, society rides on the accomplishments of all the people who were tormented when they were children.

You wrote for many years without trying to get published. Why is that, and how has being published changed your life?

I have never been ambitious in terms of publishing. I’ve been writing for thirty years, but I didn’t think about publishing, because each time I finished a story or novel, I thought: the next one will be better.

I was fifteen or sixteen when I saw Pasolini’s Decameron. Pasolini himself plays an artist who is working on a fresco. At the end of the movie, the fresco comes to life, the angels begin to sing, and Pasolini says something like: what is the point of creating, when what you dream is always so much more beautiful?

That struck me very powerfully as a motif that would follow me all my life. The vision and the creation drift apart in the process of creating, and that is a continual source of despair. But over the years, I’ve learnt to accept and even be amused by the phenomenon. When I completed Ten Thousand Lovers, I felt that the novel was close enough to my initial vision to be published. I was still hesitant, though, because I was afraid of some aspects of publishing.

My fears were justified, in fact, but the letters I receive from readers, and the freedom I now have to write full-time, more than make up for the drawbacks. Really, there is only one drawback: permanence. The permanence of ridiculous misquotes in articles, the permanence of the published text (no more rewrites!), the permanence of recorded opinions that later change.

The misquotes range from major distortions to smaller tampering, such as editors changing my gender-neutral pronouns to masculine pronouns. One of the most embarrassing misquotes had to do with the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic. I was quoted as saying something absurd about the origins of those languages. I imagined my former PhD advisor reading the article and thinking I’d actually made that comment, and demanding I return my degree… one has to develop a sense of humour about these things, but I now understand why some writers don’t want to give interviews, and why performing artists often make only the blandest statements. The Internet amplifies the misrepresentation. (I also show up on the Internet as the translator of an article by S. Aloni which I never translated.)

There was as well an unexpected disappointment: the discovery that some reviewers read other reviews instead of reading the book. I suppose it doesn’t seem worth it to them, to read an entire novel in order to write a short review, for which they may not be getting paid all that much. At the same time, reviewers do influence potential readers, and it’s a pity to see some of them (not all!) copying other reviews. I had one reviewer who it seems only read a few pages of my novel, and got the basic plot all wrong – she didn’t seem to know that Sonya was deaf, or that Sonya had difficulties getting to East Jerusalem. Most of the review was copied from the press kit (which I wrote). But there’s nothing one can do – it’s part of the profession and it happens to everyone. I’ve yet to read a review of the marvelous Black Swan Green that comments on the double ending of the novel, the dissolution of the plot in those last pages and the implicit renunciation or revocation of the entire enterprise of fiction – if you skip a few paragraphs, you’ll miss it altogether.

But on the whole I’m glad now that some of my books are in print, because the miracle of reaching readers is very inspiring. And the gift of time to write is also possible only because I’ve started publishing.

The trilogy is set in politically hot territory; do you feel that it is somehow propagating a specific political view?

Inevitably, my political perceptions come through in my writing, as does my view of life in general. Writers expose themselves completely in their fiction: one is stripped naked. But my activist self and my writer self are separate. As  a writer, I deal with ambiguity, unanswered questions, unknown territory. This affects my activism, too, as I try to understand the complexity of the situation. I know there are no simple answers, though I feel there are some necessary steps that must be taken (ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).

As the South African writer, Njabulo Ndebele, has said, fiction frees you from the pre-determined formula. A novel seeks to expand possibilities rather than narrow them. That is the great pleasure of writing: the freedom to delve as deeply as one wishes, look at things as closely as possible. I am always interested in the human story, in the way people experience their surroundings and how they are affected by them.

I have heard that Ten Thousand Lovers is popular among the Intelligence community in Israel.  A former head of the Mossad has praised it, and I think it’s partly because I strove so hard for accuracy and partly because I tried to understand my characters.  It has pained me to be occasionally misunderstood by the Jewish community in the Diaspora, but I know that the conflict is a very emotional issue for everyone involved.

How does your Canadian identity help you write about Israel?

Like many Israelis who live outside Israel (about 750,000 according to some estimates), I have never lost my Israeli identity, even though English is now my primary language, and even though I have lived longer in Canada than in Israel. As soon as I step off the plane in Israel, I feel completely integrated. When I return to Canada, the adjustment takes much longer. My personality appears to be more Israeli than Canadian, especially in terms of the informality one finds in Israeli culture.

