Hope has a darkish aspect in alum’s ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ — Harvard Gazette

Set in climate-stricken Kolkata within the not-too-distant future, Megha Majumdar’s second novel, “A Guardian and a Thief,” weaves collectively the tales of two households over the course of every week, every in their very own means navigating psychological and ethical complexities. “There are two selves who occupy this body,” one among Majumdar’s characters tells us. “There is who I am to strangers, and there is who I am to the people who saw me grow up.”

In this edited interview, Majumdar ’10, who printed her debut, “A Burning,” in 2020, discusses how the follow-up — a finalist for this 12 months’s National Book Award in fiction — foregrounds the human coronary heart in battle with itself.

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What impressed “A Guardian and a Thief”?

The guide has a number of roots. One factor I used to be serious about was love and hope. In a time of disaster, these sentiments we consider as noble and good would possibly acquire manifestations that are vicious or imply or sly. Can we nonetheless be pleased with them in these expressions?

Another place the place this guide began for me was my hometown, Kolkata, India. It is without doubt one of the locations most profoundly affected by local weather change, and I used to be serious about the lived expertise of it. When I used to be studying about rising warmth in Kolkata, I assumed again to a childhood expertise. I used to be going to the movie show to look at “Monsters, Inc.” when it got here out. The day was so scorching, I keep in mind my sneakers sticking to the tar of the street. We can speak about rising temperatures and warmth, however that’s what it feels like: Your sneakers keep on with the street.

So this stuff have been attention-grabbing to me — this future world of Kolkata and the ethical questions — however I couldn’t make the plot work. I had completely different characters, a unique storyline. Then, in 2021, I had my older son, and my perspective on the guide fully modified. I took an interest within the standpoint of a mom on this disaster. That expertise of early parenthood helped me drill all the way down to the emotional core of the guide.

The guide takes place over the course of a (very eventful) week. How did you utilize your writing to seize the depth and the pace at which the story unfolds?

I knew that I needed one thing that may really feel crammed with rigidity, actually taut. And I would wish to maintain that power, that feeling of one thing having gone very fallacious: What goes to occur? What selections will these characters make? I wanted a really compressed period of time the place I may maintain that power and likewise present issues meaningfully altering. Every week felt like a very good period of time for that.

Throughout the story, most of the grownup characters are mendacity, not simply to 1 one other but additionally to themselves. Their inside narratives are sometimes at odds with their actions. What is it a couple of disaster that brings this out within the characters?

That’s a very attention-grabbing query. I believe that house exists between who we wish to be — the principled self that we wish to be, that as a matter of self-preservation we should consider we’re — and who we grow to be once we are beneath stress. When we really feel that sources are scarce, and we should seize what’s obtainable for our family members or different folks will seize it as an alternative … that house is attention-grabbing to me as a novelist. It’s an area of each claiming one thing and sacrificing one thing else, an area of acquire and of loss. It’s an area the place our conception of ourselves is profoundly altered, and do we’ve got the braveness to be clear-eyed about who we actually are, or should we mislead ourselves in an effort to shield the picture that we’ve got? And, who’s to say which is the true self? Am I my true self now in a time of relative abundance and luxury, or would I be my true self in a situation of disaster and shortage?

For a reader, it’s simple to attempt to pit the “guardian” versus the “thief,” however in some ways they’re one and the identical. There’s a quote from the guide about hope: “Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled, it fought, it deceived.” How does this guide wrestle with a unique portrayal of hope than the one we regularly encounter?

The guide is excited about confronting faces of hope and love that may frighten us. Hope and love are much more advanced than we would intuitively comprehend. I believe the ability of these emotions — the drive contained in hope and love — is such that we is perhaps pushed to do issues that we’re not pleased with; we is perhaps pushed to make selections that fully contradict our sense of ourselves as ethical beings, as respectable neighbors and associates and members of a neighborhood. One of probably the most energizing issues in fiction is to come across complexity and truthfulness in different folks’s lives. And I used to be very struck after I was studying about local weather change by how there was a lot discuss of hope — how we have to be hopeful within the face of actually grim predictions — and the idea is that hope is that this factor of sunshine. Well, what if it’s not? You can act out of hope and do one thing that’s actually dangerous to your neighbor. What do you do with that type of hope?

What do you hope readers will take away from studying the novel?

I took a artistic fiction writing class at Harvard with Amy Hempel, and I keep in mind studying an interview along with her the place she stated that she all the time writes as if the reader is dying to get away from her. And that has all the time caught with me. This would possibly sound unusual, however I like serious about find out how to entertain a reader. So I hope, to begin with, {that a} reader feels engaged within the guide and drawn in by the plot. And then on the finish of the guide, I hope that they sit with the questions that have been so essential to me in writing it.

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Majumdar will speak about “A Guardian and a Thief” at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Cambridge Public Library.