Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn and her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story collection, The Caprices. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Felicia Sullivan: Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in your recent novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, funneled through your keenly brilliant, yet unreliable narrator, Katherine Shea. Your novel reminded me of Delillo’s White Noise, and although the two novels are completely different, they both share wry observations about America’s obsession with consumerism (with cannibalism in Carnivore serving as a metaphor for excess consumption), the acquisition of tangible things and the false comfort that they could provide. What brought you to this story in particular?
Sabina Murray: I always wondered about the taboo of cannibalism—why this in particular had the ability to horrify people—and how ubiquitous it was in art and literature, western and eastern. I wrote this book from a western perspective, from the west looking at the east; cannibalism becomes just one more way of exoticizing the east, another way of “othering.” Then, of course, we began our invasion of the middle-east, and although this threw that entire region into chaos, it focused my work somewhat. How do nations consume other nations? Where does this endless need to consume come from? Or is the need to consume where the question ends, the catalyst rather than merely the process? Not to answer your fine question with more questions, but I’m still wondering about all of that.
FS: As the novel progresses, we learn a great deal more about Katherine, a 23 year old nomad that has traveled extensively throughout Europe, has already been married, takes up with a Russian émigré novelist in New York – but most critical is the unraveling of her harrowing upbringing, a cold unyielding father, a sadistic mother and Katherine, left with only art and books as means for survival. Could you discuss a little bit about family (or in this sense, a lack of) and how that operates in the novel?
SM: Katherine’s family does come off as a bit of a mystery, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s utterly unreliable on anything other than history, art, and literature. Katherine’s father, despite his being cold and unyielding, is a bit ordinary, and her mother, although sadistic, does try to inflict cruelty on behalf of rather than on Katherine. But ultimately, Katherine is responsible for her own actions. What she says about her family is more of the apple not falling far from the tree. Her journey out of childhood falls heavily in favor of nature over nurture.
FS: Katherine and her mother share an uncanny obsession for cannibalism in art: Goya & Gericault, literature: Melville & Poe, and folklore: Donner Party. In my review of your novel, I noted: Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive. Is Katherine attempting to use art to rationalize cannibalism, the ultimate solution or is it something else entirely? How paramount was the infusion of art, literature and history to elevate the story and create Katherine?
SM: Goya says that the sleep of reason births monsters, and he gives us these monsters, that fascinate rather than repel. Art, along with death, ends up being the ultimate equalizer where cannibal and queen can vie for one’s attention, each one beguiling in his or her own way, safely contained in a gilt frame. Katherine does use art to justify her actions—she’s no young turk, she’s part of a grand tradition. Art and literature are paramount to Katherine’s character because she’s a complicated monster. On a personal note, I’m willing to forgive people any manner of poor behavior if they are interesting and have a good sense of humor. Concordantly, I wanted the reader to feel that about Katherine. She is not good, not good at all, but she’s erudite and witty, so who cares? I am aware of the fact that some people did care and found Katherine unsympathetic, but I doubt that those people have much of a sense of humor.
FS: Would you say that A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a departure from your PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices? Both books are incredibly haunting, presenting complex, sometimes sinister characters and although one story takes place in the Far East during the Second World War and the other on the streets of New York, Maine and New Mexico, there is a sense of survival – man’s desperation to survive by any mean’s necessary. Do the two books complement one another in any way?
SM: I do think of the books as weird siblings. Both owe something to Goya; The Caprices, in both its title and the format, story after story, that I hoped would echo in form Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War; and A Carnivore’s Inquiry, in its exploration of the romantic idea that the current and possibly lurid, through size and artistic application, can indeed be transformed into art. Both books are anti-empirical in sentiment. Both books are fascinated by the clash of cultures when one particular group invades another. And actually, both books have cannibalism in them, although The Caprices only references this twice and Carnivore suggests it through out. Both books adhere to certain gothic ideals. After writing The Caprices, I was interested in some lighter fare, and that’s were Carnivore comes from, the younger, sunnier book, although perhaps not that sunny…
FS: I’m curious – did you intend for Katherine to be quite young (23)? How would (to you) the story have shifted if she were 30? 35?
SM: Katherine at 23 has a fearlessness, which I associate with the age, although she is very much a creation, young but possessing the intellect of someone older. She had to look innocent, incapable of any kind of conquering, a little girl to most men. And that’s why she’s twenty-three years old. She also had to be parasitical in nature, and someone at thirty who provides for herself in this manner is more pathetic than manipulative.
FS: How did you come about the novel’s elegant title?
SM: At one stage in the writing of this book, there was in fact a point at which Katherine asked a question. I think it was, “Is the best eating really the upper arms?” So the carnivore actually inquired. I know I made the title up, but I make up an awful lot of stuff, so I’m not really sure how. I know I liked it, and that many reviewers have chosen to rename the book, which I think is an accident. On my annual faculty report here at the University of Massachusetts, the book was erroneously referred to as “The Cannibal’s Delight,” which I rather liked, and thought of being sung to the tune of “Afternoon Delight.”
FS: You wrote a screenplay, “Beautiful Country”, which was commissioned by Terence Malick and will star Nick Nolte. Can you talk a bit about the experience – how in your own experience writing a screenplay differs than novel writing? Are you actively involved in the film?