In the trilogy that dual perspective emerges in different ways. In Ten Thousand Lovers, Lily moves in and out of memory; she is both deeply immersed in the events that took place in Israel, and watching them from a distance. In Look For Me, Dana is the daughter of South Africans, and she’s an activist, which means that she’s taken a step back to reflect on policies that others take for granted. She’s grown up reading Miss Read! You can’t get more of a contrast to Israeli life than the quiet English villages of the Miss Read books. In A Wall of Light, I move closer to the heart of Israel, but once again my main character, Sonya, is an outsider.

So I think it is probably easier for non-Israelis to enter the world of my novels than it would be if I were writing from an entirely Israeli perspective. When we write as insiders, we open the doors to our literary world, and our readers enter at their own risk. When we write as partial outsiders, we offer more guidance, a tourist booth with brochures.

How did you come to create the characters in A Wall of Light?

I fell in love with the characters of this novel, and I felt truly bereft when I’d finished. I wanted to meet them; I didn’t want to accept that they didn’t exist in the real world. When I was in my twenties, I wrote such dark stories and novels! That changed gradually after I had a child. I think I was so focussed on creating a gentle and friendly environment for my daughter, and she amused me so much, that I began creating more hopeful worlds. I didn’t lose interest in the lunatics and dour pessimists, but I found myself writing more about gentler people who were trying to find their way in a difficult and often tragic world.

Where do characters come from? I really can’t say. They came to me as if out of nowhere. I adore Noah; he’s so honest and funny and straight-forward, and he’s also quite strong. I think I was interested in his strength: how does he manage to remain so centred in the midst of crisis and tragedy? I was probably exploring this question as I wrote. I love his relationship with Kostya, and how he decides to ask Kostya for advice when he begins to wonder about his sexual orientation. I enjoyed writing about Noah at different ages, from ten to twenty-two. One sees how his basic personality never really changes, and the clues to his future are all there from the start. I am very drawn to diaries, and have several boxes of diaries myself, going back to age 12. I like to think about the way we choose to narrate our stories, and the relationship between those stories and fiction - the way events are recreated and redefined the minute you find words for them and of course the endless ways in which a single event can be recorded.

Having a deaf character posed technical challenges; Sonya uses Sign, which is visual. But I discovered that people who lose their hearing when they are older continue to think in spoken language as well as Sign. I’ve always been interested in Sign, and I was glad to learn more about it; for example, I had no idea that there were so many signing systems a different one for every country.

As I wrote, I began to sniff an allegorical undercurrent. I made every effort not to think about it, because thinking that way is anathema to writing, in my experience. Writing for me has to be almost entirely intuitive; when I decide a word or passage or plot element isn’t right, it’s because it feels wrong. But I have academic training, and I’m an analytic reader, so that side of me is also quite active. I simply push it away. I was half-way through the novel before I noticed that Sonya’s name has allegorical resonance.

When I finished writing the novel, an Israeli read the MS and told me that Sonya is an old-fashioned name, and that in 1973, when Sonya was born, that name would not be an obvious choice. So I had the nurse at the hospital write Tziyona on the birth certificate. My main characters almost always come to me with names, though I do use a name book for minor characters. Noah just came with his name, as did Kostya. It never ceases to amaze me how much coherence emerges from the unconscious mind.

In Ten Thousand Lovers, there is an episode in which a nurse influences the choice of a baby name; this would not be unusual in Israel. I was almost called Ada instead of Edeet, but the kibbutz had already made a poster that said, Welcome Edeet, and when my mother changed her mind, on the day I was born, she was told the poster was already up and it would be a pity to have to redo it.

Eli is not based on anyone I’ve known, though I suppose the campus womanizer is a familiar figure in universities everywhere. I think the way I present certain aspects of Israeli culture may strike readers who are not familiar with that culture as unrealistic. A reviewer of Ten Thousand Lovers thought it was strange that the characters moved so easily from politics to personal topics, but that is typical of Israeli discourse. Directness, informality, easy conversation about subjects which might be considered taboo in other cultures, openness about sex, the acceptance of eccentricity, the personalization of politics - all these are quite characteristic. Within minutes, a taxi driver in Israel will start describing his hernia operation, his son’s drug rehabilitation, his despair over the conflict. No two people are alike, of course, but there are cultural tendencies.

