Places I’ve Never Been: A Conversation with Kristina Carlson

Zhang Zeduan, ‘Games in the Jinming Pool’, early 12th-century painting depicting Kaifeng.

Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Kristina Carlson about her admirably clear and refreshingly compact novel Eunuch, to mark its publication in English, translated from Finnish by Mikko Alapuro, today. In the book, we meet an ageing eunuch, named Wang Wei after the great poet, as he looks back on his life spent at the court of the Song dynasty in 12th-century China. A meditation on power and exclusion, love and loneliness, gender and identity, ageing and transformation, Eunuch was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and is Carlson’s 17th book.

How did you come to write Eunuch?

My novels are not ‘autobiographical’ in the sense the term is so often used nowadays. I think, though, that even this novel has a connection to my life and the situation I was in when I began writing it. Age is one thing (I’m over seventy), and the mastectomy I had after a breast cancer diagnosis is another thing. I don’t compare myself to a eunuch who has been deprived of his gender and all sexual life, but I felt that I was deprived of something as a woman. I wanted to think and explore all this, and that’s how I found my Wang Wei. A friend gave me a book which was very enlightening; it had facts about China and eunuchs during several periods.

The novel is set in 12th-century China. What drew you to this period, and how did it inform your narrative, language, and temporal choices?

In the Song period, 907–1270, China was one (though divided into South and North), but in 1270 the Mongolians invaded it. I wanted to set my story in a time before that. The emperor’s city was Dongjing (present-day Kaipeng) at the time. While I of course had to research the period – this may sound arrogant, I hope it doesn’t – the main source for me is always imagination. So it was with my first novel, which was set in Siberia, where I have never been. Impressions of a certain period come, besides facts, stem from literature, poetry, and the visual arts, but mostly from the connections, imaginary or real, that I have to places and people I have known. I wanted to keep Wang Wei’s language rather simple, although he is educated, can read and write. The story takes place in his head. He is not writing notes or telling it to anyone but himself. This also explains the temporal changes; he moves between different periods of his own life.

Eunuch by Kristina Carlson, translated from Finnishby Mikko Alapuro. Design by Dorte Limkilde.

Both the form and prose of the novel have unusual clarity, with each new thought or memory marked by a few words in bold. Why did it take this shape, and what effect did you want it to have on the reader?

First, I like the visual effect which bold gives. I also hope it makes it easier for the reader to follow the text, which does not progress linearly but moves from one thought to another without explanation. Like one’s mind does, that’s my experience.

Both Eunuch and your first novel which appeared in English, Mr Darwin's Gardener, take place in intricate and distant societies – the court of the Song dynasty and an English village in the 1880s – with characters revolving around a silent yet powerful figure – the emperor and Charles Darwin, respectively. Despite their vastly different settings, both novels exude an interest in the layers of society, and in characters on the periphery. Could you discuss this positioning of Wang Wei?

Yes, these two novels are very different, but it’s true that the structure of a society is a concern in both. And my main characters do not belong with those of power and wealth. I suppose many of Wang Wei’s contemporaries – even his own parents and siblings – will have thought that he had done quite well for himself, being at the court. And of course he had, compared to poor peasants. But they don’t consider the price Wang Wei has paid for it as a human being. The court is a society within a society. It has a strict hierarchy, rules and rites, competition, rumors, and violence. At the age of seventy, Wang Wei has accepted his fate, and he is rather good-natured about it. And yet, he is critical – and a bit rebellious, too – about the court, particularly about the high-ranking people there, even though his criticism often takes the form of sarcasm or humor. His low status has made him a bystander, which earns him certain insights. Some of his comments could be applied to China today.

Wang Wei is divided within himself, struggling to align his identity with either men or women, dead or alive, or as in or out of love. Through his experiences and recollections, he tries to place himself. What attracted you about this in-between space?

Wang Wei’s situation is special, because he hasn’t experienced family life in his childhood, and never sexual love either.  He is genuinely curious about the experiences of other people but knows himself very little. In a way, however, he is not so different from us. We ask certain basic questions – about our identity, about love, about death – when we are young. In fact, we continue asking them all our life, because we change, and our circumstances change. Death is of course one of the big questions – Wang Wei is rebellious in the way he thinks about death, activating both rage and sorrow. He is not calm or philosophical about it. I suppose I’m like him.

Eunuch by Kristina Carlson, translated from Finnish by Mikko Alapuro, publishes today. Purchase your copy here.

KRISTINA CARLSON (b. 1949) is a Finnish writer. Her work has won the Finlandia Prize in 1999, the State Prize in Literature, the ‘Tack för boken’ medal, and the English translation of Mr Darwin’s Gardener was longlisted for the DUBLIN literary Award. Both Mr Darwin’s Gardener and Eunuch were nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

MIKKO ALAPURO is a literary translator and philologist working between Finnish and English.

Top image: Zhang Zeduan, ‘Games in the Jinming Pool’, early 12th-century painting depicting Kaifeng