SM: I could write a book about the differences in the form. For me, mostly, it’s all about control. I like the control I have in the novel, and I like the lack of control I have in a screenplay. The screenplay is not about finished project, its concerns are structure and clarity of vision, and both of these need to be so clear and so strong that an infinite amount of people can use it as the staging ground for their own particular talents: directing, acting, lighting, catering…The screenplay is not about easy money and selling out, because even if you do want easy money and very much desire to sell out, the screenplay is not waiting there to save you.
“Beautiful Country” has already premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and in Norway, and should be in American theatres this May. That said, the film is finished but even when it was going on, I had little to do with it other than the writing. I did go down to New York to watch a day of filming, and made friends with the director, and after that his wife, and have stayed in Oslo at their house. All this friendliness probably has more to do with me being completely uninvolved with the film—post screenplay—than anything else. There’s nothing as unloved as a writer who wants to direct.
FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays? Any authors you’ve been intrigued by but haven’t yet read?
SM: My mainstays: Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Herman Melville, Andrea Barett—any dead man with a thing for the sea and women whose first names begin with “A.” It’s a hard (and good) question. Right now, I love Graham Greene, who must have at least tolerated the sea with all his travels…Paul Bowles, because life is scary. Nabokov, because sincerity is over-rated, particularly in art. I’m reading James Kelman’s latest, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free. I’m a big fan of Clare Messud. Next on my list to read is Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and I have not yet read him.
FS: If you could host a salon of artists, writers, luminaries – alive or dead – who would you include? Who would Katherine include?
SM: I once met a writer that I greatly admired. His literature is still exemplary, but he was very insulting man and I have a hard time plowing through his fiction with the same energy I once did. This experience has left me wondering if ignorance is bliss. With that in mind, my husband informs me that Algernon Swinburne was wonderful friend, loyal and true, and a tremendous partier who liked to imbibe with passionate abandon and then remove all his clothes and run around. I do not know his poetry, but I would definitely invite him to my salon. Goya, for all my love of his work, was very deaf and somewhat demented. I can’t imagine him getting along with, say, Conrad, and they wouldn’t be able to speak to each other. Unless Conrad knew Spanish. He knew many languages. Goya spent his final days living in Bordeaux, but I don’t know if he picked up any French, but the two possibly might be able to converse in this. I would be stuck in the kitchen slicing cheese and cured meats.
I don’t know if Katherine would be the same in her assessments of people. I think she’d go for anyone who didn’t bore her and had some meat on his bones, so out with members of the Donner Party, and in, perhaps, with Oscar Wilde.
FS: And naturally, the obligatory question – what’s next on the horizon.
SM: I am writing a book entitled Hellenic Travel set mostly in Greece in the early sixties. It has an interest in antiquities, decorative arts, the CIA and the notion of falsehood.
Small Spiral Notebook reviews A Carnivore's Inquiry
[an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] Felicia C. Sullivan interviews Author, Sabina Murray, A Carnivore’s Inquiry
Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn and her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story collection, The Caprices. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Felicia Sullivan: Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in your recent novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, funneled through your keenly brilliant, yet unreliable narrator, Katherine Shea. Your novel reminded me of Delillo’s White Noise, and although the two novels are completely different, they both share wry observations about America’s obsession with consumerism (with cannibalism in Carnivore serving as a metaphor for excess consumption), the acquisition of tangible things and the false comfort that they could provide. What brought you to this story in particular?
Sabina Murray: I always wondered about the taboo of cannibalism—why this in particular had the ability to horrify people—and how ubiquitous it was in art and literature, western and eastern. I wrote this book from a western perspective, from the west looking at the east; cannibalism becomes just one more way of exoticizing the east, another way of “othering.” Then, of course, we began our invasion of the middle-east, and although this threw that entire region into chaos, it focused my work somewhat. How do nations consume other nations? Where does this endless need to consume come from? Or is the need to consume where the question ends, the catalyst rather than merely the process? Not to answer your fine question with more questions, but I’m still wondering about all of that.
FS: As the novel progresses, we learn a great deal more about Katherine, a 23 year old nomad that has traveled extensively throughout Europe, has already been married, takes up with a Russian émigré novelist in New York – but most critical is the unraveling of her harrowing upbringing, a cold unyielding father, a sadistic mother and Katherine, left with only art and books as means for survival. Could you discuss a little bit about family (or in this sense, a lack of) and how that operates in the novel?
SM: Katherine’s family does come off as a bit of a mystery, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s utterly unreliable on anything other than history, art, and literature. Katherine’s father, despite his being cold and unyielding, is a bit ordinary, and her mother, although sadistic, does try to inflict cruelty on behalf of rather than on Katherine. But ultimately, Katherine is responsible for her own actions. What she says about her family is more of the apple not falling far from the tree. Her journey out of childhood falls heavily in favor of nature over nurture.
FS: Katherine and her mother share an uncanny obsession for cannibalism in art: Goya & Gericault, literature: Melville & Poe, and folklore: Donner Party. In my review of your novel, I noted: Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive. Is Katherine attempting to use art to rationalize cannibalism, the ultimate solution or is it something else entirely? How paramount was the infusion of art, literature and history to elevate the story and create Katherine?