For all three books in the trilogy, I gave my completed drafts to Israelis to read, including at least one army person, so they could find any mistakes I might have made, or offer suggestions.  I made sure to give the MS to people with opposing political views, as I wanted to hear all comments, from all sides. Everyone who read the MS had important contributions to make, and helped with accuracy of details and credibility.

How are the three books of the trilogy connected, and how do they differ from one another?

I had not set out to write a trilogy, but half-way through Ten Thousand Lovers I realized that it would take three novels for me to release all the feelings about Israel which I had stored inside me. I saw the novels as interconnected by theme, structure and setting, as well as through the minor characters.

Writing the first novel, Ten Thousand Lovers, was an extremely emotional experience. I cried often, and I postponed writing the ending because I knew how hard it would be for me. I was looking at very painful issues in that novel. The tragedies of war, the madness of the conflict, the cruelties of torture. I was also looking back at the early days of the Occupation and at Lily’s past. In Ten Thousand Lovers I focussed on language and meaning. The novel was influenced by midrash, which is a form of free textual interpretation, where layers of meaning are unravelled through association and imagination. I love Hebrew, its etymology and development, and I wanted to write about language because the way we use words is so closely tied to the way we understand and create our reality.

The original title of Ten Thousand Lovers was The Things We Do, and that is what the novel is about: the things we do with our bodies, for example: how the same body, the same few limbs and organs, can perform acts of love as well as acts that cause unbearable pain. The image at the end of the novel, the body of the child on the altar, is an image of purity and potential - of the choices we make, to bring down the sword or to let the child live. The first Israeli who used that image, in a sculpture, to condemn war created an uproar, and the sculpture was banished to the museum’s basement. Today there is more acceptance of the view that fighting is not the only alternative, and that sending our beloved sons and daughters to be killed in war is not always as necessary as our leaders would have us believe.

Though I did a lot of research for Ten Thousand Lovers, it was small-time compared to what I had to do in order to write Look For Me. Research for that novel quickly merged with peace activism. Was I terrified the first time I boarded a bus to go into the Occupied Territories to see new outposts [unauthorized Jewish settlement]? Yes. It was the height of the second intafada; and I was entering a war zone. But the fear passed as I became involved and committed to working towards peace. It is uplifting to see Israelis and Palestinians meeting, seeing eye to eye, wanting the same things. It is also important to see the Palestinians as they are, and not in the distorted way the media often portrays them. Palestinian society is diverse and complex, as is Israeli or any other society. This seems obvious, but it needs to be said, because we always carry misconceptions about cultures we aren’t familiar with - which is why communication and interaction are so crucial.

Dana in Look for Me is more practical than Lily in Ten Thousand Lovers, I think. She has a romantic streak but she is also quite down-to-earth; and this dichotomy is reflected in her profession: she writes formulaic romance novels.  Lily is a linguist; Dana is a photographer. In some ways Ten Thousand Lovers is about what we say (and don’t say), and Look For Me is about what we see (and don’t see).

I wrote these novels because they urged themselves upon me. The writing was personal, solitary. I was alone with my stories, and I tried to tell them as well as I could. If they now speak to others, and do some good, I am grateful.


Essay for students

by Jani Liggins, Paper Store Enterprises

In both Ten Thousand Lovers and Look for Me, Ravel sets up a consistent dynamic tension between the world we live in, and that of myth: her characters are credible and realistic in their own right, but also demonstrate a deeper meaning which reflects the cultural importance of myth. In Ten Thousand Lovers, for instance, the names of the couple are significant: "Ami" means "my country" and we would associate Lily with the various references in the Jewish scriptures.

Right from the opening of the novel, Ravel makes it clear that traditional culture and current events are interwoven. It takes some time for her to describe the first meeting between Lily and Ami, because she is constantly stopping to interject or explain some snippet about how a Hebrew phrase is used, what the cultural significance of a gesture is, and so on. The characters are not allowed to become isolated from their history and cultural metier, and consequently we have a continuous connection being established between the world of myth and the world of real people and their lives.

There are clearly established associations between Ami and Lily, and Adam and Eve of the Genesis myth. They live in a home which they regard as paradisiacal, where gardening is an essential element of their lives, but have to venture out into the outside world in order to earn their living, and survive. The structure of the narrative weaves the past, the present and the cultural threads which connect the two, in the form of the history of Hebrew, demonstrating the impact which myth has on the present day lives of real people.

