Jim Ruland interviews Delia Falconer for The Elegant Variation
TEV: On one hand, the literal lost thoughts of the soldiers in your book, particularly those of Star-Gazer and Handsome Jack, have the density of poetry; on the other hand, their yearnings and quotidian catalogs could fill several books. Why did you choose the form of a novella for this story?DF: Two writers were guiding influences as I was writing The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers: W G Sebald and Junichiro Tanizaki. I'm a huge fan of Sebald's, especially the way in which he assumes our knowledge of the Holocaust in his novels and works around its edges to concentrate instead on ephemeral details of trauma and longing. In doing this he completely renews that history's capacity to shock; this is what makes his novels profoundly moving and deeply moral. This idea of renewing history to make it sting appealed to me greatly. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Tanizaki writes about Musashi's abiding sexual obsession with "woman-heads", the noseless heads of warriors slain on the battlefield and taken as trophies. There is a compelling Japanese elegance about Tanizaki's choice to focus his story on this bizarre detail; and, again, that history seems more alive and human to me because of that choice. Sebald gave me the courage to assume that readers were already familiar with the story of Little Bighorn and to concentrate instead on the human detail, the "seams and spaces in between" as Benteen himself says. And there was something about the west that seemed compatible with an almost Asian approach. The haiku-like brevity of people's speech in Wyoming, for example; and the sense of a shadow-world at its edges. I wanted to emphasise the strangeness of that history, to make it foreign, in order to take the spotlight off Custer and turn the focus onto poignant, ordinary moments.
The complete review and interview here.