Johanna Skibsrud says she first heard composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time accidentally at a free concert series in Toronto. “I was shocked by the beauty and strangeness of it” she says.
A program accompanying the performance detailed the creation of Quartet which was composed by Messiaen while detained in a German prison camp during the Second World War. “The structure wasn’t dictated by his own creativity exactly” says Skibsrud. “He knew a clarinetist cellist and violinist in the camp and wrote the piece specifically for them.”
She was struck by the idea of creating work from that experience particularly the implication that Messiaen and the musicians were collaborating with the Germans. “As far as I’m aware there was some disquiet because the musicians had the time and privilege to compose and perform” she says.
Her new novel also titled Quartet for the End of Time is a sprawling drama taking readers from Depression-era America to Europe at the end of the Second World War. It opens with a mass of angry disenfranchised First World War veterans (calling themselves the Bonus Army) marching on Washington demanding bonus pay promised before the war. “I was surprised that I had never heard of the protest before” says Skibsrud adding that she had been unaware of the fact many veterans returned from the First World War feeling bitter and dejected. “I thought the experience of Vietnam War veterans not treated with respect was anomalous.”
The structure of the novel is also based (“very loosely” says Skibsrud) on Messiaen’s Quartet consisting of eight sections and an interlude in the middle. “Obviously my desire to base it on the Quartet wasn’t an attempt to translate the work which is probably impossible” she says. “It’s more inspired by it — I wanted to reflect upon its structure.”
The interlude in the novel is a series of photographs that take the reader on a mini elliptical trip through the novel’s events and inspiration. “I thought about what an interlude in a novel could be” she says adding that she wanted to “get outside language” by curating a distillation of certain events in the book. “I hope that with them being incoherent to a certain extent that the reader won’t take them literally.”
Skibsrud says she started working on Quartet before “the whirlwind” of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize win for her first novel The Sentimentalists. “The book already had its momentum it was just a question of going back to the project and seeing it through” she says. “I felt a lot of pressure writing the novel with all of its different themes and threads but tried to have that pressure self-inflicted and not worry too much about expectations.
“The Sentimentalists started much longer and more convoluted and came together with the process of revision” she adds. “With Quartet I wanted to go about writing differently but I learned differently.”
She says the initial writing phase — following one narrative thread to another — is the most exciting. “The writing was piling up and again it was deciding what elements are important what story I wanted to tell because the scope and ideas I wanted to tackle were much bigger. There was a lot more to thread together.”
Wordfest presents Johanna Skibsrud at Literary Death Match on October 17 at Theatre Junction Grand; and Writing About War on October 19 at Theatre Junction Grand.