At the same time, Ravel sets up contradictions and dissonances: Lily's feelings for Ami have to be balanced against her feelings about his job as an interrogator. We can see, in this, that the "garden" is not perfect, is not a genuine Eden, since there is already poison within it. The importance of language is constantly reiterated. Lily's explanations of the roots of Hebrew emphasise not only the way that language exemplifies culture, but also the need to create new words when Hebrew was revived as a spoken language in the nineteenth century. The language had remained in the past, while the world moved on, and as Lily says, there was no word for "occupied" or all the other terms associated with occupation – "held", "liberated", "administered". The language has to adapt in order to incorporate concepts such as "electricity", "torture" and "bomb shelter".

Just as there is a disjunction between culture, language and meaning, so Ravel also explores paradoxes in the relationship between her characters. The love affair between Ami and Lily is an echo of the love affair between Jewish people and their land, something which is constantly reiterated as Lily's narrative goes from the past and present to the concepts expressed by the Hebrew language. Ami himself is contradictory: an interrogator who understands and hates the occupation, one of the few Israelis to refer to "Palestinians" at a point when Palestine was not recognised by the Israeli government. The qualities which make him attractive as a lover to Lily are also the qualities which make him such a skilled interrogator; is it possible for her to love the man and hate his job, since the two are so closely interwoven?

Ravel raises similar questions about the Israeli people's feelings for one another, for their country, and for their culture. She comments that the very word "Israeli" has to signify all citizens of Israel, which includes Arabs, and yet when people use the term "Israeli" they do not think of Arabs as being part of that concept. Israeli Arabs are both there and not-there, which imbues them with a mythic, unreal quality despite their clear presence as human beings in the real world.

In "Look for Me" we again have an account of a relationship between two people which follows a distorted, wandering course. At the opening of the novel, we find that Dana's lover Daniel has disappeared: her complacent assumption that a soldier whose duties involve folding laundry will not be injured has been shattered when he is badly burned in an accident. Because of his ruined appearance, he feels he can no longer stay with Dana: she, however, is equally determined to find him and bring him home.

Again, we see the echoes of the Eden myth in the description of their bedroom; Daniel has surrounded the mirror on the wall with foliage plants, so that they see their reflection peeping from a jungle. This time, however, it is only Daniel who has been forced out of Eden, although Dana makes a conscious choice to follow him. Throughout the narrative, dreams are an essential element: Dana records the myths and symbols she sees in her dreams and thus interweaves them with the events of her waking daily life. We are told that she has relied on her dreams since she was a child, when she kept contact with her dead mother through her dreams. We might equate this with the way that modern society keeps in contact with its heritage and its roots, through the preservation of myth. Just as Dana has to try and interpret the symbols in her dreams and apply them to the real world, so we would interpret the concepts and ideas which are contained within myth in order to relate them to the lives of human beings in the present day.

In both Ten Thousand Lovers and Look for Me, it is the man who vanishes, and the theme of the narrative is to discover why he has disappeared. Dana's heartbreak and her search for her husband echoes the saga of separation from the Biblical Song of Songs, but the narrative also incorporates the real world of Israel and the occupation; Dana's photographs of the checkpoints, for instance, or the westernised romances which she writes in order to earn a living. It is notable that the formula of these novels involves romantic intrigue and the obligatory happy ending; a pattern which is clearly not present in her own life. In fact, Ravel deliberately sets the weddings in her narratives at the beginning of the story, rather than at the end, making it clear from the outset that this is not a conventional romantic format.

Not surprisingly, Dana does not regard her creations as having any personal value: she sends them away to a faceless publisher and never looks for them on bookstalls. They are simply a way of earning a living, with no connection to her own emotions and feelings or to the cultural and social changes taking place in Israel. In effect, they do not make any contribution to the myth and are therefore of no lasting consequence.

In both novels, then, we are given a perspective on modern Israel which is dependent on myth, as expressed in dream-symbols, linguistic meaning, and the patterning of real-life events after those in the scriptures. It is impossible to understand Israel as a construct without being aware of the mythology, or the way that myth and reality constantly interact and reinforce one another. On the surface, the two narratives might be regarded as straightforward love stories; however, the reiterated paradoxes and ambiguities emphasise the complexity of the Israeli psyche, and the parameters of Israeli culture.

