Kate Christensen: "It was fun to allow these women to be full of longing"
Kate Christensen "Feldman's Women".
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: Did not you really know that your novel "Feldman's Women" was nominated for Best American Book of the Year for the PEN / Faulkner Award?
Kate Christensen: That's really true - it was the total surprise for me, not to say a shock.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: Because you thought these ancient lions of literature and then me?
Kate Christensen: Exactly. I almost fainted when the call came.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: An old lion of his guild is also the title hero of her new novel - the fictional painter Oscar Feldman. However, he is already dead on the first page.
Kate Christensen: So the stage is free for the muses of his life. It was great fun to allow these women to be full of longing. Full of desire, passion, hope and life.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: You once said that the male muse is an innumerable rarity in the art world. What about her collection of muses?
Kate Christensen: My muses are men I wanted to impress at any time of my life. That started with a boy named Kenny. He went with me to the eighth grade and I wanted to marry him. But he had a crush on a girl who was a lot prettier and a lot nicer. So I had to come up with something. I wrote my first story and sent it to him chapter by chapter during the lesson. I wanted to make him laugh, and when I heard this redeeming noise four rows behind me, I never stopped writing. Since then I have written each of my books for another male muse.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: But this time you dedicated your novel to your mother Lizzie.
Kate Christensen: I keep my male muses secret. And my mother did inspire me for my new novel: she fell in love again in her 60s and had a fantastic affair. With a man she already knew for 30 years. He was the love of her life, but she just had to reach a certain age to get it. And while I was writing the book, there were suddenly a lot of messages about lovers well over 80 in the media - apparently they have more sex than anyone else.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: What did your mother say about her novel?
Kate Christensen: She loves the book.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: Do you actually have German roots? If you read your first novel "The Bar Stool", you will not shake the suspicion that you know a lot about German mothers and Hummelfiguren.
Kate Christensen: I had a German grandfather. Hans Otto Max Friedrich Pusch - my mother was born in Dornach and Swiss German was her mother tongue. The Pusch family emigrated to America when she was three, so that my grandfather could not be drafted into Hitler's army. I also have ancestors from Norway and England, so I'm a North European mix, but my German roots are a strong part of my heritage.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com: Your books are not only passionately loved but also passionately eaten. Write how you cook?
Kate Christensen: Absolutely. I go to the kitchen or sit down at my desk with an idea but no recipe or schedule for the plot. I pick up my characters or ingredients and start playing around. And eventually take over the ingredients and determine what I serve people. That's the most fun thing for me.
The book: "Feldmans Women" by Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen "Feldman's Women".
This novel actually makes you younger. Because his heroines are well over 70 and so wild that they instantly infect you with their arrogance, cravings, and ability to cook men to bed. They are called "Feldman's women", named after Oscar Feldman, a fictive painter. Throughout his life he has obsessively painted women's acts and brought them to New York's MoMA. Right at the beginning of the novel is his obituary in the "New York Times". And that's where his life gets complicated. Because he leaves behind not only a woman and a sister, who was always in his shadow as an artist (both mentioned in the obituary), but also a long-term mistress Teddy (in the obituary as unmentioned as the twin twin daughters) and their bosom friend Lila, who also consumed by Feldman. That then two biographers come on the scene, which - stir up in the race for the first work on the artist - dust, makes the novel about second, third, even fourth chances in life to a great deal of fun.
"I think he fell in love with me a bit," says Oscar's mistress Teddy (74) after the first biographer's visit."How old is he?" Asks her friend Lila. "Forty, I would say, maybe a bit older." - "A boy," says the girlfriend. And happy. And the widowed lover is even more happy. "I prefer a young bung." Kate Christensen wanted to write a novel about "when it comes to the end of a life and you feel that you have so much life left in you". She succeeded in doing this with a joke that ironically revolves around spider veins and "armbands". And a dignity that rightly earned her the PEN / Faulkner Award for Best American Book of the Year 2008.
(B: Kristina Lake-Zapp, 352 p., 16.95 euros, Droemer)
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