Brevity Creates Breadth: A Review-Interview with Kalani Pickhart on "I Will Die in a Foreign Land"
Kalani Pickhart | I Will Die in a Foreign Land | Two Dollar Radio | 2021 | 300 pages
When readers need to know a century’s worth of history to comprehend a novel’s dynamics, a fiction writer confronts a task that may appear simple but is actually excruciatingly difficult. Of course, adept writers can explain decades of strife in a few pages, but a novel’s aim is to dramatize life’s most complex troubles and evoke emotional and intellectual responses to them. Writers accomplish this, as John Gardner famously said, by creating “a vivid and continuous fictional dream” in the reader’s mind. Summaries of history will usually feel at odds with this dream. So what’s an intrepid author to do?
Kalani Pickhart faced this dilemma while writing her novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land, published in October 2021 by Two Dollar Radio. Her story deals with events in Russia, Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia over the past fifty-plus years, and features four primary characters. Slava is a young, brash Ukrainian woman trying to find her place in an inhospitable world. Katya is an American-Ukrainian doctor who’s fled a troubled marriage after her son’s death. These two stories take place in 2014, during the culmination of an uprising that toppled Ukraine’s Russian-leaning government. Katya has come from Boston to help treat injured protesters, and Slava lives near the main protest site in Kyiv.
Slava’s friend Misha is an engineer helping build defensive structures in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. His story alternates between 2014 and the events that led up to his moving to Kyiv, including his family’s experience during the Chernobyl disaster, his work in Ukrainian mines, and his marriage. The fourth character is Aleksandr, an older Russian man who’s been playing piano at the protests and is injured in the opening pages of the novel. From that point forward, readers only glimpse him through the eyes of Katya and Misha, who tend to him in the makeshift hospital of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. Most of Aleksandr’s story takes place fifty years earlier, while he was a KGB agent living between Russia and Czechoslovakia.
Pickhart knew that most English-speaking readers wouldn’t be familiar with the Russian and Ukrainian history necessary to understand the characters, so she would have to delineate that history without violating Gardener’s dream. On top of this, she would have to find a way to juggle three different time periods. I recently had an opportunity to speak to Pickhart about how she accomplished this incredible feat. Her approach demonstrates that sometimes brevity is the secret to breadth.
One choice she made in the initial draft was to embrace a fragmented and “underwritten” approach. She kept the chapters, scenes, and exposition short. Readers will notice a lot of white space, or frequent section breaks, used to leap between pivotal moments. Pickhart also allowed some of the sequencing and time-lapses to go unspecified.
Kalani Pickhart: I can’t conceive of writing a novel from only one perspective because there’s so much we learn from different voices. I feel like each of the stories makes the other much richer and fuller. And I do get a little bored if I force myself to stay in the same space too long. If I’m not enjoying writing it then I think the reader is not going to enjoy reading it…I also tend to write less [initially] and have to fill in [later].
Pickhart also embraced the fact that when you are writing a polyphonic book with different time periods, it’s too limiting to write sections in the order they will appear. Often, it’s easier to imagine one storyline at a time, then intercut them for draft two (or there, or four).
Pickhart: In the early stages the majority of the writing was writing each character straight through. I was trying to get into the space of each character, feeling out who they are, what’s happened to them, and notice the memory recalls and what things would trigger them.
As Pickhart drafted, she realized her characters couldn’t always be credible conduits for the deep history the novel required, so she incorporated non-narrative chapters, including newspaper articles (real and invented), lists, and song lyrics. She also wrote chapters from the point of view of traditional Ukrainian folk singers called the Kobzari. To help the reader juggle all these forms, Pickhart utilized a varied labeling scheme for chapters, eschewing the regularity most novels impose. Headings include:
BELLS RING AT ST. MICHAEL’S MONASTERY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY 800 YEARS SUNG BY KOBZARI
SLAVA’S APARTMENT SHOVKOVYCHNA STREET JANUARY 18, 2014
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF ANTI-PROTEST LAWS PASSED BY VERKHOVNA RADA ON JANUARY 16, 2014
AUDIO CASSETTE RECORDING SIDE ONE CONTINUED
JOURNALIST DASCHA BANDURA REPORTED MISSING FEBRUARY 20, 2014
Some headings are used to explicitly state when and where a chapter is taking place, whose point of view will be featured, and what kind of text we’re reading. In others, Pickhart provides only the facts she wants the reader to know, such as in the chapters labeled “Audio Cassette Recording.” Their content quickly makes clear who is speaking—Aleksandr, the former KGB agent—but it takes most of the novel to understand when, where, and why he recorded the story of his life.
