The woman had her hands in front of her face as if in pain, or maybe she's praying.
Someone, I assume a stranger, was tending to it. It was of a woman with long red hair on the street, surrounded by protests, and she had a cut on her forehead. And then I started to do some research and came across a photo by Allan Sekula in a book called "5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond" (by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. I just found some characters I was interested in. And when I was in grad school in 2009, casting about for a novel idea - and (his teacher, the novelist) Colum McCann kept killing my novel ideas, saying, "No, that's not going to work" - I remembered this protest and thought, "That might make an excellent novel." And I just jumped into the writing of it. Having grown up in that milieu, I was very much aware of the protests in Seattle when they happened in '99. My dad was a Marxist geographer - he still is, although he's retired - and I studied with him at Penn State. I have to say that it started with the nonfictional event.
In the process, Yapa penetrates to the human connections and disconnections at play between the lines of history in the era of the global village.Ī: It's a hybrid novel, in that it's about a nonfictional event - something that really happened - with fictional characters. In this beautifully written, kaleidoscopically shifting novel, the author focuses on a handful of characters with various roles in the Battle of Seattle, as it's sometimes called, including Victor, a 19-year-old runaway his father, Bishop, chief of the city's police department two cops and the finance minister of Sri Lanka, who's hoping to meet with President Clinton at the conference. What really happened, and why? Who participated on both sides of the clash, and what motivated them? The answers can be found, through the medium of art, in Sunil Yapa's fictional debut, "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist," the first offering of Lee Boudreaux Books, a new imprint at Little, Brown. If we remember anything about the event, it's its sheer size - an estimated 60,000 demonstrators converged on the city, occupying and effectively shutting down several major intersections - and the fact that its largely peaceful character was marred by violent clashes between protesters and police, who used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades on the crowd. The protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in late 1999 are a blur in the national consciousness.
0 kommentar(er)
