Empire Settings
by David Schmahmann
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0452283272
Publisher: Plume
David Schmahmann was born in Durban, South Africa. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Cornell Law School and has studied in India and Israel and worked in Burma. His publications include a short story in The Yale Review and articles on legal issues. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and practices law in Boston.
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Q: Why did you choose to tell the story in several different voices (Danny, Santi, Helga, Bridget and Baptie)? Was it difficult finding and sustaining each voice?
DS: I wanted to do more than tell a story with a single narrative theme. I wanted to pose the dilemma of the novel—Danny's affair with Santi— not as a chronologically told story but rather as an event that changed everyone around it, and then to move forward twenty years and have the perspectives I had previously presented reconsidered in light of the passage of time. By having each person tell their part of the story I wanted to put my readers right inside the skin of the person talking, to try and let a reader feel what the world was like to that person and why they saw and did the things as they did.
As for sustaining the voices, I sat there in the small hours in the study of my home and pretended to be the person speaking. When I reread what I've written now, I still somehow feel that I'm reading from a letter they might have written me.
Q: Which strain of the novel proved most challenging, the love story or the suspense tale or the political commentary? Did you plan Empire Settings to be an epic romance/thriller with political undertones from the very beginning, or did certain thematic elements develop as your writing progressed?
DS: I had the Danny and Santi love story in mind from the outset, and also how I wanted the essential structure to be. This is in part because I have always enjoyed novels that progress from one point of view to another, and also novels where the protagonist takes a physical journey that is also a journey back in time. The love story is the political story, and the suspense tale --- Danny's foray into money smuggling --- forces Danny to confront the conflict within his own views about change in South Africa. Santi, of course, is emblematic of much of that change, and Danny’s response to the opportunity she presents makes clear how flimsy some of his longest held convictions may actually be.
Q: The descriptions of Durban are very meticulous. As a native of Durban, did you rely on your memory or did you have to do some research?
DS: I haven't lived in South Africa for a long time, and though I have been back there twice in the last year, I hadn't seen Durban for several years when I wrote Empire Settings. Several old friends who live there have taken great pride in pointing out at least two major mistakes in my geography. But I remember Durban as it was almost perfectly.
Q: Baptie is the most grounded character in the novel. What does she have that the other characters don't?
DS: Danny says that Baptie is the most grounded in Africa, but mostly because twenty years later she is the only member of his household who is still alive and in Africa, and because so much of the turmoil and change that has made his family and his own life almost unrecognizable has not touched her at all. Baptie is earthy, and eminently practical, and in some ways the most conservative person in the story. Her analysis of everything that happens to the family has a very basic and uncluttered logic.
Q: Were you political growing up in South Africa? How autobiographical is Empire Settings?
DS: I was actually a good deal more politically active than Danny in the novel. From my early teens I was very active in the only political party in South Africa that advocated a multiracial franchise and eventual majority rule, and much of my social life in high school revolved around party congresses and door-to-door campaigns and electioneering, all among the white electorate of course because nonwhites were denied the vote. In retrospect, it's hard to see what we achieved because we lost all of the elections we contested and were more often than not rudely received when we did try to change peoples' opinions. But ours was a viewpoint—unabashedly supporting civil rights for all South Africans regardless of color—that needed to be expressed and especially now when many white South Africans prefer to distance themselves from the views they held in the apartheid years, I am pleased that I was part of a small group that was quite outspoken in very bad times.
As for whether the novel is autobiographical, the people are composites of many different people, and every emotion and conflict in the novel reflects things I have seen and felt.
Excerpted from Empire Settings © Copyright 2008 by David Schmahmann. Reprinted with permission by Plume. All rights reserved.
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