SM: Goya says that the sleep of reason births monsters, and he gives us these monsters, that fascinate rather than repel. Art, along with death, ends up being the ultimate equalizer where cannibal and queen can vie for one’s attention, each one beguiling in his or her own way, safely contained in a gilt frame. Katherine does use art to justify her actions—she’s no young turk, she’s part of a grand tradition. Art and literature are paramount to Katherine’s character because she’s a complicated monster. On a personal note, I’m willing to forgive people any manner of poor behavior if they are interesting and have a good sense of humor. Concordantly, I wanted the reader to feel that about Katherine. She is not good, not good at all, but she’s erudite and witty, so who cares? I am aware of the fact that some people did care and found Katherine unsympathetic, but I doubt that those people have much of a sense of humor.
FS: Would you say that A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a departure from your PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices? Both books are incredibly haunting, presenting complex, sometimes sinister characters and although one story takes place in the Far East during the Second World War and the other on the streets of New York, Maine and New Mexico, there is a sense of survival – man’s desperation to survive by any mean’s necessary. Do the two books complement one another in any way?
SM: I do think of the books as weird siblings. Both owe something to Goya; The Caprices, in both its title and the format, story after story, that I hoped would echo in form Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War; and A Carnivore’s Inquiry, in its exploration of the romantic idea that the current and possibly lurid, through size and artistic application, can indeed be transformed into art. Both books are anti-empirical in sentiment. Both books are fascinated by the clash of cultures when one particular group invades another. And actually, both books have cannibalism in them, although The Caprices only references this twice and Carnivore suggests it through out. Both books adhere to certain gothic ideals. After writing The Caprices, I was interested in some lighter fare, and that’s were Carnivore comes from, the younger, sunnier book, although perhaps not that sunny…
FS: I’m curious – did you intend for Katherine to be quite young (23)? How would (to you) the story have shifted if she were 30? 35?
SM: Katherine at 23 has a fearlessness, which I associate with the age, although she is very much a creation, young but possessing the intellect of someone older. She had to look innocent, incapable of any kind of conquering, a little girl to most men. And that’s why she’s twenty-three years old. She also had to be parasitical in nature, and someone at thirty who provides for herself in this manner is more pathetic than manipulative.
FS: How did you come about the novel’s elegant title?
SM: At one stage in the writing of this book, there was in fact a point at which Katherine asked a question. I think it was, “Is the best eating really the upper arms?” So the carnivore actually inquired. I know I made the title up, but I make up an awful lot of stuff, so I’m not really sure how. I know I liked it, and that many reviewers have chosen to rename the book, which I think is an accident. On my annual faculty report here at the University of Massachusetts, the book was erroneously referred to as “The Cannibal’s Delight,” which I rather liked, and thought of being sung to the tune of “Afternoon Delight.”
FS: You wrote a screenplay, “Beautiful Country”, which was commissioned by Terence Malick and will star Nick Nolte. Can you talk a bit about the experience – how in your own experience writing a screenplay differs than novel writing? Are you actively involved in the film?
SM: I could write a book about the differences in the form. For me, mostly, it’s all about control. I like the control I have in the novel, and I like the lack of control I have in a screenplay. The screenplay is not about finished project, its concerns are structure and clarity of vision, and both of these need to be so clear and so strong that an infinite amount of people can use it as the staging ground for their own particular talents: directing, acting, lighting, catering…The screenplay is not about easy money and selling out, because even if you do want easy money and very much desire to sell out, the screenplay is not waiting there to save you.
“Beautiful Country” has already premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and in Norway, and should be in American theatres this May. That said, the film is finished but even when it was going on, I had little to do with it other than the writing. I did go down to New York to watch a day of filming, and made friends with the director, and after that his wife, and have stayed in Oslo at their house. All this friendliness probably has more to do with me being completely uninvolved with the film—post screenplay—than anything else. There’s nothing as unloved as a writer who wants to direct.
FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays? Any authors you’ve been intrigued by but haven’t yet read?
SM: My mainstays: Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Herman Melville, Andrea Barett—any dead man with a thing for the sea and women whose first names begin with “A.” It’s a hard (and good) question. Right now, I love Graham Greene, who must have at least tolerated the sea with all his travels…Paul Bowles, because life is scary. Nabokov, because sincerity is over-rated, particularly in art. I’m reading James Kelman’s latest, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free. I’m a big fan of Clare Messud. Next on my list to read is Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and I have not yet read him.
FS: If you could host a salon of artists, writers, luminaries – alive or dead – who would you include? Who would Katherine include?
SM: I once met a writer that I greatly admired. His literature is still exemplary, but he was very insulting man and I have a hard time plowing through his fiction with the same energy I once did. This experience has left me wondering if ignorance is bliss. With that in mind, my husband informs me that Algernon Swinburne was wonderful friend, loyal and true, and a tremendous partier who liked to imbibe with passionate abandon and then remove all his clothes and run around. I do not know his poetry, but I would definitely invite him to my salon. Goya, for all my love of his work, was very deaf and somewhat demented. I can’t imagine him getting along with, say, Conrad, and they wouldn’t be able to speak to each other. Unless Conrad knew Spanish. He knew many languages. Goya spent his final days living in Bordeaux, but I don’t know if he picked up any French, but the two possibly might be able to converse in this. I would be stuck in the kitchen slicing cheese and cured meats.
