Welcome, friend! Today I am chatting with author Catherine de Saint Phalle about her book, Call Me Marlow. This is an Australian literary fiction that came out in May. Let’s welcome Catherine and learn more about the book!
Get to know the author: Catherine de Saint Phalle
Welcome Catherine! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
My name is Catherine de Saint Phalle. I live in Brunswick. I arrived in Australia in 2003, just after my mother’s death. I have been writing since the age of seven. I am an Australian citizen since 2008. I was born in London and only spoke English until I was eight years of age. Then the person who was like a mother to me suddenly left and I had to learn French. I’ve written 6 books in French and four in English. I have always published in Australia with Transit Lounge. I have no children, only a small, very determined dog. My friends are my family.
What inspired you to write this book?
I had written a novel called The Sea and Us before this one. The main character was called Harold. When I finished it, my life took a sudden turn, and everything changed for me. The only part that didn’t change was Harold. He would not leave me. He just stayed there. I kept on hearing his voice, so I started writing a second novel with him as main character again – Call me Marlowe.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
About four or five years.
What makes your story unique?
I suppose what makes it unique (for me), is the characters.
They led their lives, and I was an observer, a notetaker, a secretary. They decided. Not me.
Sometimes I could not write fast enough. I ran after them.
I felt that it was all happening as I was writing.
That’s what was special. They were alive. More alive than me.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
My mother was obsessed with exile and banishment. The two words acquired a power over me. Anyone who feels exiled from their feelings, or their body, or their memory, or their country, anyone who is disenfranchised and cannot return to a familiar soil of friends, or family or workplace, anyone who does not recognise their life and feels banished from it – could perhaps feel an affinity with this book.
I wonder if we are not all ‘exilees’ from some form of home at different times of our life. But the effort of finding it again is what makes us grow.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
I hope they’ll feel better if they have the flu, more confident if they feel doubtful. I hope it makes them laugh on a grey day and comfort them on a dark one. I hope it brings them even an atom of consolation.
Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?
Yes, when the character Petr is sitting beside Harold on the chemist’s bench.
What is something you have learned on your author journey so far?
I always learn the same thing – to forge ahead into darkness until you find some light. A bit like a mole …
What’s the best piece of advice you have received related to writing?
Listen to your heart.
If you could give a shout out to someone(s) who has helped in your writer journey, please feel free to mention them below!
Barry Scott who ‘heard’ the book. Barry Scott whose been such a profound help in every way and in friendship.
Call Me Marlow
Literary Fiction, Published 2023
Set in both Prague and Melbourne. ‘Call me Marlowe’ captures a man’s search for his motherland in the hope of making sense of his life.
With a delicate touch, the novel embodies the nature of trauma – both personal and political – in people’s lives. Harold Vaněk loves Marylou, a woman he met in South Korea, where she was working as a sex worker, but whom he has managed to bring to Melbourne. She is the one who calls Harold ‘Marlowe.’ Theirs is an uncommonly beautiful but tenuous intimacy.
Harold feels his mistakes are urging him to leave Melbourne. In a wild gamble to retrieve all he has lost, he disappears to Prague. What happens in ‘the City of the Hundred Spires’ is both remarkable and affecting. The people he meets there – Václav, Marie, Pete and Petr – and the soul of the city itself provide answers and a ‘world’ that he wants desperately wants Marylou to be part of.
But is it all too late?
Content notes: None declared by the author.
Book Excerpt from
Call Me Marlow
Doctor Doolittle
The aircraft is behaving like a bucking bronco, but I’m not bothered. I realise that the whiskey must be pursuing its benevolent task. When the pilot lands without a bump, they all clap. I feel more like having a nap. In fact, I could have flown on forever. Eventually, I meekly follow the last passengers out of the plane. We are hermetically syphoned off to the terminal in a jet bridge.
Suffused with light, dwarfed by its pharaonic proportions, walking in Doha airport feels like being in a galactic bee’s eye.
I check the gate for the connecting flight to Praha and write the number down on the back of my old boarding card. Then, I wade towards a cosy bar. It’s extending its arms out to me. Something about it has a Korean feel – it’s neat and purposeful, with lights twinkling in a shadowy grove.
