Waiting to Be Found

Again and Again and Again

The Thirty-Fifth Page: The Past Is Never Past

Ruins of the former Hotel Osmica, high above Sarajevo, reportedly seized by Bosnian Serb forces and used as a sniper position during the siege before being bombed by NATO near the war’s end.

Perhaps those images of what was once hidden but is now being revealed resonated with me because they feel so close to the heart of my most recent novel, The Thirty-Fifth Page. In the story, manuscript conservator Miri Adler travels to Sarajevo on the eve of the Bosnian War to study the legendary Sarajevo Haggadah, a medieval manuscript that has survived centuries of violence. Inside it, she discovers something that should not exist: an impossible thirty-fifth page depicting events that have not yet happened.

Miri believes the past can be studied, catalogued and preserved. But as the story unfolds, that certainty begins to unravel. History isn’t safely behind us. It survives in objects and stories, in landscapes and people, sometimes waiting for the right circumstances to surface again. Again and again.

Author Life

My next novel is still a long way from finished, but lately I’ve found myself circling some of these same ideas from a different direction.

The working title is Echo Bardo, and it’s set among musicians in Seattle in 1983, when the city’s underground music scene was becoming something it didn’t yet have a name for.

Like my other novels, this one draws from things I’ve lived. I was a musician in Seattle then, playing in bands and spending time in some of the same clubs, streets and slightly questionable apartments I’m writing about now. The story is invented, but the world around it is one I remember well.

In music, one note can begin vibrating because another nearby has been struck. Memory can work much the same way. I’ll be writing a scene and something I haven’t thought about in forty years suddenly begins vibrating along with it—a room, a face, the particular light on a Seattle street.

Somewhere along the way, this led me down the rabbit hole of quantum physics: particles and waves, strange connections, the unsettling possibility that things we experience as separate may not be quite as separate as they seem. Can an event leave an echo? Can something that happened long ago still exert a pull on the present?

Then there’s the bardo, the Buddhist state between death and rebirth, who we were and who we become, one era and the next, what is gone and what continues to reverberate. Again and again.

Seattle itself is full of those layers. Beneath the city are buried streets and shorelines that have been filled, moved and remade. Beneath those are older landscapes still—glacial ice, ancient seabeds, stone. I love the thought that one Seattle exists beneath another, whether we can see it or not.

Writing has always felt a little like that to me. A kind of magic. Sometimes a word comes, then a sentence, and I don’t feel as though I’ve invented it at all. It feels as though it was already there, waiting beneath the surface, and my job was simply to uncover it.

Which may be why I keep thinking about those ships in the Danube.

Maybe what’s gone from sight is just waiting under the surface. Again and again and again.