Growing up in Paris, one of my favorite places to take visitors was the catacombs. The entrance was located within walking distance to our apartment, near the busy Denfert Rochereau subway stop. It is fairly typical of teens to be drawn to the macabre (I also loved wandering the Père Lachaise cemetery), but what fascinated me about the catacombs more than the walls of stacked bones and skulls was the vast gallery of tunnels in which they were located, and the way in which the subway system somehow didn't transect them. Here underground, below the bustling street market of the rue Daguerre and the multiple cafés of the Place Denfert Rochereau, was a whole separate world. One that contained history, a story of public health and city planning, and of course human beings. Lives lived and lost.
(The creepiest catacombs I have visited are the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily. I won't post photos; you can visit the web site and see images of actual bodies hanging on the walls. I was there in 1989 as a delegate from my school to an international conference on "La Cité”—meaning "The City" but encompassing the idea of a city as a vast, multilayered, many tentacled, living entity—where I was presenting on Balzac and Zola's depictions of Paris in their books, and my French teacher categorically refused to enter the catacombs with us. Rome also has some great catacombs to visit.)
My friend and writing pal Crystal King (who happens to be very knowledgeable about Italy and its history and writes about it in her Substack) asked me the other day for a paragraph on why I write historical fiction, and as I wrote it I arrived at this insight which I'd never thought about in so many words: that the study of infrastructure (my first career) and the writing of historical fiction have in common the unearthing of the invisible to make sense of the visible. Growing up in several large cities—Paris, New York, Bombay—I was always intrigued by the networks that connected parts of the city, serving as its veins and arteries. Subways, streetcars, sewers, gas lines, power lines, phone lines, water mains... Some cities also have caves, abandoned underground theaters, escape routes. All kinds of stuff!
These are what enable what one sees: shops, homes, office buildings, parks, transit. The living of our lives as urban dwellers. In the same way, our lives today are informed by the history that came before us. The policies that regulate our institutions, the norms that govern social behavior, the standards that inform our values, all of these result from the effects of events that shaped lives in the past, and therefore shape our lives now. I always bristle when someone (usually a child) says that history is boring—clearly it is not being taught effectively to that child—or when someone says that historical fiction is not relevant or relatable. Historical fiction tells the story of individuals, the intimate stories behind periods of movement and change. As James Joyce said, "In the particular is contained the universal."
So we keep on writing. In case you are wondering after my last post, mixed in with the "good" rejections to my manuscript have also been several non-rejections, which I'll tell you are definitely more uplifting. One house passed (their loss!) because they decided it was too "upmarket" for them. If you Google "upmarket" the first definition that comes up, at least for me, is one from the Master Class site that says "Upmarket fiction is a subgenre of fiction books that incorporates elements of page-turning mainstream fiction, while still showcasing the more nuanced prose and complex character development more often found in literary fiction." Well, I don't know about you but that sounds like just the type of book I'd like to read. But terms are so subjective. What is “upmarket” to one is “literary” to another, and “book club” to a third. Upmarket is only one of several terms that agents and editors use to categorize books in ways that readers and even booksellers don't necessarily realize. There's a whole word soup in publishing that's enough to drive a writer up the wall. More on this in another issue.
Meantime, Spring is trying its best to make itself known in New England (I've gone around dousing my tulips and daffodils with Rabbit Scram, hot pepper flakes, and garlic powder to ward off the cute bunnies, and maybe vampires, too) and I hope it's bringing good things to all. This is the season of Passover and Easter and Ramadan, and I send you good wishes if you are observing any of these.
If you are in the Boston area this weekend, do check out this excellent line up of classical Indian concerts, put on by LearnQuest, a local organization dedicated to Indian music.
Click on the image for the full schedule. Maybe I’ll see some of you there.
Warm wishes,
Anjali