Q&A: Bryan Walpert
Author photo by Michael Krzanich
Entanglement is Bryan Walpert’s Ockham-shortlisted novel about a memory-impaired time traveller who attempts to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1977 when, panicked, he abandoned his brother on a frozen lake in Baltimore. Bryan answers our quick Q&A.
1. How are you and what have you been up to lately?
I’m doing well! I’ve been focusing on the teaching part of my job at Massey University—preparing for courses and then starting the semester. This of course means reviewing work I ask students to read and also reading their original poems and stories, which is always interesting and surprising.
2. If you were working in a bookshop, how would you hand-sell your book to customers? What would you say to convince them to buy and read it?
If there were one thing in your life you could change—one big mistake, the one you can’t stop thinking about—what would it be, and how would changing it affect everything since that point?
3. What books (or other art/media) influenced you while writing this book, or generally in your life?
Though I can’t pinpoint the influence of specific books I read during the writing of this one, I can feel the influence on Entanglement of several authors I’ve read over time: Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Foster Wallace. I have no idea if this is obvious to anyone else.
4. What good books have you read lately?
A sampler would include Gigi Fenster’s A Good Winter for the control of voice, narrative restraint and the development of tension; Angelique Kasmara’s Isobar Precinct for the impressive way she ties together so many time-travel threads into a moving story about a daughter and father; Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West for the surprising and engaging way he uses third-person narration and his use of a speculative element to engage with real world issues around immigration; Richard Powers’ Bewilderment for its weaving of science, politics and family into a taut, moving story with a sense of inevitability that I resisted throughout; and Rick Gegoski’s Darke Matter, for wit, erudition, humour and the expert fashioning of a grouchy and, when it comes to himself, unreliable narrator who it was difficult for me not to like.
Buy Entanglement (Mākaro Press), $35
