One of the most original, dazzling, and critically acclaimed debut novels this year.
In this debut novel, hailed by Stephen King as ?terrifying, touching, and wildly funny,? the stories of two strangers, Eugene Brentani and Mr. Schmitz, interweave. What unfolds is a bold reinvention of storytelling in which Eugene, a devotee of the reclusive and monstrous author, Constance Eakins, and Mr. Schmitz, who has been receiving ominous letters from an old friend, embark from New York for Italy, where the line between imagination and reality begins to blur and stories take on a life of their own.
I read The Mayor's Tongue with ever-increasing delight, rooting with all my heart for the young protagonist on his near-mythic quest. This is an elegantly-structured, brilliantly-told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny, and always generous and magical... a brave book, a novel brimming with brio. The Mayor's Tongue reminds me of Peter Carey's early work-- the highest possible praise. It presents a young writer of deep ambition and imagination working with a kind of unnerving maturity. Ambitious, intelligent, hallucinatory, and, most importantly: heartfelt. Here is a young writer who is not afraid to give literature a kick in the pants Playfully postmodern but eminently readable. This is a novel with a big brain and a cheeky wink by an author who could well become one of the defining writers of his generation The Sunday Telegraph Rich invites absolute trust in his postmodern jousting with the reality-busting potential of storytelling Metro The book is original and wildly ambitious... his (Rich) inventiveness is joyous The Guardian If ambition alone wins prizes, Nathaniel Rich's mantelpiece should be creaking by the end of the year Financial Times Rich's novel reads a little like a hybrid of The New York Trilogy and Up the Faraway Tree, with frequent appearances of wood sprites and other forest-dwelling creatures. The fantasy element develops throughout and Rich is at his most successful in the throes of it, building towards his mad denouement. Like with many debuts, there is a little too much going on, but it is original and intelligent, and Rich is an elegant writer with a great deal of promise. He is definitely one to watch The Observer Hugely inventive and playful debut Esquire Imaginatively folkloric...the experience of sharing in its feverish tussling with ideas is consistently exuberant The Los Angeles Times Book Review When Rich writes of his characters, their affections, their impulses and failings, he writes generously and movingly...Surprising friendships, small intimacies of fidelity and kindness, large gestures of joy: The Mayor's Tongue does all these so well, pointing the way to Nathaniel Rich's promise as a fiction writer The New York Times Book Review The Mayor's Tongue is a spare masterpiece of postmodernism, an incisive fable whose myriad threads of plot and thought take the inhibitions of our era to task and make Rich's first novel a New York Trilogy for the new millennium The Boston Globe
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Q: You've said that The Mayor's Tongue is extremely personal but not autobiographical. How so?
None of the events depicted in the book are real, except perhaps for moments in which a male character humiliates himself by being inarticulate in front of a woman. None of the characters are stand-ins for me, and none of them--with the exception of one or two very minor characters--are based on any people I know in real life. But the book's emotions are very real to me, the themes and ideas are ones that I have thought about obsessively, and the spirit and the tone of the writing feels very much a reflection of my own sensibility. I felt like I funneled all of my own personal thoughts into some crazy contraption and, sausage-machine-style, out came The Mayor's Tongue.
Q: The failure of language is a central preoccupation of your novel. How do you develop that theme?
The main characters all want urgently to communicate their thoughts and emotions, but for different reasons, are unable to do so. They develop all kinds of strategies, some of them preposterous, but whether or not they succeed is open to interpretation. I think this is something we all struggle with; at least I do.
Q: There are two main stories that flow side by side in your novel, but never actually intersect. Why did you use this structure?
I had hoped that the two stories would generate some (perhaps unconventional) suspense as they unfold, that the reader wouldn't be able to help but wonder what the two stories were going to do. Even if that suspense is spoiled (by an interviewer's leading question, for instance), the fact is the characters in both stories are faced with similar problems but they approach them from their own perspectives, and reach different conclusions. My hope is that the two stories reflect and echo each other in different ways, and I felt that if they were to intersect, it would cheapen that dialogue. I think that, by the end, the stories feel resolved in a way that is true to the spirit of the novel.
Q: Your novel blends elements from many genres, including fantasy, realism, mystery, fable, melodrama, and romance, for starters. How do you describe the result?
I never thought in terms of genre, maybe because I don't have much experience in reading genre fiction, except for horror. I worked hard to make the characters human, vivid, and honest. It was important to me that the story move along at a steady pace (this required a good amount of cutting and condensing over the course of the writing process). I knew I wanted to explore certain themes, so I concentrated on making those as nuanced and involved as I could. I also knew from the very beginning of the project that there would be some slightly fantastical elements, but I wanted to work up to them gradually, so that the reader was never jarred by some sudden plunge into the surreal. I was thinking of a frog in slowly boiling water.
Q: You chose one of Italy's least-known regions, the Carso, as the setting for most of your book. Why?
The most prosaic reason is that I was living in Trieste the summer I started writing the book. That summer, Trieste hosted the annual international Esperanto festival, so everyone was walking around speaking this invented language. And this in a city where people speak a smattering of different tongues--Italian, German, Slovenian, and Hungarian primarily, but also Triestino, a thick dialect incomprehensible to other Italians. When you go up into the Carso, this odd web of languages and cultures becomes even more pronounced. On the winding mountain roads it's often difficult to tell what country you're in. The signs are all in different languages.
