Zhang Fan, “Resting,” 1998, Oil on Canvas

For more.

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“I was betraying Abigail fast and furious on the keyboard. Typing and typing and typing.”

Chris Abani describes how he came to write his novella, Becoming Abigail. (Hat-tip, Elegant Variation.) I’m always a bit divided over fragmentary narratives, but in Abani’s account, we get brief, haunting stories:

A few months later, waiting for my friend at the South Bank Center, sitting by a big window overlooking the Thames, nursing a tea and flipping through an old newspaper someone had discarded, a story caught my eye. A judge in France presiding over an immigration case fell in love with a young woman brought before him. She was fleeing some injustice to women in Morocco. Anyway, she was underage and he was forced to retire. The full nature of their relationship was not clear. The girl tried to appeal his dismissal. Then she appealed the order keeping them apart. She was in love. Finally, with some misguided notion that if she were not around everything would go back to normal for him, she killed herself.

And another one that mentions Amitav Ghosh, whose In An Antique Land we’re reading in class next week:

Amitav Ghosh, on a stage in Durban, South Africa, expressed this thought in response to a question: What is often most important to me when writing, even in a historical moment, what matters most, is not so much the particulars of that historical moment, but the texture of the characters’ lives.

chris-abani-becoming-abigail