The Fiddler on the Hut

There is a certain device that some writers have used wherein they populate an otherwise natural story with a character so unique as to be wholly unreal. The classic case of this is the title character of "The Fiddler on the Roof". The Fiddler plays a very real role as being one of Tevya's village-mates, but yet has a more important role as an otherworldly symbol as well. It is almost as if the Fiddler is the very conscience of the play. What he plays upon his violin, is the pure ethereal thread of hope and light that sustains. Even though it is not a speaking part, it is an essential role - one that is part mime, part soundtrack, part Greek Chorus, and every bit amazing as a unifying element.

There are similar character elements throughout literature - from the Fiddler to Beatrice in Dante's "Il Purgatorio" to Jiminy Cricket.

Interview on Indie Blog

A new interview of me is now live on Kris Wampler's blog about Independent Writers. As a writer himself (Love Train) Kris is interested in the ever-changing way books go to market and the Indie Writing scene in general. Not sure I said anything overly profound or insightful here, but I think it is interesting nonetheless. Enjoy!

Here is the opening bit of his interview.

Interview: John Kenworthy

John Kenworthy is the quintessential eclectic writer, using his various life experiences to craft his writing. In this interview, John discusses how he uses social media and how he directs much of his marketing to independent bookstores.



1. Tell me briefly about your books – what are they about and what motivated you to write them?

My first book, The Hand About the Mouse: An Intimate Biography of Ub Iwerks, was published by Disney in 2001. Co-written with Ub’s granddaughter, Leslie, we tell the compelling story of one of the most amazing minds in entertainment history. Ub is the forgotten man. For me personally, I have always been drawn to those geniuses who work seemingly without ego behind the scenes to lift up technology and art – and Ub is an incredible example of that.

Read more at: http://kriswampler.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/interview-john-kenworthy/

And while you're there - check out his book, Love Train!

Palahniuk: the king of transgressive novelists...

"The Missionary and the Brute" could rightly be categorized as being 'transgressive fiction'. It is an unrelenting look at the characters of a group of people interacting in a land that strips away all pretense to the bare-knuckle bones of raw intensity. There are few idealized characters, opting instead for rich portraits of people on their own journeys of suffering and turmoil. A few have devolved into beasts that contradict the strictures of a civilized culture that thus created them. In these ways it is transgressive and well in keeping with some of the other novels on our shelves thus labeled.

Labels, as always, are limiting and not completely accurate, but there are certain novelists whose work does indeed fall largely in this category. The king among these is Chuck Palahniuk. Bursting on the literary scene with the absolutely incendiary "Fight Club", Chuck's subsequent work has walked much the same treacherous terrain as that - his most famous novel. "Fight Club" is rightly deemed a classic. My gosh. It shines the harsh light of reality in the face of some aspects of our world in a unique and quite disturbing way. (Disturbing in a good way.) Boiled down to one sentence it can be summed up as 'we spend so much time psychically beating ourselves up that the act of beating ourselves up becomes the thing for which we beat ourselves up...'

Or something like that.

What do you want to know about "The Missionary and the Brute"?

From time to time - I'll open this up to do an informal interview on here. Post your comments and I'll answer them as best I am able. Try not to spoil anything if you have read the book, and I'll do the same. But I would be happy to answer your messages.

One of the zillion lessons I have learned from Anne Rice is the loving care she takes with her readers. Despite her extreme success she still answers her own mail because it's important. For those of us who are nowhere near Anne's stature, we have much humility to learn from that.

So what do you want to know? About the book? About the process? About the characters, setting, style? About Africa? About me as a writer? Give it a whirl...

For the best question (from now until next Tuesday) I'll reward an autographed copy of the book.
(If your comments don't post immediately be patient, I'll release them as I'm able).

Book Trailer - YouTube

I just added a little video 'book trailer' to YouTube. Simply a teaser to entice folks to have an interest in the book. Enjoy and share. I'm trying to spread the word far and wide about the unique work of art that is "The Missionary and the Brute".



