Munich Airport
Page 25
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Thomas Lovegrove and Adam Butler, aka Vert.
For material on the Rhineland and Charlemagne, the author is indebted to Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. The quotations from composers were encountered in Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise.
About the Author
Greg Baxter is the author of two previous highly acclaimed books, The Apartment and A Preparation for Death. Originally from Texas, he has lived in Europe for almost two decades. He currently lives in Berlin with his wife and two children.
Author Q&A
1. How much of MUNICH AIRPORT was drawn from your own experience as an American expatriate?
It is probably accurate to say that nothing in the book is disconnected from my experiences as an expatriate—though at the same time I never define myself that way. I never say, I’m an American expat, and I suspect the modern world has made the term obsolete: It feels like a word that belongs to history. In my mind, I just ended up in Europe somehow, and for some reason I’m still here. The narrator’s experiences, I hope, reflect this accidentalness as well.
2. What was your process of writing the novel?
I write longhand, in squared Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks (145mm x 210mm). Depending on how quickly the book is moving for me, I’ll write between one and ten pages in the notebook, and then transcribe those pages into my desktop computer, and in this way I have an intensive edit built into the first typed draft: Often what I type has very little to do with what I’ve written in my notebook.
I wrote the book over a period of one year, from early autumn to the end of summer. During that time, I read many books about European history, studied music theory, and sought inspiration from walking around Berlin listening to dodecaphonic music on my headphones.
3. In your last novel, The Apartment, you left the narrator and the setting unnamed. In MUNICH AIRPORT, two of the principal characters—the narrator and his father—are unnamed, but the novel’s geography is very real and specific; the characters are always in named places. What were the reasons behind your decisions to name or not name characters and places?
Well, the airport is called Munich Airport, but the building they are in is not Munich Airport. It is an amalgamation of airports, plus part imaginary. I’d had a couple of very long layovers in Munich Airport—the first of which I spent in a wheelchair and the second of which I was on crutches—in the months preceding the point at which I began writing the book. I wanted to write a book called Munich Airport as a result—to redeem the hours I’d spent there—but I needed some freedom in the matter of movement, and I could not really remember how the airport looked, anyway. Generally, I cannot say why I name places and don’t name others, make some places up or apply extreme accuracy to others. I don’t know why I name some people and don’t name others.
4. Do you find that international families such as the one in MUNICH AIRPORT are becoming increasingly common? Does the physical distance between the members of such a family place a strain on their relationships?
I never consciously set out to say anything about families, international or otherwise, when I wrote this book, nor did I ever imagine that the theme of family would rise so high on the list of things this book is, to others, so obviously about. But I am aware of the general phenomenon whereby the book a novelist writes is not the same thing as the book the readership reads. I embrace this, of course. But I do not think physical distance is the problem—and maybe it’s one of the reasons why I portray, near the end, the man named Hans in the small German town of Walluf, estranged from his family, who no doubt lives less than a minute’s walk from him.
5. The structure of the novel is interesting in that while much of the story is narrated through flashbacks, the present action takes place entirely at the airport. Why did you choose to tell the story in this manner instead of taking a more linear approach?
I just wanted to continue the approach I’d found so personally suitable in The Apartment. I’m drawn to unconventional fiction, and I’m very fond of the essay. I sense that I have mixed my affections and influences into something I’m increasingly comfortable with—a digressive and free narrative that relies very little on the outcome of the plot, because almost all the action has already taken place and is, more or less, known to the reader, and instead relies heavily on how strange I can make that known outcome finally seem to the reader. On another level, I don’t want to write books that can be turned into films.
It’s odd to hear the word flashback applied to this book, because I don’t have much sympathy for books that make heavy use of flashback, and I never think of the word when, as I write, a narrator’s thoughts digress to the past. I think of flashbacks as clumsy devices when used in conventional, linear narratives—they arrive predictably, they act predictably, they almost always serve to explain or simplify motive in characters. But most important, they do not make linear narrative nonlinear: They just pause the flow. I discard, in myself, expectations of linear narrative from the outset.
6. The novel displays a strong interest in the history of the Rhineland. What motivated this interest?
Europe’s real birthplace is the Rhineland, it has been argued: The tribes migrating across the prehistoric Eurasian steppes, once they passed the Black Sea shore, had only two directions to take, two mountain passes: southward to the imperial frontier, or northward, the path of least resistance, to the Rhine. They mostly took the latter, and gradually crowded the Rhineland with the people who would become the nationalities of power and wealth in Europe today. I read about this in Norman Davies’s finely written history of Europe, and the preoccupation with this part of the world in the novel is an attempt to convey my fascination with this story. During composition, I drove the very route—and visited the very same places—that the father and son in Munich Airport visit.
