Interesting item which came though the email last week and I only now had a chance to read it … some excerpts:
[…]
DAVID Guterson is proud of the risk he took in his new novel, Ed King.
The Bainbridge Island, Wash. resident and author of Snow Falling on Cedars opted to retell the story of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, a Greek myth whereby the main character, Oedipus, is fated to kill his father and marry his mother.
“There’s a risk involved when you retell a story that people already know,” says Guterson, adding some readers may peruse the book’s cover copy and decide there’s no point in reading it when they already know how it ends.
“But I think most of the time people are really interested in not what happens but how you get there,” he says. “We go back to the same stories over and over again. People will rewatch the same movie or reread the same book or go to four or five different performances of Hamlet in their lives knowing full well what’s going to happen to Hamlet but wanting to experience it again and see how it’s worked out this time around by this director and this actor. I hope that it’s the telling, it’s the journey so to speak, and not the end point, that interests readers.”
And the journey of Guterson’s contemporary Oedipus, Ed King, whom the book is named after, is entirely unique. Set in the Pacific Northwest, the novel begins in 1962 in Seattle with an actuary who errs when he sleeps with and subsequently impregnates his underage au pair while his wife is recovering from mental illness. The au pair leaves their son on a doorstep and Ed is adopted by an adoring Jewish family and goes on to lead a successful career as an Internet king; however, the Greek myth continues to shape his fate.
[…]
Guterson started writing Ed King, his seventh book, in 2007.
“At the time I was dealing with a couple of strange relationships,” he says. “One person seemed to me to be a sort of pathological liar.”
The concept intrigued him, particularly that people could be unaware of their own lies.
“They’re blind to it,” he says. “I started getting really interested in the idea that we could be blind to something so fundamental about ourselves, but something that’s so obvious to others, about which we’re ignorant. I wanted to tell a story about that. I wanted to explore that in narrative.”
He was attracted to the Oedipal myth as blindness is such an important element of the story. “Oedipus, it’s completely unwitting as he kills his father and marries his mother. He’s completely blind to himself,” he says.
While Guterson has long been a fan of classical literature, Greek in particular, he’s never drawn on it before. In his former career as a high school English teacher, Oedipus Rex was a play he taught for 10 years. In recent years, he’s enjoyed reading Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Guterson feels the classical tale of Oedipus has much to say to a modern audience.
“A story about hubris and blindness is maybe appropriate to the American moment if you will,” he says. “I think post-World War Two, America emerged as a world power, that we have struggled with those very things, with hubris and with blindness to ourselves. And so perhaps the story of Oedipus is appropriate to our own historical moment here in the United States,” he says.
As it’s a dark tale, Guterson didn’t feel comfortable retelling it in a straightforward manner as tragedy; rather, he employed a tragicomic tone.
“It’s a social satire,” he says. “Yes, this book is dark but I’d say in the vein of dark humour. I think people will laugh a lot reading it and do laugh a lot reading it. It’s not dark in the sombre tragic sense at all.”
When asked what he’s most proud of with Ed King, Guterson says it’s that he took a risk.
“I did something very different from what I’ve done before. I didn’t play it safe and just sort of stay in the vein that was familiar. I didn’t travel accustomed ground. I think I stretched myself creatively and made demands on myself artistically and I’m glad that I did that. I think it’s an opportunity for some growth as a writer,” he says.
[…]
- via: Writer has new take on ancient Greek myth (Northshore News)
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