Authors’ Sala presents internationally known author Sena Jeter Naslund
By Carol Lopes

Authors’ Sala

Sena Jeter Naslund

Fri, Oct 5, 5–7pm

Posada de San Francisco

Plaza Principal 2

50 pesos

October’s Authors’ Sala is honored to host a well-known international celebrity, Sena Jeter Naslund. Recipient of the 2000 Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award, she is editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. Naslund is the author of the novels Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits and Sherlock in Love and a collection of stories, including The Disobedience of Water, and her most recent book, Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (see the September 29 edition of Atencion for more information about Naslund and background on her novel about Marie Antoinette).

Naslund, novelist, would be listed among biographers, her characters are so real. Using the “license to suppose,” and historical figures, events and characters, Naslund weaves together a cultural landscape for her readers. This is furthered by her observation that several of the “great American novels” did not include significant women characters. Naslund writes about “the other half of the human race.”

In an early novel, Sherlock in Love, Naslund presents period England, Sherlock Holmes, and a woman worthy of his great intellect and of equal integrity (or more). It “was written in part to insist that there were women who were the equivalent of any imaginatively conceived male figure,” Naslund admits.

In her well-known book, Ahab’s Wife, or the Star Gazer (1999, Book-of-the-Month Club main selection), Naslund uses Moby-Dick as a starting place. Melville himself included three references to the wife of Ahab. Other historical elements are Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and noted astronomer Maria Mitchell, who was the first person to discover a comet with a telescope. Even Halley’s Comet makes an appearance.

While on a book tour in Rhode Island she stayed at a bed and breakfast—a stone inn with a widow’s walk on top—the image of it lodged itself into her memory. The opening sentence “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last” came in a flash, and with it, a picture of a woman on a roof-walk at night, looking out to sea for her whaling husband to come home, then ceasing to look out, but looking up at the starry sky; the main character, Una’s own spiritual journey beginning. “I knew her quest would not end in death and destruction, but in a feeling of being home and in harmony with the cosmos.”

And it’s the cosmos and nineteenth-century woman that Naslund brought to her readers. She discusses difficult subjects, slavery and cannibalism, along with whaling, sailing, death and spirituality. However, the stars are a constant, and Naslund herself had bedtime reading on physics and astronomy for two years prior to conceiving Ahab’s Wife. Six months after her vision of Una on the rooftop, she met her husband, an atomic physicist who had worked at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Following is an excerpt from the New York Times Book Review of Ahab’s Wife:

Call Me Una

According to his wife, Ahab was a decent guy (and good in bed) until that whale came along.

“Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and kind should not, however, blind one to the fact that she is, in the most non-aggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity. On the froth and foam and rage of Moby-Dick Naslund lays a cool hand, as if to say: “There, there. Such a fuss about a fish.”

Melville probably would have found Naslund’s inversion of his work anathema: not only did he basically exclude women from the decks of his fiction, he could barely tolerate the thought of them reading his books. Of Moby-Dick he wrote to a female acquaintance, “Don’t you buy it—don’t you read it when it does come out, because it is by no means a sort of book for you.” In The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas called Moby-Dick, “an implicit critique of liberal Protestantism,” its intense masculinity and Calvinist perspective specifically designed to torpedo the popular and sentimental feminine works of the time. The book failed—it wasn’t taken seriously until many years after Melville’s death. Ironically, Ahab’s Wife, which reworks the great whaling novel from a female, liberal, Protestant point of view, is positioned to be a bestseller. A Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, with a huge first printing, it may well turn out to be Melville’s worst nightmare: Moby-Dick rewritten by a woman as a conve
ntionally constructed popular novel with an unflaggingly virtuous heroine and a happy ending.

“Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,” begins Naslund’s heroine, Una Spenser, as she lies on her back on a Nantucket beach after Ahab’s death, watching the clouds go by. One of them, she thinks, looks a bit like Ahab’s face, a face that she always recalls as “mild” if somewhat excitable. She waves goodbye. With one dreamy, casual gesture, Una thus waves aside a century’s worth of canonization and goes on to talk about what’s really on her mind: her mother. Over the course of the next 667 pages, Una unscrolls her life story, a long and winding tale in which Ahab is one player among many, and not necessarily the most important one.

Naslund will be reading from her latest book, Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. Her portrait of Marie Antoinette, like the new Sofia Coppola film, is not unsympathetic. Written in the first person, it begins as the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, leaving her home in Austria for her marriage to the future King of France, is forced to strip, divesting herself of everything Austrian. “Like everyone, I am born naked,” the book begins.

This forum is not to be missed! Be sure to come early to get a good seat….

Additionally, remember to mark your calendars for the upcoming October 26, 2007 Anthology Book Launch, Solamente en San Miguel, Writings from the Authors Sala of San Miguel de Allende.

The mission of the San Miguel Authors’ Sala is to provide visibility, community and education for writers and readers in both English and Spanish.

The Authors’ Sala presents works by writers of novels, poetry, memoirs, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as agents and editors. Additionally, it presents readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. Look for books by local authors in a special section in La Tienda in the Biblioteca. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.authorssalasanmiguel.com .


Kerouac pop quiz answers

No one submitted 10 correct answers to claim the first prize, so it appears Atención staff will have to dispose of that bottle of tequila in an appropriate manner.

1(b) Kerouac’s poem Mexico City Blues has 242 choruses.

2(a) Carolyn Cassady was the real-life model for Camille in On the Road.

3(c) Gap used Kerouac in a 1993 ad campaign.

4(c) La Cucaracha was Kerouac’s favorite bar in San Miguel.

5(b) Kerouac’s mother, Gabrielle, was fondly known as Memere.

6(c) Kerouac excelled at football in high school.

7(a) The original scroll of On the Road was 120 feet long.

8(a) Cassady bought a brand-new 1949 Hudson Hornet for a road trip to Mexico.

9(b) The Australian band The Go-Betweens recorded the track, “The House That Jack Kerouac Built.”

10(b) Kerouac fell in love with Esperanza, the Mexican prostitute honored in Tristessa.