In our latest issue, The Europe Special, we spoke to German writer Dan Vyleta about his debut novel Pavel & I. The interview is a fascinating insight into why the author chose to write in English, and he is very talkative about his literary influences. So talkative, in fact, that we couldn’t fit all of what he said into the issue. Here, like the special features of a DVD, is a little more…
Pavel and I tells the story of Pavel, a mysterious American GI living in post-War Berlin. He has just taken in an orphan boy called Anders when an old army friend turns up at his apartment with the body of a Russian midget. Soon Pavel and Anders are being pursued by the obese British Colonel Fosko and his violent one-eyed henchman, Peterson. It is a novel that is alive with Vyleta’s love of literature, and here he talks about some of the direct inspiration for his debut novel.
“A big influence on my novel was Charles Dickens, who is uniquely comfortable in putting something sentimental next to something very cynical. Specifically I’m thinking of Bleak House. You have an enormously sentimental novel that is also an incredibly cynical social critique. I respond to that impulse.
“The Fosko character (inspired by Wilkie Collins’ Count in The Woman in White) is the clearest crystallisation of this strategy that the borders between fiction and fact are falling into each other. I like the fact that Fosko is from a sensation novel and has crept into this hardboiled tale.
“The book also makes several references to The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. His gang of children has an influence on my gang of children. Anders wants Pavel to be Alyosha from that book. He wants him to be the holy, monkish saint.
“I have a great love for the Russian novel, and I have a great love for the 19th Century novel. Some of the things I’m channeling are quite old or old fashioned.”
You can read more from this interview in Transmission #11, which is out now and can be bought at our online shop.
Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is out now.