Author Talk: January 29, 2015
Texas-born Greg Baxter now lives in Berlin, where he writes and translates. His latest book, MUNICH AIRPORT, is about an unnamed, expatriate narrator who is waiting in Munich’s fog-bound airport with his father and a US consul to transport the corpse of his sister to America. Baxter deftly weaves flashbacks throughout the story in order to bring his narrator’s pain and conflict into sharper relief. In this interview, he discusses how he was able to use flashbacks in a way that feels emotionally honest and organic to the story, as well as the unusual role music plays in his novel.
Question: How much of MUNICH AIRPORT was drawn from your own experience as an American expatriate?
Greg Baxter: It is probably accurate to say that nothing in the book is disconnected from my experiences as an expatriate --- though at the same time I never define myself that way. I never say, “I’m an American expat,” and I suspect the modern world has made the term obsolete; it feels like a word that belongs to history. In my mind, I just ended up in Europe somehow, and for some reason I’m still here. The narrator’s experiences, I hope, reflect this accidental-ness as well.
Q: What was your process of writing the novel?
GB: I write longhand, in squared Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks (145mm x 210mm). Depending on how quickly the book is moving for me, I’ll write between one and 10 pages in the notebook, and then transcribe those pages into my desktop computer, and in this way I have an intensive edit built into the first typed draft; often what I type has very little to do with what I’ve written in my notebook.
I wrote the book over a period of one year, from early autumn to the end of summer. During that time, I read many books about European history, studied music theory and sought inspiration from walking around Berlin listening to dodecaphonic music on my headphones.
Q: In your last novel, THE APARTMENT, you left the narrator and the setting unnamed. In MUNICH AIRPORT, two of the principal characters --- the narrator and his father --- are unnamed, but the novel’s geography is very real and specific; the characters are always in named places. What were the reasons behind your decisions to name or not name characters and places?
GB: Well, the airport is called Munich Airport, but the building they are in is not Munich Airport. It is an amalgamation of airports, plus part imaginary. I’d had a couple of very long layovers in Munich Airport --- the first of which I spent in a wheelchair and the second of which I was on crutches --- in the months preceding the point at which I began writing the book. I wanted to write a book called “Munich Airport” as a result --- to redeem the hours I’d spent there --- but I needed some freedom in the matter of movement, and I could not really remember how the airport looked, anyway. Generally, I cannot say why I name places and don’t name others, make some places up or apply extreme accuracy to others. I don’t know why I name some people and don’t name others.
Q: Do you find that international families like the one in MUNICH AIRPORT are becoming increasingly common? Does the physical distance between the members of such a family place a strain on their relationships?
GB: I never consciously set out to say anything about families, international or otherwise, when I wrote this book, nor did I ever imagine that the theme of "family" would rise so high on the list of things this book is, to others, so obviously about. But I am aware of the general phenomenon whereby the book a novelist writes is not the same thing as the book the readership reads. I embrace this, of course. But I do not think physical distance is the problem --- and maybe it’s one of the reasons why I portray, near the end, the man named Hans in the small German town of Walluf, estranged from his family, who no doubt live less than a minute’s walk from him.
Q: The structure of the novel is interesting in that while much of the story is narrated through flashbacks, the present action takes place entirely at the airport. Why did you choose to tell the story in this manner, instead of taking a more linear approach?
GB: I just wanted to continue the approach I’d found so personally suitable in THE APARTMENT. I’m drawn to unconventional fiction, and I’m very fond of the essay. I sense that I have mixed my affections and influences into something I’m increasingly comfortable with: a digressive and free narrative that relies very little on the outcome of the plot because almost all the action has already taken place and is, more or less, known to the reader, and that instead relies heavily on how strange I can make that known outcome finally seem to the reader. On another level, I don’t want to write books that can be turned into films.
It’s odd to hear the word ‘flashback’ applied to this book, because I don’t have much sympathy for books that make heavy use of flashback, and I never think of the word when, as I write, a narrator’s thoughts digress to the past. I think of flashbacks as clumsy devices when used in conventional, linear narratives --- they arrive predictably, they act predictably, they almost always serve to explain or simplify motive in characters. But most importantly, they do not make linear narrative nonlinear; they just pause the flow. I discard, in myself, expectations of linear narrative from the outset.
Q: The novel displays a strong interest in the history of the Rhineland. What motivated this interest?
GB: Europe’s real birthplace is the Rhineland, it has been argued. The tribes migrating across the prehistoric Eurasian steppes, once they passed the Black Sea shore, had only two directions to take, two mountain passes: southward to the imperial frontier, or northward, the path of least resistance, to the Rhine. They mostly took the latter, and gradually crowded the Rhineland with the people who would become the nationalities of power and wealth in Europe today. I read about this in Norman Davies’s finely written history of Europe, and the preoccupation with this part of the world in the novel is an attempt to convey my fascination with this story. During composition, I drove the very route --- and visited the very same places --- that the father and son in MUNICH AIRPORT visit.
Q: Do you see a special connection in the novel between history and memory?
GB: I don’t think I have anything new to say about either history or memory. However, I do think that a marketing executive, a historian and a diplomat all have very different and unique relationships with time (in a context where all are present in a single narrative), and these relationships seemed important once the book got moving.
Q: The topic of music also comes up a few times in the novel, especially music that is unconventional or experimental. What guided this concern, and how do you see it working within the scope of the novel?
GB: Some years ago, I heard my first piece of music by the composer Alban Berg. Until then, music had never felt particularly important to me. Ever since, I’ve become a student of Berg’s, after a fashion, and in the sum of music’s total importance to the book --- measured in a variety of ways --- is a hidden thesis submitted for Berg’s consideration.
Q: Which authors or novels would you name as your literary forebears? Which of them influenced the writing of MUNICH AIRPORT most strongly?
GB: I read a lot of books in translation; probably in excess of 90 percent of all the literature I read (novels and essays) are books in translation. The list of individual authors most important to me comes almost exclusively from these books, with notable exceptions. I don’t dare claim my favorites as influences, however, for fear of drowning in their wakes.
Q: What drew you to write about the theme of hunger, which is so persistent in this novel? How do you understand Miriam’s desire to starve herself?
GB: I don’t understand Miriam’s choice to starve to death any differently than the narrator understands it, which is to say I do not understand it at all. It’s really only possible, I think, to talk productively about the reasons for the narrator’s devotion to the mystery of the method of his sister’s death.
