Have you ever wished that you could read a book before everyone else? Have you ever read a review and thought, "I could do that!" Well, here's your opportunity! I am giving away 2 galleys (softcover book that comes out before the hardcover) to two lucky readers who want their chance to be immortalized on the BookBitchBlog! If you win, you simply have to read the book and send me your review. It can be as long or short as you like, only you can't give away the ending! Read on to learn more about this amazing new book and how you can get your own advance copy!
Set in 1663 in the hardscrabble Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present day lower
Manhattan), THE ORPHANMASTER pairs a beguiling
Dutch she-merchant with a dashing British spy who together hunt down a demonic
serial killer preying on the colony’s orphans.
Nationally recognized independent
bookseller Mitchell Kaplan (Books & Books, Miami) and award-winning Hollywood producer Paula Mazur (The Mazur/Kaplan Company)
are adding Viking’s major summer release to their feature slate of bestselling
titles including The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Major
Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
A Conversation with Jean
Zimmerman, author of THE ORPHANMASTER
(Viking / Strict on-sale: June 19, 2012 /
ISBN: 978-0-670-02364-6/ $27.95)
You’ve had considerable
success as a writer of nonfiction. How did it feel to make the transition to
fiction?
I’ve
always considered it an incredible privilege to write nonfiction, as you get to
snoop in private lives via letters, diaries, etc., in order to tell your story.
That said, in writing on some historical subjects, particularly the lives of
women, these sources are not always readily available. I found that I could use
the research I had done and expand upon it imaginatively in a way that was
extremely satisfying.
To produce its powerful
effects, THE ORPHANMASTER mingles
historical fact with some imaginative storytelling. What are some of the more
surprising discoveries that you happened on in your research?
I
found a map that was drawn in 1660, the first street plan of Manhattan , which
conveys every street, structure, meadow and garden in the settlement. It was the
world of my characters, and it was the geographical jumping-off point of my
work. Also vital was the discovery of the orphanmaster function, an official job
that was needed because of the dire trend toward parental deaths through
sickness, shipwrecks or Indian incursions. And I also was surprised to learn
about the sport of pulling the goose!
Your novel goes rather
hard on one of your real-life historical figures, Governor Petrus Stuyvesant.
Why were you so rough on him?
Stuyvesant was a complex man. Not readily
likable because of his high-handed policies—no one wanted the taverns shut on
Sundays!—he also created order in a time when New Amsterdam was going a bit out
of control. He was somebody whose domineering personality would definitely
create friction with the other characters I portray. Historically, he was so
hated that the colonists refused to fight alongside him to resist the English
takeover in 1664.
One of your nonfiction
books concerns a colonial-era she-merchant similar to THE ORPHANMASTER’s
heroine, Blandine van Couvering. What are the major differences between the
fictional heroine and her real-life precursor?
For my
earlier book, The Women of the
House, I researched a trader named Margaret Hardenbroeck, who through
smarts and sheer force of will became the richest woman in the colony that would
become New York . She-merchants were common in New Amsterdam , where there were
roughly two hundred female traders out of a population of 1,500 settlers—a very
high percentage. Women such as Margaret Hardenbroeck (and Blandine van Couvering
in THE ORPHANMASTER) loved the
excitement of commerce, especially the high-end, high-status commodities like
fur. Blandine is a young merchant, still earnestly trying to work her way up.
But she feels the thrill of trade in her bones.
Blandine knows a
surprising amount about seventeenth-century armaments and, by extension, so do
you. How did you come by your expertise?
Research is a writer’s best friend, an
area of my work that I have come to love and rely upon in nonfiction. And
weapons are a fascinating subject to learn about. They were crucial to the lives
of the people of the New Netherland frontier. Although not much of a gun freak
myself, I read in the field and consulted with people I know who are
knowledgeable.
In Blandine and in the
villain Martyn Hendrickson, you present an interesting theological diptych: one
atheist whose character we find ourselves admiring and another who is utterly
contemptible. What thoughts did you mean to suggest by introducing the implied
comparison between the two?
While
Martyn has abandoned God altogether, or has completely subverted Christian
ideals to his own twisted ends, Blandine is in quest of a new definition of God.
Ever since the incomprehensible tragedy of losing her parents and sister in a
shipwreck, she no longer finds the idea of God as personal savior compelling.
Blandine is a questing soul, searching for a new belief system, while Martyn has
settled upon a particularly vicious form of nihilism.
In a fairly early
chapter, you ask, “How does the superior man live in a godless world Nice
question. Any answers?
Drummond’s hallmarks are courage, kindness
and reserve. He feels the need to change the picture, to change his idea of god,
so he does not, indeed, inhabit a godless world. In this, he attempts to align
himself with a larger order, terrible and immense, that he especially perceives
in the staggering beauty of the natural world.
