Daniel A. Blum grew up in New York, attended Brandeis
University and currently lives outside of Boston with his family. His first novel Lisa33 was published by
Viking in 2003. He has been featured in Poets and Writers magazine, Publisher’s
Weekly and most recently, interviewed in Psychology Today.
Daniel writes a humor blog, The
Rotting Post, that has developed a loyal following.
His latest release is the literary
novel, The
Feet Say Run.
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Title:
THE FEET SAY RUN
Author: Daniel A. Blum
Publisher: Gabriel’s Horn Press
Pages: 349
Genre: Literary Fiction
Author: Daniel A. Blum
Publisher: Gabriel’s Horn Press
Pages: 349
Genre: Literary Fiction
At the
age of eighty-five, Hans Jaeger finds himself a castaway among a group of
survivors on a deserted island. What
is my particular crime? he asks. Why have I
been chosen for this fate? And so he begins his
extraordinary chronicle.
It
would be an understatement to say he has lived a full life. He has grown up in Nazi Germany and falls in
love with Jewish girl. He fights for the
Germans on two continents, watches the Reich collapse spectacularly into
occupation and starvation, and marries his former governess. After the war he goes on wildflower
expeditions in the Alps, finds solace among prostitutes while his wife lay in a coma, and
marries a Brazilian chambermaid in order to receive a kidney from her.
By
turns sardonic and tragic and surreal, Hans’s story is the story of all of the insanity,
irony and horror of the modern world itself.
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Tell
us a little about yourself.
grew up in the exotic hinterlands of Long
Island, New York. For the most part, it was the sort of
run-of-the-mill, suburban background that I have little desire to write
about. (The old adage, “Write what you
know” sounds great, but what if “what you know” is lot really all that
remarkable?). The most unusual part of
my background is that my my immediate family are all either psychiatrists
(father and brother) or psychologists (mother and sister). So I suppose I could either be at least
marginally introspective or go crazy.
These days I live outside Boston with
my own family.
When
did you begin writing?
Well, I tried writing in high school. But those efforts have thankfully been lost to
the ravages of time.
My first passably decent piece of writing was actually
letter I wrote to in college to a girl who I was interested in. It was a long, rambling, comic description of
a train ride I was on, and it was something of an “aha” moment about how to
inject life and wit into descriptions of the everyday world around you.
Thinking back, it is not really surprising that my best early bit of prose was
born of an effort to impress a girl.
The letter itself was definitely a success with its target
audience. Unfortunately, the ensuing
love affair was rather less successful.
It lasted all of a month. Yet my
love affair with the written word is still going strong.
Describe
your writing process. Do you plot or write by the seat of your pants? When and
where do you write?
I
have no particular pattern. Although
wife assures me that I write best when there are dishes in the sink, when the
trash needs to go out, or when there is an errand that needs to be run.
I
try to plot out a storyline, but I like big, complicated plots, so I am always
going back and revising. The first
version of the plot is pretty much unrecognizable by the time I’m
finished.
Can
you tell us about your most recent release?
The Feet Say Run is
not an easy book to describe or classify.
It’s really the story of the twentieth century told through a single,
long, extraordingary life. The narrator,
Hans, is an eighty-five year old castaway, reflecting on his past.
Hans grows up in Nazi Germany and falls in love with Jewish
girl. He fights for the Germans on two
continents, watches the Reich collapse spectacularly into occupation and
starvation, and marries his former governess.
After the war he goes on wildflower expeditions in the Alps,
marries a Brazilian chambermaid in order to receive a kidney from her, and
keeps reliving his war experiences.
There are many, many interwoven stories.
I think of it as a literary novel that is also a page-turner
- full of comedy and tragedy and suspense.
What
would you say is the message or meaning of the book?
It seems that survivors of Literature 101 assume there is
always a hidden meaning of sorts to a serious novel. Yet few novelists go around planting secret
messages, symbols, like so many Easter Eggs, waiting to be discovered. (Perhaps some modern poets make a habit of
this, but if you ask me, it’s a pretty annoying habit.) In my own experience, what a good novelist
wants to say, in almost every case, is pretty much right there in the story
itself: What it feels like to be alive,
to have this odd thing we call consciouness, to have this or that extraordinary
experience, to be alive in this time in history and in this particular
place.
In The Feet Say Run
the plot is intricate and involved, but what it says is not: That humans are
capable of extraordinary cruelty and kindness, stupidity and brilliance; that
life is chaotic and complex; that this
sturdy-seeming thing we call civilization is in truth desperately fragile.
Of
all your characters, which one is your favorite? Why?
That would have to be
Hans, the narrator. I’m pleased to find
that most readers are quite drawn to him.
He has seen humanity at its worst, and has a sort-of worldly pessimism, yet
he is also a romantic, an adventurer and a lover, flawed in ways that are very
human and recognizable.
What was your
favorite chapter to write and why?
There is a scene in The Feet Say Run that is just after the
end of World War II in the ruins of Berlin. The narrator takes his lover to the first
concert at the re-opening of the Berling philharmonic. There is still no heat inside. Everyone is more-or-less hungry and in
rags. But the settle in to hear a
Beethoven symphony, and it fills the narrator with this sea of emotion – grief
at the horror of the war and this desire to turn back time, but also a sense
that it was truly over, that it was possible again to think about something
besides pure survival, to marvel at human achievement instead of human
brutality.
Tell us a bit about the road to publication?
It was more a roller-coaster ride than a road.
This is actually my second novel. My first novel was Lisa33, which was
published by Viking over a decade ago.
I actually went from a long string of rejections to having publishers
suddenly in a bidding war for my novel.
That was quite surreal. In the
end, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, book was not promoted at all
by the publisher. They took a financial
bath on it, and I soon returned to obscurity.
Ironically, my agent, who had assured me I would be famous, later came
out with his own memoir and found fame with it.
For years after that experience I ceased writing fiction
entirely and even reading it. Yet one
day I found myself working again, crafting this new story, and before I knew it
I was in deep and – as they say in a military campaign – the only way out was
forward. When The Feet Say Run was
completed, I had few connections left in the publishing world. But I had posted a few poems to a public
website, and my publisher had read an admired them there. She emailed me and asked what else I wrote,
and I sent her the manuscript.
In a way I feel I am one of the few writer to be
“discovered” twice.
What
advice would you offer to new or aspiring authors?
First, forget everything anyone has “taught” you about writing. Nobody knows.
There is no assembly manual.
There is not carefully marked trail.
You must find your own way through the wilderness. Second, a novel is not just a long
short-story. You must have an
ever-advancing plot-line, and you must make the reader want to find out what
happens next. Many writing classes seem
to work from short stories, yet the requirements of a short story and a novel
and qualitatively different. Third,
please please please, forget, “write what you know”! Worst advice ever. Write the type of book that, as a reader,
you would most want to read.
