Idra Novey’s Shelf Life
Idra Novey is a writer and translator. She’s the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, Indie Next Pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice and also Ways to Disappear, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story ‘The Glacier’. She teaches fiction at Princeton University. Her latest novel, Take What You Need, is published by Daunt Books in the UK.
How and where are you?
I'm eating leftover pie for breakfast in my hometown right now, in western Pennsylvania. Last night, I gave a reading with the Appalachian artist Norman Ed, whose mixed media sculptures greatly influenced the sculptures I invented for Jean in the novel. Norm has accumulated decades of wondrous sculptures in his home, as Jean does in the novel. At the reading last night, Norm's daughter told me she felt a profound connection to Jean's stepdaughter quest to figure out a meaningful home for Jean's immense sculptures. Norm's daughter Nelly also recognized something of her father's sensibility in the discards that Jean seeks in the novel. To speak with Nelly about the invented lives in Take What You Need, how they mirror aspects of her own life was fascinating.
What are you reading right now?
Roy Jacobsen's fourth novel set on Barroy, a remote one-family island off the coast of Norway. In the section I read this morning, a historian in the novel remarks that their isolated way of life on the coast deserves to be chronicled with reverance and care. I've come to feel a similar sense of urgency to chronicle underrecognized ways of living in the remote place where I grew up. I've never been to Norway or a one-family island like Barroy, but I feel a deep connection to Jacobsen's novels set there, and his translators, Don Shaw and Don Bartlett, create a remarkably vivid sense in English of how people speak to each other in dialect, the distinct sensibility of conversations on the island as Jacobsen rendered them in Norwegian.
And, of course, watching or listening to?
I just listened to Fabiano do Nascimento's album Das Nuvens while walking my dog. He is an extraordinary Brazilian guitarist and songwriter.
What did you read as a child?
I followed my father's books recommendations for most of childhood until at a certain age it felt necessary to take none of his recommendations, on anything. My dad was an avid reader of both fiction and poetry. He held onto a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems from his undergraduate years at State College that he gave me to one night, after I showed him one of the many dramatic poems I wrote in high school. My conversations with my father were calmest when we talked about books.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you?
My experience translating Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. irrevocably altered my notions of prose. My years translating the Brazilian poets Manoel de Barros and Paulo Henriques Britto vastly expanded the number of alleyways I now consider when starting a poem. I recently translated a story by the magnificent Chilean writer Nona Fernandez that shifted my thinking about a new short story. Translation is the deepest kind of reading. For the most part, I've only translated writers whose influence I was seeking.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
The first review of Take What You Need on Goodreads came out months before the book was available and the galleys had gone out. A woman named Amy posted a vicious review and I couldn't figure out how she even had access to the novel,or why she wanted to hack it to pieces. Maybe she didn't have the book and just made up the reivew because I accidentally took her seat once on a bus, who knows. It was a vague review that could have been written without reading the book, as often happens on Goodreads. Her rant ended with this pronouncement: "This feels like a first draft, with some serious kinks that need to be worked out before it becomes the story it wants to be." I found it amusing that she presumed to know what someone else's novel "wants to be."
How would you describe your creative process?
I move forward one sentence at a time, as slowly as a poet. Sentences are my unit of meaning and the only way I know how to proceed, murmuring each phrase aloud, focusing on the sonic resonances between the words and the subtext of each sentence, how much I can leave unsaid.
Tell us about your experience of the publishing industry.
I've been extremely fortunate, overall, in my publishing experiences. I've worked with the same wondrous agent and editor on each novel, PJ Mark and Laura Tisdel for ten years on three books. I've grown close to both of them and their guidance has been crucial. My experiences with the editors and publishing team at Daunt Books has been wondrous, too.
With translations, my experience has been mixed. I had a horrible experience with a series editor who wanted to take credit for one of my translations and remove my name and put his own name on the cover instead. It was quite bizarre and something I've never heard of any other editor attempting to do. That editor went on to try and take credit for the translations of several other young female translators as well.
This summer, I started working with a new editor, Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan, on my first book of poetry in ten years, coming out in fall 2024. Suzanna's edits and ideas have been exceptional. We brainstormed together on the title and I'm really looking forward to working with her on the rest of the book.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Francisco Goldman told me to think of book reviews like knots along the length of a rope, to imagine complimentary reviews as knots clustered at one end and disappointing critical reviews as knots clustered at the other end. Regardless of where the knots are, the length and material of the rope remains the same, and over time, Francisco advised, it's better not to take any of the knots too seriously, how many happen to be on one end of the rope or the other. I haven't been able to internalize this excellent advice yet, but I think of it often.
What are you working on right now?
I've written the opening passages of a new novel thirty or so times this summer. It will likely be years before I settle on the point of entry that feels right. I'm also experimenting with a long poem I might add to this new collection coming out next year. I may scrap both before September, we'll see.
(Author photo: Jesse Ditmar)