Although Ravel's characters are credible, lively and well-rounded, we are constantly aware that they are also representations of elements of the Israeli cultural myth; the echoes of the garden of Eden reinforce the idea that in some way, these two couples are the direct descendants of Adam and Eve, both in reality and in the narrative of the mythos. Lily and Dana are realistic, modern individuals, but at the same time they have a symbolic dimension which imbues them with a timeless quality: they are both "a woman" and "Everywoman", and their stories form part of the mythology which is constantly being created as human beings act out the stories of their cultural heritage.


Interview from Quill and Quire*

Edeet Ravel made her name with a trilogy about Israeli-Palestinian relations. With her new work, she’s still more interested in questions than answers

In a cozy café in Guelph, Ontario, Israeli-Canadian author Edeet Ravel gives off a warm vibe as she enjoys a date square and drinks chamomile tea. It’s no surprise when she jokingly refers to her hippie approach to mowing the lawn at her South Guelph home.

When I follow up with her later on her “hippie” comment, though, she says, “I don’t think of myself as belonging to a social group or movement, and in general, I don’t think of anyone in those terms.” It’s clear that Ravel is leery of labels. And while she answers my questions about money and divorce candidly, she’s guarded when discussing her political activism, or the political themes in her novels. She is wary of being misinterpreted.

Ravel is best known for a trio of novels about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in September, she published two new books. Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (Penguin Canada) is a novel about the children of Holocaust survivors in Montreal, and The Saver (Groundwood Books) is a YA novel about a native teenager who is forced to fend for herself after her mother’s death.

While assumptions can easily be made about Ravel’s political leanings – she says one of the things that attracted her to her second husband was his membership in the Communist Party – she stresses that she writes not to fulfill a political agenda, but to explore questions and contradictions. “When it comes to people, no one really fits anywhere,” she says. “It’s so difficult to describe or know anyone, and the whole project of the sort of fiction I read and write is searching for a way to express that mystery.”

There’s a sense of questing in Ravel’s biography as well. She’s moved back and forth between Canada and Israel and has accumulated three master’s degrees and a PhD. She was born on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border and lived in Israel until the age of seven, when her family returned to Montreal, her parents’ birthplace. (Ravel has an older brother and two younger sisters, one of whom is from the Gwich’in tribe and was adopted into the family at age four; her family, she says, is “complicated, like most families” and not as close as she would wish.) She returned to Israel at the age of 18 and completed a BA and MA in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She met her first husband, an Israeli pianist, the first week she was there, and they married a year later. An albino, he found the Israeli climate difficult, and after five years in Israel, Ravel and her husband moved back to Montreal, where she did a creative writing MA at Concordia and an MA and PhD in Jewish Studies at McGill.



I ask Ravel about her first marriage and why it ended. She explains that her first husband was devoted to his music and didn’t want children. “It was a very difficult decision. But in my late twenties, I suddenly wanted a child more than anything in the world.” She had her daughter, Larissa, with a second husband, but that marriage “never worked” – they split shortly after Larissa’s birth, falling into an amicable routine of co-parenting.

When I ask her whether she wrote about love because it was missing in her own life, she laughed. She reflects that writing doesn’t work that way; the novel tells you what it needs. As for her private life, she tells me that when her second marriage ended, she preferred to devote her energies to her daughter and her career. “It was the end of my love life, I guess forever,” she says, smiling. She has been on her own for 18 years. Did she have dreams of the sort of romantic relationships that are found in her novel? “Yes,” she answers. “Like most young people, I envisioned a future with a lifelong, devoted partner. But life plays out in unpredictable ways. These days, I’ve become more of a hermit. I like being on my own, I find it pleasant. I need a lot of time for writing, which is what I most want to do. But that’s recent; I used to love hanging out with friends. Maybe there just seems to be less time now.” Three years ago, Ravel and Larissa moved to Guelph. Now 21, Larissa attends university there and lives in dorms.

Ravel has visited Israel regularly over the years, most recently in 2006. She would like to visit again this year, but isn’t sure it will fit into her budget – or her busy writing schedule. And while she’s lived in Canada for most of her life, she remains torn between the two worlds. “In Tel Aviv, I miss the many things I love about living in Canada, and in Canada, I miss many aspects of life in Tel Aviv,” she says. “There’s no solution.”