I don’t know if Katherine would be the same in her assessments of people. I think she’d go for anyone who didn’t bore her and had some meat on his bones, so out with members of the Donner Party, and in, perhaps, with Oscar Wilde.
FS: And naturally, the obligatory question – what’s next on the horizon.
SM: I am writing a book entitled Hellenic Travel set mostly in Greece in the early sixties. It has an interest in antiquities, decorative arts, the CIA and the notion of falsehood.
Small Spiral Notebook reviews A Carnivore's Inquiry
[an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] Felicia C. Sullivan interviews Author, Sabina Murray, A Carnivore’s Inquiry
Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn and her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story collection, The Caprices. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Felicia Sullivan: Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in your recent novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, funneled through your keenly brilliant, yet unreliable narrator, Katherine Shea. Your novel reminded me of Delillo’s White Noise, and although the two novels are completely different, they both share wry observations about America’s obsession with consumerism (with cannibalism in Carnivore serving as a metaphor for excess consumption), the acquisition of tangible things and the false comfort that they could provide. What brought you to this story in particular?
Sabina Murray: I always wondered about the taboo of cannibalism—why this in particular had the ability to horrify people—and how ubiquitous it was in art and literature, western and eastern. I wrote this book from a western perspective, from the west looking at the east; cannibalism becomes just one more way of exoticizing the east, another way of “othering.” Then, of course, we began our invasion of the middle-east, and although this threw that entire region into chaos, it focused my work somewhat. How do nations consume other nations? Where does this endless need to consume come from? Or is the need to consume where the question ends, the catalyst rather than merely the process? Not to answer your fine question with more questions, but I’m still wondering about all of that.
FS: As the novel progresses, we learn a great deal more about Katherine, a 23 year old nomad that has traveled extensively throughout Europe, has already been married, takes up with a Russian émigré novelist in New York – but most critical is the unraveling of her harrowing upbringing, a cold unyielding father, a sadistic mother and Katherine, left with only art and books as means for survival. Could you discuss a little bit about family (or in this sense, a lack of) and how that operates in the novel?
SM: Katherine’s family does come off as a bit of a mystery, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s utterly unreliable on anything other than history, art, and literature. Katherine’s father, despite his being cold and unyielding, is a bit ordinary, and her mother, although sadistic, does try to inflict cruelty on behalf of rather than on Katherine. But ultimately, Katherine is responsible for her own actions. What she says about her family is more of the apple not falling far from the tree. Her journey out of childhood falls heavily in favor of nature over nurture.
FS: Katherine and her mother share an uncanny obsession for cannibalism in art: Goya & Gericault, literature: Melville & Poe, and folklore: Donner Party. In my review of your novel, I noted: Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive. Is Katherine attempting to use art to rationalize cannibalism, the ultimate solution or is it something else entirely? How paramount was the infusion of art, literature and history to elevate the story and create Katherine?
SM: Goya says that the sleep of reason births monsters, and he gives us these monsters, that fascinate rather than repel. Art, along with death, ends up being the ultimate equalizer where cannibal and queen can vie for one’s attention, each one beguiling in his or her own way, safely contained in a gilt frame. Katherine does use art to justify her actions—she’s no young turk, she’s part of a grand tradition. Art and literature are paramount to Katherine’s character because she’s a complicated monster. On a personal note, I’m willing to forgive people any manner of poor behavior if they are interesting and have a good sense of humor. Concordantly, I wanted the reader to feel that about Katherine. She is not good, not good at all, but she’s erudite and witty, so who cares? I am aware of the fact that some people did care and found Katherine unsympathetic, but I doubt that those people have much of a sense of humor.
FS: Would you say that A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a departure from your PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices? Both books are incredibly haunting, presenting complex, sometimes sinister characters and although one story takes place in the Far East during the Second World War and the other on the streets of New York, Maine and New Mexico, there is a sense of survival – man’s desperation to survive by any mean’s necessary. Do the two books complement one another in any way?
SM: I do think of the books as weird siblings. Both owe something to Goya; The Caprices, in both its title and the format, story after story, that I hoped would echo in form Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War; and A Carnivore’s Inquiry, in its exploration of the romantic idea that the current and possibly lurid, through size and artistic application, can indeed be transformed into art. Both books are anti-empirical in sentiment. Both books are fascinated by the clash of cultures when one particular group invades another. And actually, both books have cannibalism in them, although The Caprices only references this twice and Carnivore suggests it through out. Both books adhere to certain gothic ideals. After writing The Caprices, I was interested in some lighter fare, and that’s were Carnivore comes from, the younger, sunnier book, although perhaps not that sunny…
FS: I’m curious – did you intend for Katherine to be quite young (23)? How would (to you) the story have shifted if she were 30? 35?