Pickhart: Many of the characters’ narratives happen in present tense, so the character is responding in real-time, whereas with Aleksandr his story is in past tense and his goal is to be reflective and try to understand his life. Sometimes he will have laments like ‘if only I’d known.’
The audio cassettes solve two challenges. As a narrative conceit, they create the occasion for his self-reflection. As physical objects, they allow other characters to hear Aleksandr’s story in 2014 even though he lies in a church in Kyiv, injured and unable to talk.
Pickhart was acutely aware of how ambitious her novel was, but instead of becoming timid or changing her goals, the difficulties made her more willing to experiment.
Pickhart: [Readers] are trying to learn so many different things at once. I wasn’t sure how the Kobzari voice was going to be received, but when I was writing it, it was mostly in verse, and I thought, “I’m going to have poetry in this book?” I was already writing about Ukraine, a conflict many don’t know much about, and yet the more I was writing it, the more the Kobzari felt right, and because it was like a Greek chorus, I thought it would feel familiar.
The Kobzari’s ability to impart historical information, comment and speculate on situations, and offer philosophical insights does feel familiar to anyone who’s read the Greek classics. The chorus and the Kobzari can also speak in the rare first-person collective, a “we” point of view, and Pickhart uses it to give the entire Ukrainian people a voice.
Another demanding strategy that paid off was letting go of a chronological approach. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Review of Books Pickhart’s method was referred to as a “tapestry.” Indeed, the novel captures so much in so few pages by using what one might call a “patchwork” structure. In addition to featuring several perspectives, patchwork novels leap around in time, relating events based on a subjective or emotional timeline rather than describing them in chronological order.
Pickhart: The Kobzari voice can go anywhere in time and the news articles can also jump back in time in order to bring certain events to light for the reader at a point when they [are] important to the characters rather than when they actually happened.
That’s an important detail: bringing events to light for the reader at a point when they [are] important to the characters rather than when they actually happened. As Pickhart suggests, the emotional impact an event has on us is tied as much to when we learn about it as to when it actually happened, and this concept applies equally to characters and readers. For example, the first chapters occur in late January 2014, but a third of the way into the novel, Pickhart includes a chapter about a real journalist being assaulted in December 2013. The next chapter shows Slava with her lover, also a journalist. This juxtaposition pairs the two reporters in the reader’s mind. Now we know Slava’s lover is also at risk of assault, and the historical journalist becomes, ironically, more emotionally real to us as we read the private, tender scene between the fictional characters.
In a traditional narrative approach, Pickhart might have created a reason for Slava to be looking through an old newspaper or a scene in which she sees a journalist being beaten in order to connect her lover with this risk. Setting up such moments in fiction can demand several pages to feel credible. Pickhart’s bold approach obviates the need for this and also makes more emotional sense. Slava would already know that her lover is at risk of being beaten. The character doesn’t need the connection made. The reader does.
Similarly, if Pickhart had relayed all the characters’ stories chronologically, the history of Russia and Ukraine would have come first, followed by Aleksandr’s life, then Misha’s childhood and early adulthood. Only very late in the novel would Slava, Katya, and the events of the 2014 Ukrainian uprising appear. Such an approach would have destroyed the implied dialogue created by intercutting time periods and required more expository connective tissue with more characters and more plot lines, resulting in a tome like War and Peace.
Nonetheless, Pickhart recognizes that her approach demands a lot from her readers. She had faith, however, that they would bring intelligence, curiosity, and emotional intuition to their reading the same way she did to her writing.
Pickhart: I figured if I could understand the information, then my reader can. Each one of the characters in their own way is an orphan, so in that way, the characters feel intuitively connected. So no matter who you are reading you are getting a similar internal struggle… Also, the sections are arranged according to the characters’ relationships so that the reader connects the ideas, emotions, and events as they flow from one character to another even if the characters aren’t themselves thinking about what happened in the previous section.
The warm reception the book has received proves that Pickhart’s faith was well-placed and her ambition achievable. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia engulfs the world today, and Pickhart’s novel has proven hauntingly germane in its portrayal of the ever-widening gyre and the innocents destroyed at its center.