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BIO
David Schmahmann was born in Durban, South Africa. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Cornell Law School and has studied in India and Israel and worked in Burma. His publications include a short story in The Yale Review and articles on legal issues. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and practices law in Boston. EMPIRE SETTINGS is the first in a two novel series. The second, THE IVORY DINGHY, is in progress.
INTERVIEW
October, 12 2001
EMPIRE SETTINGS, author David Schmahmann's debut novel, is a powerful investigation of
race, class, politics, and the transcendence (or, as the case sometimes is,
non-transcendence) of love. Bookreporter.com recently spoke with Schmahmann about his home
country of South Africa, the trials of being a lawyer, the wonders of having five
different people living in your head and, of course, the movies.
TBR: Now, you are a successful lawyer in a Boston firm. How did this project originate?
DS: When I was a boy in South Africa I somehow came to
believe that it was my destiny to be a lawyer. After I came to America, and especially in
law school, it became clear to me that law wasn't what I had once imagined, and I also
developed an urge to write that grew over time.
I finished law school and started work as an associate in a law firm, but every night
after work I would sit down to write. It took time to finish a novel I wanted to publish,
and then to find a publisher. In the interim I did take my law practice seriously,
ultimately became a partner, and then a senior partner in my firm, and time just passed.
There's some sense in EMPIRE SETTINGS of how time just passes while you're involved in
doing things you don't really care to be doing. Maybe it comes from this.
I think that EMPIRE SETTINGS is in part my attempt to explain myself in my new country,
not by telling my own story but by recreating what it was like to live as a white person
under apartheid and to show the society in all its complexity. The novel that forms the
second part of EMPIRE SETTINGS, THE IVORY DINGHY (which I hope will be ready next year),
completes the structure by putting the stories of EMPIRE SETTINGS in a larger context.
TBR: Why did you choose to tell the story in several different voices (Danny's,
Santi's, Helga's, Bridget's and Baptie's)? Was it difficult finding and sustaining each
voice?
DS: I wanted to do more than tell a story with a
single narrative theme. I wanted to pose the dilemma of the novel --- Danny's affair with
Santi --- not as a chronologically told story but rather as an event that changed everyone
around it, and then to move forward twenty years and have the perspectives I had
previously presented reconsidered in light of the passage of time. By having each person
tell their part of the story I wanted to put my readers right inside the skin of the
person talking, to try and let a reader feel what the world was like to that person and
why they saw and did the things as they did.
As for sustaining the voices, I truly sat there in the small hours in the study of my home
and pretended to be the person speaking. When I reread what I've written now, I still
somehow feel that I'm reading from a letter they might have written me.
TBR: Which strain of the novel proved more challenging, the love story or the suspense
tale or the political commentary? Did you plan EMPIRE SETTINGS to be an epic
romance/thriller with political undertones from the very beginning, or did certain
thematic elements develop as your writing progressed?
DS: I had the Danny and Santi love story in mind from
the outset, and also how I wanted the essential structure to be. This is in part because I
have always enjoyed novels that progress from one point of view to another, and also
novels where the protagonist takes a physical journey that is also a journey back in time.
The love story is the political story, and the suspense tale --- Danny's foray into money
smuggling --- forces Danny to confront the conflict within his own views about change in
South Africa, and ultimately his attitude toward Santi and how he now thinks about what
happened all those years before.
TBR: The descriptions of Durban are very meticulous. As a native of Durban, did you
rely on your memory or did you have to do some research?
DS: I haven't lived in South Africa for a long time,
and though I have been back there twice in the last year, I hadn't seen Durban for several
years when I wrote EMPIRE SETTINGS. Several former friends who live there have taken great
pride in pointing out at least two major mistakes in my geography. But I remember Durban
as it was almost perfectly.
TBR: Baptie is the most grounded character in the novel. What does she have that the
other characters don't?
DS: Danny says that Baptie is the most grounded in
Africa, but mostly because twenty years later she is the only member of his household who
is still alive and in Africa, and because so much of the turmoil and change that has made
his family and his own life almost unrecognizable has not touched her at all. Baptie is
earthy, and eminently practical, and in some ways the most conservative person in the
story. Her analysis of everything that happens to the family has a very basic and
uncluttered logic.
TBR: Were you political growing up in South Africa? How autobiographical is Empire
Settings?
DS: I was actually a good deal more politically active
than Danny in the novel. From my early teens I was very active in the only political party
in South Africa that advocated a multiracial franchise and eventual majority rule, and
much of my social life in high school revolved around party congresses and door-to-door
campaigns and electioneering, all among the white electorate of course because nonwhites
were denied the vote. In retrospect, it's hard to see what we achieved because we lost all
of the elections we contested and were more often than not rudely received when we did try
to change peoples' opinions. But ours was a viewpoint --- unabashedly supporting civil
rights for all South Africans regardless of color --- that needed to be expressed and I'm
pleased that I was one of those who expressed it.
As for whether the novel is autobiographical, the people are composites of many different
people, and every emotion and conflict in the novel reflects things I have seen and felt
at one time or another.
TBR: What was your writing schedule like while writing EMPIRE SETTINGS? A lawyer by day
and a furious writer by night?
DS: Probably more accurately an aggressive lawyer in
the day and a very dedicated writer at night. As I said, I went to law school and
continued practicing law because I needed to earn a living, and I persevered at it because
I seemed to be making headway in my firm and because it did take a long time to be
published. I never had any doubt though what I really considered important, and what I
really wanted to do in my life. I have always written at night and on more than one
occasion have worked through the night when something was really going well. I have been
told that EMPIRE SETTINGS has at times a faintly sad cast to it. If that is so --- and I
think it is --- I think it is a reflection of the late hour at which much of it was
written, and, quite frankly, the solitary and at times very daunting path that seemed to
separate what I was writing from the light of day.
TBR: Will you write another novel? Ever consider chucking the legal profession all
together, moving to Tahiti, and devoting yourself to the literary life?
DS: Are you kidding? It's all I've thought about and
worked towards for twenty years. I have dozens of novels inside me bursting to be written,
and a companion novel to EMPIRE SETTINGS, THE IVORY DINGHY, which is about a quarter
written and which I am committed to finishing next year. I feel, when I consider living
the rest of my life as a writer, like I used to feel as a boy in the week before summer
vacation began. I won't "chuck" the legal profession abruptly because I have
responsibilities to my partners and to my clients, but the end is near. Not Tahiti,
though. Rangoon. Siem Riep. Jakarta. Koh Samet. Chiang Mai. Pnom Penh.
TBR: I've read that the film rights to EMPIRE SETTINGS have already been optioned. Will
you have any input into the screenplay? Not that this has ever happened in the movie biz,
but are you at all worried that your book will be turned into a sappy melodrama?
DS: The movie rights have been optioned, and to
someone who made a movie I admire very much --- Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE ---
and who was faithful to the novel when he filmed it. An author doesn't have much assurance
beyond whom he chooses to sell an option to, but I think Danny Wilson is a person of
formidable integrity. I have no screen writing experience but I'll gladly help if asked.
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