SM: Katherine at 23 has a fearlessness, which I associate with the age, although she is very much a creation, young but possessing the intellect of someone older. She had to look innocent, incapable of any kind of conquering, a little girl to most men. And that’s why she’s twenty-three years old. She also had to be parasitical in nature, and someone at thirty who provides for herself in this manner is more pathetic than manipulative.
FS: How did you come about the novel’s elegant title?
SM: At one stage in the writing of this book, there was in fact a point at which Katherine asked a question. I think it was, “Is the best eating really the upper arms?” So the carnivore actually inquired. I know I made the title up, but I make up an awful lot of stuff, so I’m not really sure how. I know I liked it, and that many reviewers have chosen to rename the book, which I think is an accident. On my annual faculty report here at the University of Massachusetts, the book was erroneously referred to as “The Cannibal’s Delight,” which I rather liked, and thought of being sung to the tune of “Afternoon Delight.”
FS: You wrote a screenplay, “Beautiful Country”, which was commissioned by Terence Malick and will star Nick Nolte. Can you talk a bit about the experience – how in your own experience writing a screenplay differs than novel writing? Are you actively involved in the film?
SM: I could write a book about the differences in the form. For me, mostly, it’s all about control. I like the control I have in the novel, and I like the lack of control I have in a screenplay. The screenplay is not about finished project, its concerns are structure and clarity of vision, and both of these need to be so clear and so strong that an infinite amount of people can use it as the staging ground for their own particular talents: directing, acting, lighting, catering…The screenplay is not about easy money and selling out, because even if you do want easy money and very much desire to sell out, the screenplay is not waiting there to save you.
“Beautiful Country” has already premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and in Norway, and should be in American theatres this May. That said, the film is finished but even when it was going on, I had little to do with it other than the writing. I did go down to New York to watch a day of filming, and made friends with the director, and after that his wife, and have stayed in Oslo at their house. All this friendliness probably has more to do with me being completely uninvolved with the film—post screenplay—than anything else. There’s nothing as unloved as a writer who wants to direct.
FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays? Any authors you’ve been intrigued by but haven’t yet read?
SM: My mainstays: Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Herman Melville, Andrea Barett—any dead man with a thing for the sea and women whose first names begin with “A.” It’s a hard (and good) question. Right now, I love Graham Greene, who must have at least tolerated the sea with all his travels…Paul Bowles, because life is scary. Nabokov, because sincerity is over-rated, particularly in art. I’m reading James Kelman’s latest, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free. I’m a big fan of Clare Messud. Next on my list to read is Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and I have not yet read him.
FS: If you could host a salon of artists, writers, luminaries – alive or dead – who would you include? Who would Katherine include?
SM: I once met a writer that I greatly admired. His literature is still exemplary, but he was very insulting man and I have a hard time plowing through his fiction with the same energy I once did. This experience has left me wondering if ignorance is bliss. With that in mind, my husband informs me that Algernon Swinburne was wonderful friend, loyal and true, and a tremendous partier who liked to imbibe with passionate abandon and then remove all his clothes and run around. I do not know his poetry, but I would definitely invite him to my salon. Goya, for all my love of his work, was very deaf and somewhat demented. I can’t imagine him getting along with, say, Conrad, and they wouldn’t be able to speak to each other. Unless Conrad knew Spanish. He knew many languages. Goya spent his final days living in Bordeaux, but I don’t know if he picked up any French, but the two possibly might be able to converse in this. I would be stuck in the kitchen slicing cheese and cured meats.
I don’t know if Katherine would be the same in her assessments of people. I think she’d go for anyone who didn’t bore her and had some meat on his bones, so out with members of the Donner Party, and in, perhaps, with Oscar Wilde.
FS: And naturally, the obligatory question – what’s next on the horizon.
SM: I am writing a book entitled Hellenic Travel set mostly in Greece in the early sixties. It has an interest in antiquities, decorative arts, the CIA and the notion of falsehood.
Small Spiral Notebook reviews A Carnivore's Inquiry
[an error occurred while processing this directive] Felicia C. Sullivan interviews Author, Sabina Murray, A Carnivore’s Inquiry
Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn and her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story collection, The Caprices. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Felicia Sullivan: Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in your recent novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, funneled through your keenly brilliant, yet unreliable narrator, Katherine Shea. Your novel reminded me of Delillo’s White Noise, and although the two novels are completely different, they both share wry observations about America’s obsession with consumerism (with cannibalism in Carnivore serving as a metaphor for excess consumption), the acquisition of tangible things and the false comfort that they could provide. What brought you to this story in particular?
Sabina Murray: I always wondered about the taboo of cannibalism—why this in particular had the ability to horrify people—and how ubiquitous it was in art and literature, western and eastern. I wrote this book from a western perspective, from the west looking at the east; cannibalism becomes just one more way of exoticizing the east, another way of “othering.” Then, of course, we began our invasion of the middle-east, and although this threw that entire region into chaos, it focused my work somewhat. How do nations consume other nations? Where does this endless need to consume come from? Or is the need to consume where the question ends, the catalyst rather than merely the process? Not to answer your fine question with more questions, but I’m still wondering about all of that.