Thanks for watching.

MIS- oh, wait, what's that moving over there? - DIRECTION...

Misdirection is key to "The Missionary and the Brute". I had the idea from the very start that nothing would be as it seemed. I wanted to disorient and slightly confuse the reader at times as to place and time and I wanted to lead them astray with every step.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Foremost is that it's darned fun to do. I especially work this at transitional scenes. I will pose a hypothetical question at the end of a chapter and sometimes literally answer it in the beginning of the next. Only it may or may not be the real answer - it may just seem that way. Like the time when I tell you that the killer is actually...

Grrrrr.... gritty, grimy and grisly...

Three words that quite appropriately describe "The Missionary and the Brute".

I wanted to set this novel - not only in an interesting locale that appealed to me - but also in a harsh natural reality that is unsullied by the nicety of illusory fairy tale optimism. Which is not to say that there is not a ray of hope that runs - sometimes literally - through this story, but rather that it is grounded so much in naturalism that it stays real. Thus giving that fleeting hope more resonance and poignancy.

For me, I view "The Missionary and the Brute" like one of those grand Caravaggio paintings depicting Biblical events. At the time they were painted, to add verisimilitude, Caravaggio reportedly had gravediggers bring him cadavers on which to model his characters. Some of the critics of his day recoiled that he could use the dead to paint images of the Saints, but the depiction of the minutiae of detail such as dirt beneath the fingernails was of such a delicate reality that it - to me (and many others) seemed to lift the artwork to an even higher realm. I got to see his paintings up close once in a traveling exhibit of Vatican artwork - and it blew me away - even moreso than the Michelangelo's or Raphael's that were also displayed. It was one of the great artistic events of my lifetime - right up there with seeing Marcel Marceau perform and hearing Maya Angelou speak.

Special treat - a short story set in Kintori...

What follows is a short story written using the same Kintori setting that is used throughout "The Missionary and the Brute". You might recognize the name Vandover from my previous discussions of Frank Norris and his influence on my work. Sharp-sighted readers will also pick up on one character who also appears in my novel... I have slowly come to realize that like Keruoac with Duluoz - I have a singular saga within my creative reach. In the upcoming years, there will be other novels featuring the Ross family - and a few odd compilations of short stories and peripheral matter as well... Enjoy!

---

The Tanzanian Fortune Cup


By John D. Kenworthy

In the northeastern Tanzanian village of Kintori the pathways sprawled forth in all directions. Like most roads in east Africa, these were single-lane, red-dirt abominations that bore no shoulders and were pockmarked with ugly, meter-deep potholes that scarred the surface like mortal sin upon the blighted soul of humanity itself.

Jansen Vandover struggled to keep up with the ancient man he was following through the dusty labyrinth of these connections - footpaths, trails, and what passed to be otherwise navigable streets of the village. They were walking to the old man's home on the western outskirts of Kintori where Vandover would have his fortune read - to be told of a fate that he desperately longed to know.

“Mzee,” Vandover called, using the traditional Swahili name for any elder, “Polé, Mzee, slow down please. I cannot keep up.”

Without turning, the old man slowed his pace just enough to allow Vandover to catch up, breathless.

“Thank you.” The American said gratefully. “Is it much further?”

The Mzee nodded silently, forming his thoughts in English carefully. “We are almost. The hill. The river. Then we are to there. Not much more, Bwana.”

Spreading the word

Some folks have asked me how to spread the word regarding the release of "The Missionary and the Brute." There are some easy ways to help do so. Some right here. Here are some easy thoughts.

