Featured Interview With Tom Maremaa
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a writer, coder and storyteller living and working in Silicon Valley.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I began reading seriously when I was around 10 or 11, mostly books about the history of science. I wrote my first novel when I was 14 as part of a project for a middle school English class. It was hard and I vowed never to do it again. Since then, I’ve shamelessly broken that vow and written 12 novels, plus thousands of pages of technical work, a number of non-fiction works, some plays and short fiction.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Coetzee, Bolano, Pamuk. I don’t typically read genre work, though I like it. Genre work tends to be all about delivering a formula to the reader, then repeating that formula book after book. That’s boring, for me. Original fiction, inspired by contemporary or historical events, is my preferred cup of tea.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is Reykjavik: A Novel and it took a lifetime, plus a few extra years to write. Writers and their work are the product of many lifetimes, like cats, I figure.
Passion always dictates form. My passion for this narrative took shape over a period of years. The seeds were planted a long time ago, drawing on my memories of Reykjavik back in the 1980s and the Summit in 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev met to decide the fate of the world.
At the time, the world was teetering on the brink of Armageddon, a dangerous and perverse period in history, with nuclear missiles from the US and Soviet Union pointed at each other, within a time window of 30 minutes from launch. Can you really believe that kind of madness? It still boggles my mind. I mean, we had reached the point where mutually assured destruction (MAD) was the order of the day. Once launched, the missiles could not be stopped or return from their targets, the gravity’s rainbow of their paths impossible to change. Millions would be dead within minutes, the world literally blown to pieces. I’d been living with that for years as a young writer, and even now it stuns when I think about it. I knew something about Reagan, had followed his rise to power, and applauded his willingness to meet with Gorbachev and end this nuclear statement. As it happened, I had come to California in the 1960s for graduate school at Berkeley when Reagan was governor and lived through the Dr. Strangelove period depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s movie with Peter Sellers. I had grown up with The Bomb, but not by any means loving it.
Anything was possible, the world gone mad. And Reagan, to his credit, wanted to rid the planet of these weapons. He and Gorbachev met a number of times, culminating in the Reykjavik Summit, when they knocked heads to figure out a way to reduce, and ultimately eliminate these monstrous nuclear arsenals on both sides. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was coming apart. Under the yoke of Soviet rule, people in Eastern Europe – in countries like Poland, the Baltics, East Germany – were growing more and more dissatisfied with the quality of their lives, restless now, hungry for freedom, resistant to the forces of oppression, all of that. Against this backdrop, the elements of my novel began to come together.
I drew on my personal experiences, travels, and memories. You try to dig deep into the wellsprings of feeling and imagination, and trust your instincts when you sit down to compose. As a young writer and journalist, I spent much of my time traveling, writing and reporting, stretching myself and learning my craft, and as it happened, my travels took me to various cities and countries depicted in the narrative. I tapped into those streams of memory and and drew on my experiences back in Berkeley, California during the 1980s, a turbulent time, much anxiety in the air, tensions between East and West, and in Reykjavik, which became the center of my novel, and in Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I grew up speaking a half-dozen languages as a typical polyglot, like the central character in the novel, Nathalie Campbell, who teaches Russian in Berkeley and is enticed to work as a “translator,” if you will, at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. How was she enticed? And by whom? And were their consequences? Yes, those are questions that novel attempts to answer, although the reader must ultimately decide for themselves.
The novel moves beyond the 1980s. Quite a bit further, as matter of fact. We as readers land in Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Wall, in November 1989 (as I did personally), then beyond to the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapses and a new class of oligarchs emerges to rule and take power and grab the wealth of the country, which was enormous and ripe for the pickings. In the story we return to Reykjavik in 1996 to hear David Bowie perform, then later in the 2000s to visit the gravesite of Bobby Fischer, the extraordinary chess master who is buried in Iceland, and who beat Boris Spassky in 1972 in the chess match of century, and finally, we taste the consequences of revenge all the way up to the present. The consequences, well, can be quite bad, as the younger generation, the youth of today, emerge and take power and control away from their elders, and set things right. That’s how we evolve, how history plays out.
One night Nathalie Campbell appeared, then Andrei Heilemann, both professionals in their respective fields, one a teacher of literature and the other a nuclear scientist, pulled together by the forces of nature, or history, or some combination, their lives intersecting at precisely the moment in time when it mattered the most, when each had to give up something of themselves and change direction in life.
Nathalie Campbell is the central character in the narrative, and as she came to me in my dreams, I began to see her as a kind of everywoman, an anima type, a woman you could not easily forget, a woman who kept you spellbound, a woman whom you could love yet not ever truly know, being somehow elusive, fleeting, magical, a woman with great depth and feeling, a woman of the world with many stories to tell. Does that make sense? Probably not. Even now, having written the book, I still can’t figure her out. Andrei Heilemann, the Soviet scientist who defects to the West, was my neighbor down the street, the colleague at work, the man whom I knew, not as a brilliant nuclear scientist, but simply a fellow I could depend on in a crisis, a good man, perhaps even a great man, yet a man with a past, a man with a vengeful brother, a man swept up in the torrents of history, caught in its dangerous cross-currents and multiplying dark forces.
For me, novels take on a life all their own if the characters won’t let go, and in this case, Nathalie and Andrei did just that. They wouldn’t let go. I began living and breathing the lives of these characters, writing about them as if they were part of my family, sharing their lives with my wife, who later worked hard and brilliantly to edit the book and understand these characters, what made them tick, what motivated their actions, what made them real in the best sense of the word.
The story of Nathalie and Andrei’s personal lives seemed important and needed to be filled in. Another character appeared, much later. Dylan Rose, the probing, inquisitive journalist, appeared to tell their story, the story of a family caught in the crosswinds of huge geopolitical changes. And of course, there had to be the resentment of the younger brother in the old Soviet Union, whose anger at the fall of Empire could not be underestimated or denied, the embodiment of all that happened when the Soviet Union crumbled and fell apart, and a new class of oligarchs emerged. He would not rest. He would go after his older brother who defected to the West, and do it with a vengeance.
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