FS: As the novel progresses, we learn a great deal more about Katherine, a 23 year old nomad that has traveled extensively throughout Europe, has already been married, takes up with a Russian émigré novelist in New York – but most critical is the unraveling of her harrowing upbringing, a cold unyielding father, a sadistic mother and Katherine, left with only art and books as means for survival. Could you discuss a little bit about family (or in this sense, a lack of) and how that operates in the novel?
SM: Katherine’s family does come off as a bit of a mystery, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s utterly unreliable on anything other than history, art, and literature. Katherine’s father, despite his being cold and unyielding, is a bit ordinary, and her mother, although sadistic, does try to inflict cruelty on behalf of rather than on Katherine. But ultimately, Katherine is responsible for her own actions. What she says about her family is more of the apple not falling far from the tree. Her journey out of childhood falls heavily in favor of nature over nurture.
FS: Katherine and her mother share an uncanny obsession for cannibalism in art: Goya & Gericault, literature: Melville & Poe, and folklore: Donner Party. In my review of your novel, I noted: Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive. Is Katherine attempting to use art to rationalize cannibalism, the ultimate solution or is it something else entirely? How paramount was the infusion of art, literature and history to elevate the story and create Katherine?
SM: Goya says that the sleep of reason births monsters, and he gives us these monsters, that fascinate rather than repel. Art, along with death, ends up being the ultimate equalizer where cannibal and queen can vie for one’s attention, each one beguiling in his or her own way, safely contained in a gilt frame. Katherine does use art to justify her actions—she’s no young turk, she’s part of a grand tradition. Art and literature are paramount to Katherine’s character because she’s a complicated monster. On a personal note, I’m willing to forgive people any manner of poor behavior if they are interesting and have a good sense of humor. Concordantly, I wanted the reader to feel that about Katherine. She is not good, not good at all, but she’s erudite and witty, so who cares? I am aware of the fact that some people did care and found Katherine unsympathetic, but I doubt that those people have much of a sense of humor.
FS: Would you say that A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a departure from your PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices? Both books are incredibly haunting, presenting complex, sometimes sinister characters and although one story takes place in the Far East during the Second World War and the other on the streets of New York, Maine and New Mexico, there is a sense of survival – man’s desperation to survive by any mean’s necessary. Do the two books complement one another in any way?
SM: I do think of the books as weird siblings. Both owe something to Goya; The Caprices, in both its title and the format, story after story, that I hoped would echo in form Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War; and A Carnivore’s Inquiry, in its exploration of the romantic idea that the current and possibly lurid, through size and artistic application, can indeed be transformed into art. Both books are anti-empirical in sentiment. Both books are fascinated by the clash of cultures when one particular group invades another. And actually, both books have cannibalism in them, although The Caprices only references this twice and Carnivore suggests it through out. Both books adhere to certain gothic ideals. After writing The Caprices, I was interested in some lighter fare, and that’s were Carnivore comes from, the younger, sunnier book, although perhaps not that sunny…
FS: I’m curious – did you intend for Katherine to be quite young (23)? How would (to you) the story have shifted if she were 30? 35?
SM: Katherine at 23 has a fearlessness, which I associate with the age, although she is very much a creation, young but possessing the intellect of someone older. She had to look innocent, incapable of any kind of conquering, a little girl to most men. And that’s why she’s twenty-three years old. She also had to be parasitical in nature, and someone at thirty who provides for herself in this manner is more pathetic than manipulative.
FS: How did you come about the novel’s elegant title?
SM: At one stage in the writing of this book, there was in fact a point at which Katherine asked a question. I think it was, “Is the best eating really the upper arms?” So the carnivore actually inquired. I know I made the title up, but I make up an awful lot of stuff, so I’m not really sure how. I know I liked it, and that many reviewers have chosen to rename the book, which I think is an accident. On my annual faculty report here at the University of Massachusetts, the book was erroneously referred to as “The Cannibal’s Delight,” which I rather liked, and thought of being sung to the tune of “Afternoon Delight.”
FS: You wrote a screenplay, “Beautiful Country”, which was commissioned by Terence Malick and will star Nick Nolte. Can you talk a bit about the experience – how in your own experience writing a screenplay differs than novel writing? Are you actively involved in the film?
SM: I could write a book about the differences in the form. For me, mostly, it’s all about control. I like the control I have in the novel, and I like the lack of control I have in a screenplay. The screenplay is not about finished project, its concerns are structure and clarity of vision, and both of these need to be so clear and so strong that an infinite amount of people can use it as the staging ground for their own particular talents: directing, acting, lighting, catering…The screenplay is not about easy money and selling out, because even if you do want easy money and very much desire to sell out, the screenplay is not waiting there to save you.
“Beautiful Country” has already premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and in Norway, and should be in American theatres this May. That said, the film is finished but even when it was going on, I had little to do with it other than the writing. I did go down to New York to watch a day of filming, and made friends with the director, and after that his wife, and have stayed in Oslo at their house. All this friendliness probably has more to do with me being completely uninvolved with the film—post screenplay—than anything else. There’s nothing as unloved as a writer who wants to direct.
FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays? Any authors you’ve been intrigued by but haven’t yet read?