• DIGG THIS: On every page - wayyy down at the bottom - is a DIGG icon. By clicking this, it will help spread the news on the DIGG pages. You can log-in using any existing FaceBook or Twitter log-ins. Painless.
• LIKE THIS: On this page, choose to LIKE it, and that will be reflected a number of places. In fact, anywhere you see "The Missionary and the Brute" click on LIKE this. The FaceBook page (search for The Missionary and the Brute), or on Amazon.com or here. It helps. It is good to be LIKEd.
• Become a Follower here. I'm not big on being a follower in life, but here it works. Basically all that does is let's you know when I update the pages (typically I write on weekends and have the various blog-entries scheduled at intervals to go live - I'm up to January on those... you have a lot of reading coming up...)
• Use Amazon tools to spread the word. Write a REVIEW if you have read it and liked it. Or add "The Missionary and the Brute" to a LIST. (I recently added it to a LIST of my favorite books about Africa, but it might also show up on a LIST of books with major twists - or one of books featuring transgressive fiction, or graphic sensuality and violence, or whathaveyou... be creative!)
• TWEET and re-TWEET any postings you make or see about the novel.

It all serves to help get the word out to folks who don't know of the book personally but would be great audiences for just such a novel. This is the sort of work that will need to go viral to get to the right audience for what it is... It certainly will not be everyone, but I believe very strongly that in the right hands it will be a much requested work.

Any help therein would be greatly appreciated.

The Missionary Jadwin Ross

The first things most folks mention about Jadwin Ross is his unusual name. Which is curious because I don't think Ross is all that unusual.

Okay, Jadwin is indeed a little beyond the norm.

The simple story is that this - like the philosophical theme of "The Missionary and the Brute" - the name was cribbed from a Frank Norris work. This time it is taken from the protagonist of "The Pit" - Curtis Jadwin. To me, it felt like it could make a good first name. For his surname, I borrowed from another literary antecedent, James Arnold Ross from "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair (the literary inspiration behind the brilliant - though wildly different film "There Will Be Blood".) Two worthy predecessors at that.

Frank Norris and the Brute (part two)

In part one of my posting about Frank Norris, we looked at his masterwork, "McTeague". In this post, we shall lift up "Vandover and the Brute" an obvious inspiration behind my first novel, "The Missionary and the Brute".

In the last of Norris' novels (published posthumously), he revisits the idea of the duality of humankind. How we are often faced with conflicting impulses within ourselves. In many ways, this feels like an assured, and vastly different retelling of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson opus, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Unlike that work however, there is no John Utterson to represent us - the gentle reader - with a sense of normalcy and we are left with an unreliable, almost unlikeable protagonist, Vandover.

Surprisingly, it works.

We are expected to be disgusted and horrified by his actions - and we most certainly are.

The title character is a recent Harvard grad who despite his economic class travels the dark streets of San Francisco with two friends. They are slumming in the absolute worst way - partaking of drink and drugs and women of every ilk in the very worst parts of town. They have a sense of extreme entitlement that comes with genetic-determined class and easy money. But they squander it all away incrementally upon their descent. Vandover moreso than the others, gives in freely to the wolf that he sees within himself. His actions are execrable and his degeneration so extreme, that it is only at the very end that Norris gives us a literal bread-crumb of hope.

In "The Missionary and the Brute" we look at a similar human duality as it impacts our characters' choices. It would not be incorrect to refer to Jadwin Ross as being akin to Vandover in his actions - though not perhaps in the way you may be thinking. It is not a spoiler to tell you that pretty much any assumption you make from reading the book's marketing blurb - or even from your early readings of the chapters of the book - may be entirely incorrect.

Or not.

It's hard to say. I just know I worked very hard to keep the elements of the story flowing with surprises happening on every level. If you take nothing for granted and trust not the narrative point of view, you should be fine. For me, there is nothing more reliably interesting in fiction than an unreliable narrator.

That being said, there is certainly an element of the wolf at play within "The Missionary and the Brute". Dramatically and significantly so. Ahem, there is that figure of the lion on the cover, you know. But - as has been so appropriately stated by others, I run before my horse to market...

