'I love to be a stranger in a strange land. In New York, you’re always a bit of a stranger in a strange land' 🌆 christobollen and WillChancellor recently met in Central Park during an 'absolute stunner' of a day.
The first thing to catch my attention in Christopher Bollen’s fiction was his tremendous, Wildean ability to capture an entire character in fewer than ten words. This skill has served him well in keeping a murder mystery’s cast of characters both vivid and memorable. A second quality has emerged and deepened in his past two novels: a masterful sense of place. With, Bollen evokes the thrum and blur of Cairo.
CHANCELLOR: I’m specifically interested in the way that we judge character and the way that we think that we know the good guys and the bad guys.CHANCELLOR: There’s a high probability in your fiction that if someone appears to be a good person, that character is not a good person. BOLLEN: It’s pre-pandemic in my mind. Probably three years after Sisi snatched power away from Morsi.
BOLLEN: It would’ve been a very different thing to write about a gay Egyptian character in the ’90s. It might have been more free. But in writing this book, I was trying to understand the questions of identity and homosexuality in my time.CHANCELLOR: That was a good move. You kept me from doing my thing.
CHANCELLOR: I’ve read your work and have always seen a real gift for character. You’re able to sum up an entire character with a pithy phrase like, “He’s the kind of guy who owned violent dogs.” We have a full trajectory of the character based on that, it’s all we need to know. This book seems like your best effort at putting place on the same pedestal as character.] was also place-heavy, in that Venice was the main character. And if you go to Venice, it overwhelms everything you do.
BOLLEN: The way I experience New York is very similar to the way I experience Cairo. Well, New York is always in danger of being Disneyfied, but it’s one of those cities in the world where you feel it all. You smell it, you taste it. That full-body immersion is what attracts me. BOLLEN: It’s extremely dark. I did a lot of research. I wrote this over COVID, in Massachusetts. Luckily I knew someone who was connected to the arms trade, just tangentially.CHANCELLOR: That’s probably better than the alternative.
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