Your hero, Edward
Drummond, observes that in an old-world cathedral it’s easy to believe, whereas
in the American wilderness it is supremely difficult to maintain that God
exists. And yet, historically, America ’s religious revivals have been
especially vigorous in remote, rural areas, where God is felt to be present in
the silence of the natural world. Is Edward just wrong, or is there some way to
defend his observation?
We
have to remember the seventeenth-century first-growth wilderness that confronted
Drummond was very different from the tamer, well-explored woods and cultivated
farmlands of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Awakenings. God for
Drummond cannot be defined in human terms, since that would be a prideful
distortion of such immensity. Rather, he sees the sacred as “[a]n entity, an
endlessness, a totality.”
THE
ORPHANMASTER features scenes of
horrific violence and mayhem—possibly off-putting to some, certainly engrossing
to others. What emotions do you yourself experience when writing these portions
of your novels?
It’s
really more about telling the story, getting the characters right, considering
how they relate to each other. That’s what makes creating a thriller exciting
and powerful. At the same time, I myself did feel challenged at some points in
the writing, and sad when some characters suffered or didn’t
survive.
Drummond’s idea of God
is strongly shaped by his reading of Baruch Spinoza. For the uninitiated, can
you briefly explain Spinoza’s philosophy of religion and why it might appeal to
someone like Drummond?
Drummond has lived a full life and has
seen violent and challenging things. He is embittered and yet still searching
for meaning. Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He wore a signet ring with the
inscription “cautiously,” and proposed treating theological questions in the
same way a mathematician, for example, might treat a triangle. In Spinoza’s
view, which Drummond is coming to adopt, the old-world god has ceased to exist,
to be replaced by a more abstract, less personal but more powerful sense of the
sacred.
One of your minor
characters opines, “The day when a corporation is accorded the same standing as
a country, with all the rights attending to that status, will be a sad day
indeed.” That also sounded like a somewhat “presentist” comment to us. Any
thoughts?
Since
all writers exist in the present, all writing is unavoidably presentist. I would
say that it is natural to use your current-day intellectual framework even when
you write about the past. It would be dishonest not to. And it can be fun to
enliven a historical text with sidelong glances at the modern. But I also
believe the rules are different for fiction, nonfiction and memoir. At times I
enjoy engaging in what I hope is a playful insouciance.
Are there other ways in
which you think your novel can be read as a commentary on present-day America
?
At the
time of THE ORPHANMASTER, eighteen
languages were spoken in New Amsterdam . The makeup of Manhattan is much the
same today—immigrants, businesspeople, criminals, orphans, women striving to
make something of themselves. The novel addresses in some part how the various
ethnicities and races get along with each other. The heroine and hero of the
book are the ones that show the most tolerance, understanding and sympathy for
other people, even those not like them superficially. This is our mandate for
today as well.
What remains today of
Blandine and Drummond’s New Amsterdam ?
The
Manhattan of today is still haunted by the ghost of New Amsterdam . New York ’s
commercial imperative and devotion to progress have buried the past in cement,
but the streets of the past exist largely as they did. You can walk Stone Street
, Pearl Street or Broadway and see just where Blandine kept her dwelling-house
or where she made her way across the canal at low tide. You can feel a poignant
vestige of what was, and if you imagine intently, still hear the creaking of the
Dutch windmills.
What are you working on
now?
A
novel about a girl who was raised in the wild, displayed at a sideshow in
Virginia City , Nevada , and adopted by a well-to-do couple in 1875 Manhattan to
be trained up as a debutante. Mysterious killings ensue, and she must track down
the murderer before he gets to her. A darker side of the Gilded
Age.
What inspired you to
center your book on the year 1663?
It was
a period of transition and discovery, danger and excitement. Colonists were
arriving in Manhattan to create new lives for themselves. Beaver was king, and
fortunes were being made in the fur industry. I chose the precise year because
the frictions between Holland and England were about to play out in a way that
ultimately gave us the culture we have today.
You can travel back in time on Jean
Zimmerman’s website here
or get a taste for 16th century treats with the below recipe for
traditional Dutch marzipan hedgehogs!
Tradition Dutch Marzipan
Hedgehogs (recipe courtesy of Jean Zimmerman’s website):
· Take two Pounds of blanched Almonds,
beat them well in a Mortar with a little Canary and Orange-flower Water-
to keep them from
oiling.
· Make them into stiff Paste, then beat
in the yolks of twelve Eggs, leave out five of the Whites,
· Put to it a Pint of Cream, sweeten it
with Sugar, put in half a Pound of sweet Butter melted,
· Set it on a Furnace or slow Fire, and
keep it constantly stirring, till it is stiff enough to be made into the Form
of an Hedhe-Hog;
· Stick it full of blanched Almonds, slit
and stuck up like the Bristles of a Hedge-Hog.
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