Featured Interview With Fiona Rintoul
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a Scottish writer based in Glasgow and on the Isle of Harris. I flit between these two very different places with my husband and our two Labradors. I grew up in East Kilbride, a new town on the outskirts of Glasgow, and spent many years living and working abroad and in London, before returning – gratefully – to Scotland in 2005.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was a voracious reader as a child and have always loved writing. The first time I remember being really excited by creative writing was aged about 12 during a school test, when I felt I’d nailed a description of some trees. However, I love all kinds of writing – not just fiction writing. Anything to do with words interests me. That’s probably why I ended up working as journalist for years. I wrote about investment, which as lot of people think is a dry topic, but I enjoyed the challenge of writing about it in an interesting way. I also love translating. I studied French and German at university, and in 2014 I published my first full-length literary translation, Outside Verdun by Arnold Zweig. The book is a German classic of the first world war, overlooked in the west because Zweig was a communist. It was incredibly complex to translate, with a lot of military vocabulary and dialect, but I enjoyed every minute of it. The thrill of finding just the right translation was the same as the one I got when I nailed the trees.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
When I was young I loved ‘the Margarets’: Margaret Atwood and Margaret Drabble. They portrayed women who were feisty and fit for the fight, and they wrote, I felt, with great humor. Then I got into ‘the Ians’: Ian McEwan and the Scottish writer Ian Banks. They too both wrote with humor, and there was often a mystery at the center of their books. I love books that unveil a secret or some terrible event from the past. One book in that vein that I love is Out Stealing Horses by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson. Another is In Times of Fading Light by the East German writer Eugen Ruge, which keeps circling back to one event on 1 October 1989 shortly before the Berlin Wall fell. I also love books that somehow make the world sparkle in new ways, even if sparkles rather darkly. The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami does this, as does Jenny Erpenbeck, another East German writer.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
In The Leipzig Affair, which is my first novel, I tried to create the kind of world I like to read about. The book is set in the former East Germany and has at its heart a series of secrets and betrayals, which are slowly unveiled. I lived in East Germany as student and I wanted to show what it was like to live in a fairly grim dictatorship, where betrayal was common currency. However, I also wanted to show the country’s romantic side – because it certainly had one. There was always something a little bit glamorous about the border crossings, the guards, the dusty, car-less streets. And it was fascinating to live in a country where money wasn’t that important. People had big, book-lined flats in tumbledown, turn-of-the-century apartment buildings. They went on holiday to Bulgaria. And there was a thriving arts scene that was all the more exciting because it was underground.
The glamorous side of East Germany is embodied in the central character of Magda. She’s a strong-minded, independent young woman who can be quite ruthless. But, of course, she also has feelings and vulnerabilities, and her trust in one particular friend is in the end her undoing.
The book took me a long time to write: over a decade from conception to publication, though I wasn’t working on it consistently all that time. It took me so long because there was a doubt at the back of my mind about whether I was ‘qualified’ to write it, as I’m not East German. A trip back to Germany quashed my doubts. I realized there was still so much suspicion between east and west that an outsider was probably the best person to write the story.
When the book was published, my favorite response was from an elderly woman in Dresden, who wrote to thank me for writing it because she said it perfectly captured her memories of what it was like to live in East Germany both before and after reunification. She said she appreciated that I was neither an ‘Ossi’ nor a ‘Wessi’. That was a lesson. You can write anyone, because the character you are creating is unique.
The Leipzig Affair is in two parts. The first part takes place in the 1980s during the communist dictatorship, and the second after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the second part, Magda begins to uncover some of the secrets that so affected her life during communism. The second part also tells the story of German reunification, which was much more complex, particularly in the eastern part of the country, than the dominant narrative allows. This is topical again today because of political developments in the European Union. It is poignant that Helmut Kohl, the architect of German reunification and of the single European currency, died just as talks on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union began.
We’re entering a new period of history in Europe and a time of great uncertainty. I hope The Leipzig Affair helps a little to illuminate what went before.
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