On Leave the world behind (Salamander), an addictive and delightfully apocalyptic fairy tale, a couple from Brooklyn – she counted, he professor – runs into a curious and non-invasive end of the world shortly after settling in the house they have rented for the summer. Amanda, that is her name, has barely had time to flirt with the supermarket cashier, and to walk naked in the garden, while the children splash in the pool, when she loses the coverage of her cell phone. He, Clay, has not even left the house when the television stops working. There is supposed to have been a blackout in New York, but there, a few kilometers away, there is light. I mean it? Night falls and someone knocks on the door. It is an older couple, of color. They were on their way to town, they say, when the world began to end and they decided they preferred to stay home. Because that, they say, is their home. But it is?
“I like to think of the novel as a mix between Guess who is coming for dinner tonight (1967) and Animal graveyard (1983) “. The speaker is Rumaan Alam (Washington DC, 44 years old), its author. The son of Bengali immigrants, he began writing at age 38, and published a pair of self-confessedly autobiographical novels starring a heterosexual white woman who, in a way, was himself. He was fighting with the third when he, her husband and the children, Simon and Xavier, then eight and 11 years old, rented a house much like the one Amanda and Clay rent in Leave the world behind. And a rereading of the aforementioned Stephen King classic, about resurrecting animals but also about the dangers of parenthood, set in motion an apocalypse that caught a family on vacation in his head. I wanted to reflect on “the fear of not being able to protect your children,” he says.
He’s at his home in Brooklyn. Next to it are a pile of books politely stacked. Behind him, a wall full of what appear to be characters from children’s stories. Is it true that you wrote the novel in just over three weeks? “Yes, when I returned from that trip I locked myself in a hotel room for six days. I finished 120 pages. And three weeks later, I had the first draft ready, “he replies. When Amanda opens the door to the Washingtons, because the supposed host’s name is none other than George Washington, the first thing she thinks is that they don’t look like their house, they rather seem like the kind of people who would clean a house like that. . Was it your intention to charge the ink against racism in your country, as you have done from the beginning of the book? “I don’t blame Amanda, she is a victim of the culturally established in America,” says Alam. “Every cultural product that is made in this country is designed so that there is nothing more fearsome than a black man. His racism is a natural response. Who are these people? What is going on out there? She only thinks about protecting her children ”, he insists.
On Leave the world behindAlam formulated the novel with climate change in mind but it has ended up being praised by critics and the public (Obama placed it on his summer reading list) as visionary, pandemically speaking. “Yes, it is a novel about how fragile civilization can be, and also about the new generations, about the extent to which they are much more prepared than ours to face this future of uncertainty. We are worried because we have not left anything to them, and they feel lucky to still have what they have, ”he argues. Smile. He’s proud of his kids, he says. And of the kids in the novel.
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