I also loved the idea of this isolated land that nevertheless is located within the borders of one of the most visited and familiar countries in the world. The region is completely forgotten by time, and even by its own country--I remember reading a survey in which the majority of Italians thought that Trieste wasn't even part of Italy. It was only annexed in 1954, and over history it has had numerous national and cultural identities, having been under the rule of the Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, the Austria-Hungarians; for several years after armistice it was even an independent territory. It is the gateway to the East, the easternmost city in Western Europe--but it also could be considered the westernmost city in the East. As Jan Morris wrote, it's "nowhere."
Q: Who are some of the writers who have influenced your work?
I wonder whether there are any writers I love whom I haven't tried to steal from. Some of the writers whose work I repeatedly consulted during the writing of the book were: Flann O'Brien, Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Dickens, Italo Svevo, Stephen King, Kazuo Ishiguro, Katherine Dunn, and Arrian's history of Alexander the Great (one of many models for the character of Constance Eakins). Jan Morris's excellent Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere was an invaluable resource, for her depiction of the city and its peculiar hazy identity.
Q: Are you working on another book yet? Can you say anything about it?
I am. It's about a bizarre apocalyptic event. Like The Mayor's Tongue, the story begins in New York City, and then moves out into the countryside. There--I've already said more than I did in the five years it took me to write the first one.
I picked up this book along with Keith Gessen's book (about with the less said the better) based on an LA Times story about young New York literary editors and their brand new novels. From the story I was expecting a book in the sort of early Roth or Bellow vein of brilliant if self-indulgent navel-gazing (for that, see Gessen) - but it turns out this is the craziest novel I've read since reading Calvino and Borges in college. It starts out with a post-collegiate guy in New York kind of annoyingly trying to find himself through manual labor, working as a mover, but as soon as you realize his moving partner is some kind of mad Dominican shape-shifter, the book just cuts loose into a quasi-surreal quest around the world in pursuit of a demagogic writer (who seemed to be based on Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway, but with a good does of Pynchon & Salinger mystery about him). It becomes this really delightful, sometimes melancholy novel about desperate love and literary obsession and really, really trying to communicate. All of which are things I feel like I know a little too much about - and seeing them treated so well and so creatively here got me more excited about a new writer than I have been for a long time. Weird or not, though I like weird.
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I first became aware of Nathaniel Rich when I read his brilliant piece on Pier Paolo Pasolini in the New York Review of Books (9/27/2007). It's the only piece the NYRB has ever published on Pasolini, and that said something important to me. The NYRB doesn't mess around. So I kept my eye out for him after that, and he rarely, if ever, disapointed. A great piece on Will Self in the New York Times Book Review comes to mind, as well as some great interviews -- with J.T. Leroy and Stephen King -- in the Paris Review. And if you like film noir, as I do, his book on San Francisco Noir is a gem. But with this book, the Mayor's Tongue, he takes his talent to a new level. This kid Rich -- what is he, 25? 26? -- writes like a man twice his age. When he takes you up the cliffs of northern Italy, your palms will get sweaty. And when he riffs his way through the history of the insurance business in Hartford, seemingly ad-libbing his way back to the early 19th century, you will laugh your head off and wonder: is this stuff true? Or is he making this up? Or both? This book is funny and moving and crazy and inventive and weird, weird in the good way, the way that keeps you up at night wondering what all his fantastic characters -- dozens of them! -- are doing right now, where they're hiding, who they're sleeping with. I'll never forget Mr. Schmitz. Mr. Schmitz will stay with me forever.
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This review is from: The Mayor's Tongue (Paperback)
Eugene is a mover in New York City whose favorite author is Constance Eakins. While doing a job one day, he runs into a biographer of Eakins who also happens to have a beautiful daughter, Sonia. Everyone else in the world believes Eakins is dead -- that he just disappeared in Italy quite a few years back and never showed up again. He's legally declared dead by the Italian authorities. Sonia's father, the biographer, demands that it isn't so -- that his daughter speaks to Eakins regularly. But, no one has heard from her after her latest trip to Italy. Eugene decides to look for Sonia.
Meanwhile in a parallel story, an elderly Mr. Schmitz, also a New Yorker, is grieving the loss of his friend Rutherford who has just moved to Italy. He receives lucid letters from Rutherford at first, but then they become more and more incomprehensible. Schmitz also decides to take off for Italy to look for his friend.
This was a bizarre story that was unique enough to keep me reading and wanting to find out more. The book has quite a few fantasy elements too, and that was unexpected, but it certainly added to the story. It's definitely a different book.
This is Nathaniel Rich's first novel.
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First Sentence:
It was June when Eugene Brentani took the job at Aaronsen and Son Moving Company and subleased an apartment in Inwood from a man on his crew named Alvaro. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Signor Brentani, Frank Lang, Private Schmitz, The Timavo, Keftir the Blind, San Francisco, Dominican Republic, Sutton Place, East River, Abe Chisholm, Constance Eakins, Central Park
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