Bloodlines in Seattle
At my talk in Seattle, I spoke about Bloodlines and the history behind it. Several members of the audience talked to me afterwards about their sense of identification with the story. I was struck, as I have been over and over, by the way people see elements of their own family histories in this novel, and in some way identify the story as their own. This is particularly true of South African expatriates, and it made me wonder about the expatriate novel’ that is, the novel written with the benefit of distance, about a homeland left and now changed into something unrecognizable, yet retaining an irrevocable aura of home.
There is a certain kind of focus available to the expatriate author, because of the distance from the time and place about which the novel is written. It’s not objectivity, because it’s almost impossible to be completely objective about the homeland one has left. One either loves or hates the place, and sometimes both; and it is a place to which no return is possible, the past being a foreign land to which no entry is allowed.