SM: My mainstays: Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Herman Melville, Andrea Barett—any dead man with a thing for the sea and women whose first names begin with “A.” It’s a hard (and good) question. Right now, I love Graham Greene, who must have at least tolerated the sea with all his travels…Paul Bowles, because life is scary. Nabokov, because sincerity is over-rated, particularly in art. I’m reading James Kelman’s latest, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free. I’m a big fan of Clare Messud. Next on my list to read is Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and I have not yet read him.
FS: If you could host a salon of artists, writers, luminaries – alive or dead – who would you include? Who would Katherine include?
SM: I once met a writer that I greatly admired. His literature is still exemplary, but he was very insulting man and I have a hard time plowing through his fiction with the same energy I once did. This experience has left me wondering if ignorance is bliss. With that in mind, my husband informs me that Algernon Swinburne was wonderful friend, loyal and true, and a tremendous partier who liked to imbibe with passionate abandon and then remove all his clothes and run around. I do not know his poetry, but I would definitely invite him to my salon. Goya, for all my love of his work, was very deaf and somewhat demented. I can’t imagine him getting along with, say, Conrad, and they wouldn’t be able to speak to each other. Unless Conrad knew Spanish. He knew many languages. Goya spent his final days living in Bordeaux, but I don’t know if he picked up any French, but the two possibly might be able to converse in this. I would be stuck in the kitchen slicing cheese and cured meats.
I don’t know if Katherine would be the same in her assessments of people. I think she’d go for anyone who didn’t bore her and had some meat on his bones, so out with members of the Donner Party, and in, perhaps, with Oscar Wilde.
FS: And naturally, the obligatory question – what’s next on the horizon.
SM: I am writing a book entitled Hellenic Travel set mostly in Greece in the early sixties. It has an interest in antiquities, decorative arts, the CIA and the notion of falsehood.
Small Spiral Notebook reviews A Carnivore's Inquiry
[an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] Felicia C. Sullivan interviews Author, Sabina Murray, A Carnivore’s Inquiry
Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn and her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story collection, The Caprices. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Felicia Sullivan: Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in your recent novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, funneled through your keenly brilliant, yet unreliable narrator, Katherine Shea. Your novel reminded me of Delillo’s White Noise, and although the two novels are completely different, they both share wry observations about America’s obsession with consumerism (with cannibalism in Carnivore serving as a metaphor for excess consumption), the acquisition of tangible things and the false comfort that they could provide. What brought you to this story in particular?
Sabina Murray: I always wondered about the taboo of cannibalism—why this in particular had the ability to horrify people—and how ubiquitous it was in art and literature, western and eastern. I wrote this book from a western perspective, from the west looking at the east; cannibalism becomes just one more way of exoticizing the east, another way of “othering.” Then, of course, we began our invasion of the middle-east, and although this threw that entire region into chaos, it focused my work somewhat. How do nations consume other nations? Where does this endless need to consume come from? Or is the need to consume where the question ends, the catalyst rather than merely the process? Not to answer your fine question with more questions, but I’m still wondering about all of that.
FS: As the novel progresses, we learn a great deal more about Katherine, a 23 year old nomad that has traveled extensively throughout Europe, has already been married, takes up with a Russian émigré novelist in New York – but most critical is the unraveling of her harrowing upbringing, a cold unyielding father, a sadistic mother and Katherine, left with only art and books as means for survival. Could you discuss a little bit about family (or in this sense, a lack of) and how that operates in the novel?
SM: Katherine’s family does come off as a bit of a mystery, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s utterly unreliable on anything other than history, art, and literature. Katherine’s father, despite his being cold and unyielding, is a bit ordinary, and her mother, although sadistic, does try to inflict cruelty on behalf of rather than on Katherine. But ultimately, Katherine is responsible for her own actions. What she says about her family is more of the apple not falling far from the tree. Her journey out of childhood falls heavily in favor of nature over nurture.
FS: Katherine and her mother share an uncanny obsession for cannibalism in art: Goya & Gericault, literature: Melville & Poe, and folklore: Donner Party. In my review of your novel, I noted: Society’s taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man’s natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive. Is Katherine attempting to use art to rationalize cannibalism, the ultimate solution or is it something else entirely? How paramount was the infusion of art, literature and history to elevate the story and create Katherine?
SM: Goya says that the sleep of reason births monsters, and he gives us these monsters, that fascinate rather than repel. Art, along with death, ends up being the ultimate equalizer where cannibal and queen can vie for one’s attention, each one beguiling in his or her own way, safely contained in a gilt frame. Katherine does use art to justify her actions—she’s no young turk, she’s part of a grand tradition. Art and literature are paramount to Katherine’s character because she’s a complicated monster. On a personal note, I’m willing to forgive people any manner of poor behavior if they are interesting and have a good sense of humor. Concordantly, I wanted the reader to feel that about Katherine. She is not good, not good at all, but she’s erudite and witty, so who cares? I am aware of the fact that some people did care and found Katherine unsympathetic, but I doubt that those people have much of a sense of humor.
