» Ceridwen Dovey discusses her debut novel, which follows three former employees of a deposed dictator in an unnamed country, and her experiences as a first time author.

» Read more about Blood Kin

Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin, Podcast

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Unfurled (once you start looking for this one, you will notice it in every piece of literary fiction published in the last 50 years)

Moist

Litany

Embedded

Lozenge

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One of the most enjoyable events I attended when the hardcover of Blood Kin came out last year was the Public Library Association Conference in Minneapolis. Caught up in all the public library love, I found myself admitting to a room full of librarians that my first fetish object was a library stamp. One of my favorite pastimes when I was little was cataloguing and labeling and then arranging in alphabetical order every single book in our house, and then checking them out to myself and my imaginary borrowers with my sister's Hello Kitty stamp. My mother, needless to say, was not impressed when she discovered that her first edition J.M. Coetzee novels had been Hello Kitty-ied.

We moved around so much when I was little that we could never take many books along with us (despite books being my family's main passion, as my mother was a literary critic), and our pilgrimages to the new public library in whichever town we turned up in were some of the most anticipated journeys of my childhood. If my mother ever lost track of where I was in the library, she knew she would find me gazing longingly at the due date stamp at the check-out counter, mesmerized as the librarian changed the date with a twirl of the metal numeric rings, and the confident way she stacked up open books on top of one another to stamp their back covers in quick succession.

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I pass Elena Climent's wonderful mural, "At Home With Their Books," every day on my way to class at NYU. Climent did exhaustive research before she began painting the intimate work spaces of six New York writers (Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank O'Hara, Jane Jacobs, and Pedro Pietri). I love the way each room is made to look as if the writer might walk back into it at any moment - messy bedcovers in Wharton's room; the door to Neale Hurston's cottage left open; a manuscript page that has been blown off Irving's desk in a gust of wind.

The first time I saw the mural, I'm ashamed to admit that I felt a wave of envy that I don't have anything that could be called a "home" for the few books I've been able to ship between different parts of the world. Part of the problem is that I've moved around so much my whole life, between Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the States. And it doesn't help being a perennial student constantly searching for the holy grail of cheap accommodation!

Writing is not yet my day job, so I can't be fussy about memorializing where I write fiction - Blood Kin was written in bits and pieces on my roommate's computer in Cape Town whenever she wasn't using it - but what I have kept track of are the various rooms I've lived in: at my last count, 7 in the last 3 years. The only recurring dream I ever have is of moving into a strange new room again, and having to figure out which way to turn the bed to fit in a chest of drawers, or trying to stuff a suitcase in the space beneath a closet.

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The three main characters in Blood Kin are the chef, the portraitist, and the barber of a corrupt President. Each man repeatedly performs an intimate yet non-political task for the President - nourishing him, rendering his image in oils to be hung in Parliament, grooming him - and I was interested in exploring whether this made them complicit in the President's wrongdoing. Are they inadvertently propping up his power and authority by performing these seemingly banal services? What is the moral fallout of their proximity to power and its abuses?

As humans, we are fascinated by "superfluous people in the service of brute power," as Ryszard Kapuscinski put it (see The Emperor, which is based on interviews he did with Haile Selassie's servants in Ethiopia in the years after Selassie was overthrown).

Think of the interest in Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, or his personal bodyguard, Rochus Misch; the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan; or the recent story about Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe's lavish birthday party for his cronies, which mentioned that "imported Ceres juice, soft drink cans, such as Fanta, Coke, Sprite and snacks flowed freely from the heavily guarded state house chef's cabin".

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Ceridwen Dovey is our guest blogger during the week of March 30th. If you have any questions for Ceridwen Dovey, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Blood Kin:

Listen to a podcast and view the reading group guide!

Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey’s Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President’s chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer’s regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton’s famous quip, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.

Awards:
Sunday Times Fiction Prize
University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing
Australia-Asia Literary Award Longlist
Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist