Author Julie Otsuka / Remembering 'Nation' Editor Victor Navasky

Fresh Air

NPR

Society & Culture, Arts, Tv & Film, Books

4.3 • 36.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After losing much of her memory to dementia, one of the things the main character in the novel The Swimmers remembers is being forced into an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Author Julie Otsuka talks about the novel and her own family's experience in Japanese incarceration camps.

Also, we remember Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and eventual publisher of The Nation. He also wrote the book Naming Names, now considered a classic, about the Hollywood 10 and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

David Bianculli reviews the new Netflix mockumentary series Cunk on Earth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley, Infateri Gross.
0:03.8	Novelist Julio Tsuca has just been awarded the Carnegie Medal for excellence for her book The Swimmers.
0:10.2	It's about a group of people who go to the local pool to escape from their problems.
0:15.1	Vogue magazine and Kirkus Review listed the book as one of the years best of 2022.
0:20.9	It's now out in paperback.
0:23.4	Otsuka's two previous novels were acclaimed as well.
0:27.2	When the Emperor was divine, is based on the experiences of her mother and grandparents
0:32.5	when they were forced into Japanese internment camps during World War II.
0:37.1	Her book The Buddha in the Attic, which won the Penn Fockner Award for Fiction,
0:42.1	is an historical novel about the women known as picture brides.
0:46.4	These were women in the early 20th century who emigrated to America from Japan the only way
0:51.9	they legally could, by marrying a man who already was living here. In Otsuka's latest novel The Swimmers,
1:00.5	one of the swimmers is in the early stages of dementia. Terry Gross spoke with Julio Tsuca
1:06.5	last year when her novel was first published.
1:10.3	Julio Tsuca, welcome to Fresh Air. I love your writing, so I'm very glad you're here.
1:15.6	I want to start with a reading from the first page of The Swimmers, your new novel.
1:20.0	Because I want our listeners to hear your style of writing and how the accumulation of detail
1:28.5	just kind of keeps building through the book. So would you read the opening for us?
1:33.1	Sure, I'd be happy to. The pool is located deep underground in a large cavernous chamber,
1:40.4	many feet beneath the streets of our town. Some of us come here because we are injured and need to heal.
1:46.9	We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety,
1:54.9	melancholia, and hedonia, the usual above ground afflictions. Others of us are employed at the
	...

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