7. Do you see a special connection in the novel between history and memory?
I don’t think I have anything new to say about either history or memory; however, I do think that a marketing executive, a historian, and a diplomat all have very different and especial relationships to time (in a context where all are present in a single narrative), and these relationships seemed important once the book got moving.
8. The topic of music also comes up a few times in the novel, especially music that is unconventional or experimental. What guided this concern, and how do you see it working within the scope of the novel?
Some years ago, I heard my first piece of music by the composer Alban Berg. Until then, music had never felt particularly important to me. Ever since, I’ve become a student of Berg’s, after a fashion, and in the sum of music’s total importance to the book—measured in a variety of ways—is a hidden thesis submitted for Berg’s consideration.
9. Which authors or novels would you name as your literary forebears? Which of them influenced the writing of MUNICH AIRPORT most strongly?
I read a lot of books in translation; probably in excess of 90 percent of all the literature I read (novels and essays) are books in translation. The list of individual authors most important to me come almost exclusively from these books, with notable exceptions. I don’t dare claim my favorites as influences, however, for fear of drowning in their wakes.
10. What drew you to write about the theme of hunger, which is so persistent in this novel? How do you understand Miriam’s desire to starve herself?
I don’t understand Miriam’s choice to starve to death any differently than the narrator understands it, which is to say I do not understand it at all. It’s really only possible, I think, to talk productively about the reasons for the narrator’s devotion to the mystery of the method of his sister’s death.
Reading Group Guide
Do you have any close relatives who have settled abroad or moved far away? How has distance changed your relationship with them?
The first time
the narrator meets Miriam’s neighbor Otis, he says, “At no time in history have human beings had less freedom, less happiness.” Why do you think he says this? Do you agree or disagree with him, and why?
What are the sources of unhappiness in the narrator’s life? Is there a difference between grief and unhappiness? Do you see such a distinction in the narrator’s life?
The narrator’s father writes that “The historian of tragic events, especially […] must cultivate guilt, must find infinite ways to implicate himself in every injustice and atrocity that has ever transpired, and be unworthy of all the heroism and courage that has resisted injustice.” How does this way of thinking inform the narrative of MUNICH AIRPORT? In what ways does the narrator cultivate guilt?
Why does Miriam starve herself? Does the narrator have the same reasons for choosing to endure hunger?
The narrator and his father react to Miriam’s death by indulging—in food, alcohol, and luxurious accommodations. Miriam’s restraint and their indulgence serve psychological as well as physical functions. Do you tend toward excess or restriction in your own life? How are the two practices similar? How are they different?
Would you intervene if you were worried about a friend or relative’s health, or would you refrain from commenting on someone else’s personal choices?
How would you describe the relationship that Trish develops with the narrator’s father? How does she fit into the novel’s family dynamic?
The characters in MUNICH AIRPORT are separated by physical distance, but there is also an emotional distance between them. Do you think that physical separation led to their emotional disconnect, or did it happen the other way around?
Do you think the narrator changes during the course of the novel? Do you see his visit to Germany in the wake of his sister’s death as a traumatic or healing experience?
What future do you imagine for the narrator and his father?
The novel ends with a memory of the narrator rowing a boat on a lake in the mountains while the people onshore wave at him. Does this episode strike you as one of hopelessness or wonder—as affirming beauty or negating it?
By the same author
A Preparation for Death
The Apartment
Acclaim for
THE APARTMENT
by Greg Baxter
“Baxter has written a novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb…It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic…With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W. G. Sebald…Baxter’s provocative, unsettling novel is, among other things, about the inexorability of identity and ‘the immortality of violence.’”
—Los Angeles Times
“Despite the lack of incident, the novel exerts a hypnotic force…It is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author’s shimmering prose, that makes THE APARTMENT such a surprisingly compelling read and so apropos; it captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new ‘lost generation,’ one formed not so much by exposure to violence as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter’s world, home, it seems, is no place.”
—Adam Langer, New York Times
“In this bleak but affecting novel, an unnamed American expat spends a day walking through a frigid, unidentified European city in search of an apartment. The narrator is a veteran who subsequently amassed a small fortune working as a civilian contractor in Iraq; he calls America ‘the kingdom of ambitious stupidity’ and has chosen his new home at random, wanting to live ‘in a cold city,’ where extremes of emotion are ‘extinct.’ What he really wants, though, is to rub away all traces of personality—to ‘anonymize’ himself and live purely in the present tense. The details of his day are rendered with anaesthetized precision and achieve a cumulative force of grief, equanimity, and resolve.”