A friendly Asian barman, with the improbable name of Carlo, is soon keeping my levels of alcohol at exactly the right pitch for me to get on the next plane. He even asks what I was drinking on the flight and advises me to stay on whisky, when I was about to stray to vodka. Carlo has just divorced and speaks gently and sadly of his ex-wife. He doesn’t regret – ‘Oh, no, I just smile,’ he says. ‘A smile for the past.’ Barmen are always crazily wise. He stops topping me up when I seem to be having trouble reading my boarding pass, and I return to my amiable ambling around the place, straying under vaulted prisms and concrete buttresses, following the kind numbers leading me to the next plane.
Travellers with their pillows around their necks, pulling cases like pet animals on wheels, are all organised, all going somewhere. Because I’m fleeing and not choosing, I could be aiming for some haphazard place, like a Doctor Doolittle with his eyes closed, holding his index finger aloft a swirling globe on its stand to choose his destination. Sometimes, Doctor Doolittle’s finger drops in the middle of the sea, and he must start again.
Maruška used to read me Hugh Lofting’s books when I was a kid. Like Chandler, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway and A.A. Milne, he was part of the Lost Generation, those who’d been in the trenches or suffered World War I in some way, but Lofting was the only one of them who, inventing a story for his children, wrote from the trench itself. Maruška filled me in on this. She was so knowledgeable about their lives. The way they had dealt with the war appeared to reassure her. Even if it were only by drinking… Swinging on gossamer threads, they hurled themselves through the jungles of their own minds. You can go through hell and still exist, Harruld. I asked her, Does exist mean to be alive? She stared at me with that Slavic absence that manages to be such a gift of presence. Yes, Harruld, but only just. I had to be content with that. But now I understand what she meant, about being only a hull, about leaving oneself in another place and hanging on to mere strands of being. Alive, but only just. At the time I didn’t connect these comments to Maruška herself. When I’m in Praha, perhaps I will.
Maruška would read to me for hours, her knees crossed at a funny angle, with her foot, housed in a reasonable shoe that absolutely no one wore in the inner suburb of Richmond, floating at an odd angle. The soft light of dusk or a lamp by a sofa would shed its glow on the scene of which I was a part. Why do I remember that shoe, that glow, so well, when the tone of her voice, her features sometime vanish entirely? How can one direly miss people who are so blurry?
She was scarred too, of course. And now, I wonder to what degree. The fact she could only really communicate with the child that I was and avoided all sustained conversation with other people, including her daughter, is slowly dawning on me. Why do I only start understanding people when I’ve lost them? Am I going to do better at understanding Marylou now that I’m at the other end of the world? Well, I can begin with Maruška…
The tutelary god of drunks brings me to the right gate and departure lounge. On the plane, I notice my whisky-providing friend again a few rows up from me, but I’m past caring and stare ahead, comatose.
I must have slept through the last leg of the trip, because suddenly I’m about to be spewed out in Prague. It feels like a non-event. I may have dreamt of the place in another life of longing, but now this Doctor Dolittle choice leaves me cold. I could just as well try imagining Maruška’s past anywhere.
When we land, we step out onto the tarmac instead of being hermetically syphoned off like in Doha. But once in the terminal, after the passport check, I’m stopped by two custom officers. One is tall and skinny, his eyes wide with trapped laughter, his tone sepulchral. His outfit, more a scarecrow’s sartorial experiment than a uniform, hangs desperately on its bony structure. His sidekick looks like a salesman from whom you wouldn’t buy a second-hand fridge. His belt is buckled at the perfect notch, his uniform fits the breadth of his shoulders to a millimetre, and the crease of his trousers cuts through the air like the bow of a ship. I respond punctiliously to their probing questions. Something about their tone, their highhanded officialdom, has me thinking of Maruška’s fear of any form of public authority – policemen, lawyers, teachers, doctors, even nurses when I come to think of it – a fear that Marylou shares.
I answer their questions in fluent Czech. My drunk Czech is more polished than my sober Czech. After all, it’s my mother’s and grandmother’s tongue. But this fluency doesn’t produce the desired effect, nor does my lack of luggage except a backpack. My situation mirrors Marylou’s flight from Seoul. They obviously think I’m a dodgy character, rightly so. Both menacing and friendly, the two men are starting to feel familiar, nearly cosy.
Then, I feel a hand on my arm.
It’s my whisky friend again. I can’t fathom how she’s suddenly part of this conversation. They don’t refer to my inebriated state, perhaps believing that it’s too obvious a point in their favour. But she does, as she launches into a discussion with them. ‘He drank too much on the plane. He’s afraid of heights.’
Interested?
Find Call Me Marlow on Goodreads.
Thank you for hanging out with us today.
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details. Check out other book excerpts here.
Be First to Comment