FS: Would you say that A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a departure from your PEN/Faulkner Award winning story collection, The Caprices? Both books are incredibly haunting, presenting complex, sometimes sinister characters and although one story takes place in the Far East during the Second World War and the other on the streets of New York, Maine and New Mexico, there is a sense of survival – man’s desperation to survive by any mean’s necessary. Do the two books complement one another in any way?
SM: I do think of the books as weird siblings. Both owe something to Goya; The Caprices, in both its title and the format, story after story, that I hoped would echo in form Goya’s series of aquatints, The Disasters of War; and A Carnivore’s Inquiry, in its exploration of the romantic idea that the current and possibly lurid, through size and artistic application, can indeed be transformed into art. Both books are anti-empirical in sentiment. Both books are fascinated by the clash of cultures when one particular group invades another. And actually, both books have cannibalism in them, although The Caprices only references this twice and Carnivore suggests it through out. Both books adhere to certain gothic ideals. After writing The Caprices, I was interested in some lighter fare, and that’s were Carnivore comes from, the younger, sunnier book, although perhaps not that sunny…
FS: I’m curious – did you intend for Katherine to be quite young (23)? How would (to you) the story have shifted if she were 30? 35?
SM: Katherine at 23 has a fearlessness, which I associate with the age, although she is very much a creation, young but possessing the intellect of someone older. She had to look innocent, incapable of any kind of conquering, a little girl to most men. And that’s why she’s twenty-three years old. She also had to be parasitical in nature, and someone at thirty who provides for herself in this manner is more pathetic than manipulative.
FS: How did you come about the novel’s elegant title?
SM: At one stage in the writing of this book, there was in fact a point at which Katherine asked a question. I think it was, “Is the best eating really the upper arms?” So the carnivore actually inquired. I know I made the title up, but I make up an awful lot of stuff, so I’m not really sure how. I know I liked it, and that many reviewers have chosen to rename the book, which I think is an accident. On my annual faculty report here at the University of Massachusetts, the book was erroneously referred to as “The Cannibal’s Delight,” which I rather liked, and thought of being sung to the tune of “Afternoon Delight.”
FS: You wrote a screenplay, “Beautiful Country”, which was commissioned by Terence Malick and will star Nick Nolte. Can you talk a bit about the experience – how in your own experience writing a screenplay differs than novel writing? Are you actively involved in the film?
SM: I could write a book about the differences in the form. For me, mostly, it’s all about control. I like the control I have in the novel, and I like the lack of control I have in a screenplay. The screenplay is not about finished project, its concerns are structure and clarity of vision, and both of these need to be so clear and so strong that an infinite amount of people can use it as the staging ground for their own particular talents: directing, acting, lighting, catering…The screenplay is not about easy money and selling out, because even if you do want easy money and very much desire to sell out, the screenplay is not waiting there to save you.
“Beautiful Country” has already premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and in Norway, and should be in American theatres this May. That said, the film is finished but even when it was going on, I had little to do with it other than the writing. I did go down to New York to watch a day of filming, and made friends with the director, and after that his wife, and have stayed in Oslo at their house. All this friendliness probably has more to do with me being completely uninvolved with the film—post screenplay—than anything else. There’s nothing as unloved as a writer who wants to direct.
FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays? Any authors you’ve been intrigued by but haven’t yet read?
SM: My mainstays: Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Herman Melville, Andrea Barett—any dead man with a thing for the sea and women whose first names begin with “A.” It’s a hard (and good) question. Right now, I love Graham Greene, who must have at least tolerated the sea with all his travels…Paul Bowles, because life is scary. Nabokov, because sincerity is over-rated, particularly in art. I’m reading James Kelman’s latest, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free. I’m a big fan of Clare Messud. Next on my list to read is Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and I have not yet read him.
FS: If you could host a salon of artists, writers, luminaries – alive or dead – who would you include? Who would Katherine include?
SM: I once met a writer that I greatly admired. His literature is still exemplary, but he was very insulting man and I have a hard time plowing through his fiction with the same energy I once did. This experience has left me wondering if ignorance is bliss. With that in mind, my husband informs me that Algernon Swinburne was wonderful friend, loyal and true, and a tremendous partier who liked to imbibe with passionate abandon and then remove all his clothes and run around. I do not know his poetry, but I would definitely invite him to my salon. Goya, for all my love of his work, was very deaf and somewhat demented. I can’t imagine him getting along with, say, Conrad, and they wouldn’t be able to speak to each other. Unless Conrad knew Spanish. He knew many languages. Goya spent his final days living in Bordeaux, but I don’t know if he picked up any French, but the two possibly might be able to converse in this. I would be stuck in the kitchen slicing cheese and cured meats.
I don’t know if Katherine would be the same in her assessments of people. I think she’d go for anyone who didn’t bore her and had some meat on his bones, so out with members of the Donner Party, and in, perhaps, with Oscar Wilde.
FS: And naturally, the obligatory question – what’s next on the horizon.
SM: I am writing a book entitled Hellenic Travel set mostly in Greece in the early sixties. It has an interest in antiquities, decorative arts, the CIA and the notion of falsehood.
Small Spiral Notebook reviews A Carnivore's Inquiry
[an error occurred while processing this directive]