Valeria’s Last Stand
by Marc Fitten
List Price: $24.00
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781596916203
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Marc Fitten was born in Brooklyn in 1974. He spent much of the 1990s living and traveling in Europe, while being based in Hungary. He has been published in Prairie Schooner, the Louisville Review, the Hogtown Creek Review, and Esquire.com. Marc is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University, where he received the Paul Bowles Fellowship in Fiction. He is currently the editor of the Chattahoochee Review.
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Q: Valeria’s Last Stand reads almost like a fable. Was that your intention?
A: Yes, Valeria’s Last Stand is a fable and a fairy tale, and I was very conscious of maintaining this form when I wrote it. This is my first novel, and I wanted the experience of telling a story in the simplest, most direct way possible. However, I also wanted to create something that was distinct and highly stylized. The language of a fable let me do both: create something accessible yet artful as well.
As a result I think the book serves as a wonderful foil for today’s complicated world. The characters have desires and they strive to meet them. It’s as simple as that. The Kundera epigraph really states it all: “The great matters of nations cannot make us forget the modest matters of the heart.” Modest matters of the heart are what drive the individual.
Q: How did you come to choose Hungary as a setting?
A: I’d definitely say that this book is inspired by Hungary and is attempting a conversation with it. Or maybe I would say it’s about Hungary the way the movie Gladiator is about Rome. Hungary is this book’s soil. I lived there for four years when I was in my twenties. I married a Hungarian woman. My child was born there. At that time --- eleven years ago --- the country was in the throes of great shifts in politics, culture, and economics. Those changes still resonate today. The transition from socialism to capitalism was heady stuff to witness. I watched a country leapfrog from 1956 to the dawn of the twenty-first century practically overnight. That change was no small feat and it had consequences on people’s lives that, despite what we might like to think, weren’t always positive. People suffered. The older generation especially. Imagine growing old under a system, one that on some real level took care of its people, and then helplessly watching it disappear. That transition is at the heart of this book. Valeria’s Last Stand is, in part, a look at the older generation coming to terms with a new world and a new reality.
Q: Is this why you chose to write about the over-sixty set?
A: Well, yes, because as I mentioned, I found the transition to capitalism and the effect it had on older people unsettling. I saw what happens when a system suddenly opens its doors to, say, a million different varieties of yogurt on a supermarket shelf but does not provide enough money in an old lady’s purse to buy any of them. I heard a conversation between two old men lamenting the change and the fact that a golden age had passed and nobody seemed to care. That was thought-provoking. Seeing old women reduced to panhandling also struck me. This was not the face of progress I expected. Valeria comments on all of this in the opening pages of the book.
Q: You’re a thirty-four-year-old man; how were you able to write about older women so deftly?
A: Observation and imagination, for starters. Maybe empathy. I think all writers should slip in and out of whatever streams they find interesting. I like the elderly; they seem to like me. I’m that guy who is always being stopped on the street by people who want to talk. I’ve heard so many life stories. I couldn’t explain why. This has been the case since I was a teenager.
To a certain extent, though, the characters in this book are autobiographical. All of the women are based on my wife, while all of the men are based on me. I just took different aspects of our personalities and stretched them to their logical extremes. For example, Valeria’s obstinacy is a magnified version of my wife’s stubbornness while the Potter’s is entirely my own. Ibolya has my wife’s determination.
Q: Why did you set so much action in Ibolya’s Tavern? Is there something unique about Hungarian taverns?
A: I set the book there because I spent so much time in taverns exactly like it and thought it would be interesting and fun to write about. It’s not the setting for me, though; it’s the people that matter. I like to travel, but I especially like figuring out how people work and what motivates them. The tavern is the perfect site for this kind of exploration.
Q: The mayor is so hilariously corrupt. Can you explain the role politics and power play in the novel?
A: As I mentioned earlier, the political and economic transition to capitalism and democracy provides the backdrop of this book. The fall of the wall was seen as a huge victory for democracy and capitalism. Maybe it was. Where are we today, though? If this were a football game, based on the way things have worked out in the nearly twenty years since the end of Communism, I would have to say it’s Speculative Capitalism 49, Nationalist Socialism 47.
Political systems come and go. I understand that. Democracy is by far the best system for the greatest number of people. I understand that as well. I guess with the mayor I was pointing out that there’s always a.. more perfect union to be formed... for lack of a better cliché.
Valeria’s Last Stand is also very much about power. However, it’s in the sense that powerful people attract and are attracted to one another. The people who populate this book are the most powerful people in their town: the mayor for obvious reasons, Ibolya because she’s the pulse of the community, Valeria because she’s their idealist and the potter because he’s their romantic. When the chimney sweep arrives he clearly becomes their shadow. It’s all power, though.
Q: Which writers have inspired you most? Who did you look to in writing this book?
A: A writer is a reader first, and that has certainly been the case for me. The three writers I tried to emulate in this book were Kundera, Marquez, and Calvino. I wanted to marry elements of all of them. I think I used notions of sex and power like Kundera, while the setting and character rendering is drawn from Marquez. The writing style itself, that fairy-tale quality I mentioned before, is from Calvino. I internalized these writers, processed them, and came up with Valeria’s Last Stand.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Well, I’ve always wanted to write a trilogy along the lines of Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. I’m calling mine A Paprika Trilogy. The second book moves to a medium-sized city a decade after Valeria, just on the other side of the millennium. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman, a successful restaurateur suffering from a midlife crisis. There are gypsies and a pastry chef. It’s darker, but hopefully still humorous. The third will look at a younger person in a bigger city with a contemporary setting.
At the heart of the trilogy will be an exploration of how three generations of people were affected by the major shift of the late 1980s.
© Copyright 2009 by Marc Fitten. Reprinted with permission by Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved.
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