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James William Brown talks about My Last Lament, a poignant and evocative novel of one Greek woman's story of her own—and her nation's—epic struggle in the aftermath of World War II.
World War II is a popular period for historical fiction, but the years immediately following the war are often overlooked. What drew you to writing about this time?
It was really the voice of Aliki, the narrator, that got this all started. After I finished my first book, I began a second manuscript, and the character of Aliki evolved in that work. I enjoyed working with her as a character, even though the manuscript never really came to much. When it was finished, I started writing a series of short stories about Aliki, and I'd planned for the third one to be about her childhood. When I figured backwards with her age, I realized she would have been a child during the German occupation of Greece, and then the Greek Civil War that followed that. And they'd always been periods that interested me. But ultimately, I followed where Aliki led. When I'm writing, I hear a voice in my imagination and just fall into the story. I don't really know where it's going to go. I just follow along.
There seems to be a great historical understanding of the horrors the Germans brought to the territories they occupied. But much of the violence seen in My Last Lament, both during the war and after, is driven by Greeks attacking fellow Greeks. Was that surprising to you?
It's just history. At the end of the German occupation, there were many resistance groups that had come together during the occupation and they all began squabbling over who would be the new government. And it turned into a civil war. That's historical record. The ruins of that war are still very visible in Greece today. Most families had people who were involved in it, and there's still a lot of resentment about things that happened during that period.
My Last Lament is Aliki's oral account of her own history, which she is speaking into a cassette tape player. What drove you to choose that structure?
I don't really make hard decisions about what my characters do or say in a conscious way. They have a life of their own in my imagination, and I go where they lead.
There are a lot of American sociological studies of rural lament practices in Greece, usually conducted by Greek-American sociologists who go to interview these women and record their laments. Because I've read several of these studies, it felt quite natural for Aliki to be interviewed in such a manner. Of course, Aliki does it her own way, and tells her whole life story instead of recording only her laments--although her story ends up becoming a lament of itself, in a way.
Aliki's story shifts back and forth in time. Since your writing happens so organically, did you find it hard to keep those threads together?
That was pretty much accidental. Everything in my writing is pretty much accidental. I never plan things out or plot them. I don't write synopses or outlines, so I never quite know what's going to happen when I sit down to work.
When I started having Aliki tell her story, it was originally just going to be her childhood. But I wanted to include things that were happening in her day-to-day life in her narration, because it seemed sort of unnatural that she would sit down and talk into a recorder for 300 pages without interruptions. As that strand of her present-day story grew and became more significant, I realized at some point that the two strands--the outer strand of her daily life and the inner strand of the story she was telling--were going to have to come together in a kind of braid. But I had no idea how that was going to happen, or even if it would happen. It really wasn't until I was into a third or fourth draft that I asked myself a key question, the answer to which moved the subplot into the outer story. Then the whole thing started to come together.
How would you say traditional Greek literature shaped My Last Lament, if at all?
I wasn't really thinking of the classical tragedies like Oedipus and so forth when I was writing. Those really didn't come to mind while I was working on this novel, but I know them well, so maybe subconsciously they were an influence. I did think consciously of the Iliad, just because I've always loved the Iliad, and I've read it many times. It seemed to me that there were some parallels between the Greek civil war of the 1940s and the Trojan War--at least in the kinds of things people go through in wartime. At one point Aliki asks Stelios what the Iliad is about, and he says "Greeks at war." In response, she tells him that she can see that by just looking out the window.
There's also a kind of lyricism about the Iliad that I wanted to infuse in the book. There is a theory that the Iliad began as a series of laments for the Greek soldiers on the Trojan plain. That theory played very much into the fact that Aliki is a lamenter who is making a recording of her life, which is, in a sense, a lament of that life, just as the Iliad could be a lament for all the lives lost in the Trojan War.
Is there anything you think readers may find surprising in your writing?
The one question that is most often asked of me is how is it that I, as a man, can write from the point of view of a woman--and a woman of a different culture, no less? And the answer to that is that I seem to write better when I write about someone who is the least like myself.
I think it's partly because I sort of got into writing through acting. In high school and college, I did a lot of speech and drama work. And the thing that fascinated me most about it was this idea that when you're in a role, you are essentially trying on another personality. I realized, at some point along my career, that I didn't have to try on a role that someone else had written. I could write it myself. And that's always been endlessly fascinating, to write about someone very unlike me, from a culture completely unlike my own.
Interview by Kerry McHugh. First published in Shelf Awareness and reproduced with the permission of Shelf Awareness.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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