One constant in her life has been her writing, though her apprenticeship was a long one. She’s been writing full-time since 2002, when she decided to leave a teaching job at John Abbott College, a Montreal CEGEP (she has also taught at Concordia and McGill). Ravel loved teaching, but it was secondary to her writing. “I was a teacher just because that’s the way it worked out,” she says. “I could’ve been a librarian or a nurse, two careers I considered, but I always would have been a writer.” She published her first novel, the slim volume Lovers: A Midrash, in 1995, but came to international attention with her so-called “Tel Aviv trilogy.” Ten Thousand Lovers (2003) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, Look for Me (2004) won the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, and A Wall of Light (2005) was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Ravel began writing the trilogy in 2000, the same year that renewed conflict sparked in the area. “The history of Israel is very closely tied to my personal history,” she says. Her parents were Zionists who moved to Palestine in 1948, just as it was becoming Israel. “There were so many issues to examine that there was no way I could do it in one book. In the first book, I dealt with the ’70s.” She then wanted to look at the present, and then at just one family in which a Jewish woman falls in love with an Arab man.

While researching, she also became involved with Israeli peace activism, which she describes as encouraging dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. “The first time I went with an activist group into the West Bank, I was there as a researcher, with my little notebook and camera. But by the time I came back, I believed in peace activism.” The nature of that involvement has since changed. “At different periods in our lives, often for technical reasons, we choose different ways to contribute,” she says. “For the past three years, my writing has taken over.”

Ravel says her ideas often simmer for years, and both of her new books were inspired by troubling scenes from her youth. Your Sad Eyes arose out of an incident at Ravel’s Hebrew day school in Montreal. She was in Grade 4, and a Holocaust survivor, a man who had been a conductor in Europe, was brought in to start a choir. When the students misbehaved – “throwing things and jeering and so on” – Ravel was shocked. “I couldn’t understand how kids could be so mean to such a terrified man. Didn’t they see what I saw?” The Saver was sparked by later memories: as a teenager, Ravel was struck by the dysfunctional relationship between a neighbourhood dressmaker and her truculent teenage daughter.

The Saver isn’t Ravel’s first book for young readers. In 2007, Raincoast Books published a more lighthearted trilogy: The Thrilling Life of Pauline de Lammermoor, The Mysterious Adventures of Pauline Bovary, and The Secret Journey of Pauline Siddhartha. Ravel wrote the first of those books 10 years ago, inspired by her daughter’s love of reading: “I wanted kids to enjoy them and have a good laugh.” Writing for children is “pretty stress-free,” says Ravel. “I don’t want to say that it’s not as complex.... You’re writing about complex issues. But it’s so much easier and faster to write for kids.” Ravel says there’s a limit to how much subtlety kids are willing to abide. “You have to give them everything,” she says. “It’s more difficult to raise a lot of questions and recreate very subtle ideas in a way that really only an adult reader would find interesting.”

Ravel would like to continue the Pauline series, but Raincoast’s publishing program officially folded early this year. “Some publishers don’t want to take a series in the middle, so I may be stuck for now,” she says. She’s also been without an agent lately, having negotiated her recent publishing deals herself. In the past, she’s worked with such agents as Beverley Slopen in Canada and Malcolm Imrie in the U.K. “An agent becomes another factor in the equation, and it’s simpler to work without one, though I know I can’t do as good a job as an agent, and I might end up with a smaller income,” she says. “But I want more time to write, and the only way to not actually deal with the business side is to find a publisher you like and trust, sell world rights, and let them be your agent. I don’t feel that publishers are the enemy. We want the same things: success for the book industry. It’s more fun dealing with publishers directly.”

Ravel signed on with Penguin after meeting David Davidar at the Vancouver International Writers Festival; the Penguin president was there promoting his own 2007 novel, The Solitude of Emperors. Ravel made the switch from Random House Canada, which published the latter two Tel Aviv novels, because she was offered a two-book deal by Penguin.  She says it’s been a pleasure working with Penguin editor Nicole Winstanley. “At the outset, she had a very clear vision of these characters,” says Winstanley. “It was like being a passenger on that ride.”

Right now, Ravel is revising a novel she wrote 15 years ago. “I didn’t start publishing for many years, even though I was writing the entire time,” she says. “So I’m taking projects I’ve written over the years and reworking them.” And she’ll likely continue to engage political themes, though she stresses that her books are not intended to offer political analysis. “I have so many questions about everything, and maybe that’s my theme: a big question mark,” she says. “I don’t write with hate and I don’t point fingers. Trying to see from multiple perspectives, and asking questions instead of answering them – that seems far more humane.”

*There were several errors in the printed Quill and Quire interview; I’ve corrected them here.


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