Frank Norris and the Brute (Part one)

In a previous post, I wrote briefly about the importance of Frank Norris' writings on my work. Today I'm going to expound on that a bit.

I have to admit to coming to Norris late in my reading life. Prior to coming fully on board and becoming immersed in his work, I had resisted every futile attempt to encounter his work. Part of the problem was that I picked up a copy of "The Octopus" early on and had a devil of a time getting past the first few long-descriptive, small, dense-printed pages. I gave a few grudging attempts at forging through and actually borrowed it from the library twice and returned it having only read the first part of the first chapter.

I wanted to like it. But couldn't make it.

The subject - the effect of the railroad on wheat farmers in California definitely appealed to me in sort of a John Steinbeck/Upton Sinclair way. I was hoping for a "Oil!" type manuscript or maybe "In Dubious Battle". What I got instead was a description of a place. Or so I thought. Oh, had I but soldiered on...

What turned the tide for me was reading "McTeague" first. I picked up one of those lovely Norton Critical Editions that has lots of peripheral reading material in the back related to the subject (sort of like a pre-blog blog...) Unlike my previous Norris foray, "McTeague" engaged me from the start. "McTeague" is one of those disturbing novels from the early 20th Century that features non-idealized characters and characterizations. McTeague was not a warm and lovely protagonist - far from it. He did not live in a world we aspire to join. Instead, he was deeply flawed and presented warts and all as a sort of observation. It was not quite realism as it had a lot of overtly symbolic scenes within it, but it inhabited a natural world that was indeed real - if unwelcome.

And the characters evolved or devolved. None stayed the same. Each changed - usually for the worse - in front of our very eyes. Hauntingly so.

Through the novel, we watch as Mac (McTeague) slowly degenerates into a paranoid, quarrelsome brute of a man wholly unable to control his own violent impulses. The transformation is believable and heart wrenching in equal measure. He slowly loses his grip on all that he once adored - eventually allowing his whiskey-fueled anger to step in the way of his friendships, his business, his stature, his marriage and ultimately his life. As Mac plummets down an abyss of his own making toward a baser, more animalistic, survivalist self, we watch a similar transformative path taken by his wife Trina in a different way. Slowly she loses touch with reality as she knew it and falls prey to an absurd obsession with the gold coins she has secretly hidden from her husband. At one point, she spreads them over her bed and rolls amongst them in a scene of abhorrent sensual greed. Symbolic? - yep. Disturbing? - of course. Visually dramatic and mesmerizingly memorable? - absolutely!

For me, the sheer concept of McTeague succumbing to his innate animal instinct (an idea that Norris embellished with thoughts based on early criminologist Cesare Lombroso's work) was so intense that it immediately drew me to Norris' other works.

Quickly I collected all of his novels and discovered that had I but read a few pages further in "The Octopus" I would have discovered what I now consider to be one of my favorite novels of all time. While "The Octopus", and "The Pit" were two parts of a planned trilogy about the growing, sales and distribution of wheat - and have informed a future novel I am writing called "The Straw Man" - it is "McTeague" and another of Norris' novels that have most directly influenced the subject and subtext of "The Missionary and the Brute".

In part two of this posting, we shall look at "Vandover and the Brute"...

Judging a book...

The book cover work-in-progress. Featuring a shot of a lion that I took in Africa several years ago on safari for the front, and a nice photo of me from the docMiami International Film Festival on the other side. The back text is a standard blurb that I have been honing in query letters to editors/agents for a couple of years now. "The Missionary and the Brute" will be a trade paperback (6" x 9" size) with 270 pages of drama and intrigue .

There is indeed a significant lion in the book - and it plays a pivotal role at a very key moment. Perhaps it is more in a symbolic than integrally active way, but it is pivotal nonetheless. And a horrifying chapter to write from my perspective.

In any event, I like the formality of the cover - and how it can easily become the first of a visually similar series of books (changing the colors as we progress), which is precisely my thought.