Notebooks permit direct, episodic narration of the day’s explosions, clouded over by memory and anticipation. Composing Circus, I was thinking specifically of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Also of Edmund Jabès, Sei Shonagon, the whole tradition of notebook-writers. RB Any particular reason for choosing the notebook/diary form? What does this epistolary form allow us to know about Theo that a more straightforward narrative would not? He needed a small town-whether Aigues-Mortes or East Kill-to make his desires seem enormous. Theo’s grandiosity would die in a big city like New York or London. I’m enamored with small-town life, at least in fantasy I used to call that strain of fantasy “hotel consciousness.” I imagined life in East Kill as the equivalent of permanent hotel-habitation: libido-limbo. Perhaps I was thinking of a town like Hudson when I invented East Kill. WKI have a house in Germantown, in upstate New York. It’s a surprisingly provincial location for the surrealness of the book's events.
#Cirkus initial release series#
RB The novel is told in a series of notebooks penned by our narrator Theo Mangrove, a concert pianist who’s returned to his family’s home in East Kill, New York after some level of mental exhaustion. I would love to find a way to put my current “ideation” into a series of dense, lurid notebooks. I would love, once more, to be possessed by a wild, demonstrative, importunate voice, not quite my own. WK I wish I could write a similar book all over again. RBHow have you changed as a writer? Do you think you would write the same book now? My novel’s tonal irregularity-its spasmodic humor, its bleakness, its unconventional eroticism-might strike chords in readers now comfortable with a novel narrated by a self that seems scissored to pieces and put back together with a glue closer to Ecstasy than to Elmer’s. WKYounger writers today seem more at ease with ragged, damaged, nervous narration. RB What has changed, culturally speaking, that you think could affect the reception of the book this time? A new strange intimacy with my former self, the person who wrote the novel. Ruby Brunton What does it feel like to see the same work released fifteen years later? I spoke to Koestenbaum about what has changed in the years since Circus’ initial release. Koestenbaum guides us through the most uncomfortable of subjects with his renowned humor and inventiveness of language, and the brilliant Rachel Kushner provides the introduction to the new edition. He’s been advised to track his emotional movements by his mother for presumably therapeutic purposes, although we can never quite trust Mangrove’s own word. Mangrove’s increasingly-fevered obsessions with young hustlers, his own and others’ musical careers, and above all the Italian circus star Moira Orfei are told earnestly, without cushioning, in a series of notebooks.
The novel takes place inside the heightened anxious mind of Theo Mangrove, a (perhaps?) once famous concert pianist with a Marquis de Sadean-size sexual thirst and a propensity for incest, self-aggrandizing and artistic delusion. His novel Circus, which was originally published in 2004, was re-released this year by Soft Skull Press. “It’s my duty as a poet to push my language and consciousness as far into the ‘forbidden’ as possible,” Koestenbaum stated in an interview with American Poetry Review and he honors this duty beyond just his poetry. Poet, writer, and otherwise diversely talented cultural mainstay Wayne Koestenbaum does not shy away from anything, and we are all the better for it.
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