Winner of the 2010 William L. Crawford Award, The Manual of Detection is Jedediah Berry's first novel. In this recent interview the author shares some of the influences and passions that have inspired his own writing, as well as what we can expect in the future.
When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
I don’t remember a particular moment, when suddenly the typewriter sprang to life under my fingers, and the pages began piling up. But I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and stories and storytelling have been an important part of my life since my grandmother started inventing fairy tales for me at bedtime.
Who are some of the authors that have influenced your own work?
There are too many to list, and of course there are different kinds of influence. But the two writers whose work I carry with me in some essential way—who got to me at an important and formative moment—are Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. The way they engaged with the fantastic in their writing gave me permission, in a way, to explore the possibilities in fiction that most interested me.
Can you tell us a bit about the initial spark of inspiration behind The Manual of Detection?
It began in my head as a series of images: two men in a rowboat in the rain, a sleepwalker who drops leaves wherever he goes, a bed in a clearing in the woods. The story was an excuse to string those images together, and most of them survived the process. I also had my main character, a hapless file clerk named Charles Unwin, pretty clearly in mind when I started.
Dreams being central to the novel, how does their surreal nature give you as a writer an opportunity to approach humanity on a unique level?
I’ll put it this way. Let’s say there are two hats on the ground. In one of the hats, someone’s head is trying to stay warm. In the other, a small animal is trying to sleep. The head is a newspaper left open to the funny pages, and the small animal is the largest animal in the world. See what I’m getting at?
How do you think the surreal nature of the story affects the reading experience of the book?
I’m not sure, because I think the story is really concrete and straightforward. It’s about a man who wants to get his old job back, but what he does to get it back makes him unsuitable for the job.
The Manual of Detection is a literary fantasy/mystery—a combination I think we don’t see nearly enough of. How does your background inform the way you write and what you write about?
I find myself easily befuddled by most things, so the world to me is a fantastic and mysterious place. I report things as I feel them, and try not to worry too much about which shelf it’ll end up on. I also blame Washington Irving, whose stories were presented more or less as fact where I grew up (the Hudson Valley region of New York State). I’m still half expecting to stumble upon an old man sleeping in the hills, his beard grown down to his feet.
What are you currently working on?
I’m trying not to talk about it too much. It’s a novel, and a lot of it takes place on a train, and there are ghosts, but the word “ghost” means something different now.
Lynne Jamneck - Lynne Jamneck lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Short listed for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards, she has published short fiction in ...
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