SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The novel "33 Place Brugmann" opens with a list of the residents of a Brussels apartment building. There are the Sauvins - a widower and his daughter - in apartment 4L. And across the hall, the Raphael family, but they've disappeared in the middle of the night. It's 1939. Germany's invasion of Belgium is on the horizon, and that list is signed as though ready to be handed over to authorities. The fates of the building's residents wind together in this first novel from Alice Austen, who joins us from the studios of WUWM in Milwaukee. Thanks so much for being with us.
ALICE AUSTEN: Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure.
SIMON: This is a novel but a real address that you really know, isn't it?
AUSTEN: Yes. I lived in the building. I lived in Brussels for some time. I was commuting to Prague and working for Vaclav Havel's nascent democracy. Havel was the philosopher and playwright who became the leader of the Czech Republic after really being the genesis of the Velvet Revolution that led to a rejection of the Soviet system. And during the time I lived there, my oldest son was born, and my first play was produced. So it was a momentous time for me.
And my son, like baby Charlotte in the book, had a terrible colic. And because of that, I got to know residents in the building, including two elderly residents who had lived there before and during the occupation, one of whom had a remarkable private art collection that inspired the art collection in the book.
SIMON: And you write in the book the building felt like a kind of fortress that, I guess, might have made it feel impervious to the events of the world of the outside, at least for a while.
AUSTEN: Yes. It's interesting because these ladies would have us to tea. They loved having a baby in the building. And they would tell me stories of what had gone on during the occupation. And the stories were funny. They were heartbreaking. And above all, they were suspenseful. And what struck me about them is that here was the story of this community within this fortress that told a story of a country and a continent in one of the darkest times in modern history.
SIMON: Tell us about the Raphael family, because they leave overnight, and the neighbors are pretty sure why, aren't they?
AUSTEN: Yes. The Raphael family is Jewish, and they're not assimilated. They're very comfortably, happily, beautifully Jewish in this building. Leo Raphael, who is an art dealer, who sort of stays ahead of what's happening and gets his family out. And the paintings disappear, and that becomes a subject of much speculation in the novel.
SIMON: And tell us about the Sauvins. Charlotte, the daughter is an art student, talented painter. And her father, Francois, is haunted by memories of what we now call World War I, which was not that long ago, in 1939.
AUSTEN: I am reticence to say that the characters have the advantage of looking back on this terrible war in the rearview mirror that was not - you're right - that long ago. They were aware of how dire things could become and how quickly things could turn. Still, I think there are characters who don't want to acknowledge that, and understandably, because I think it was such a terrible time.
SIMON: You have more than a dozen narrative voices in the novel. How do you handle that?
AUSTEN: I really wanted to capture the suspense of the situation in the building that had been communicated to me. And I actually tried an omniscient narrative voice, and then I came upon these different characters. And I'm a playwright as well. And actors have this wonderful expression - don't play the end. And every night, they have to go out on stage and convince the audience not only that they have no idea what's going to happen, but they don't know what they'll do. I don't think my characters knew what they would do.
You know, we know the outcome of World War II. These are fictional characters. But I was really forced, through the narrative, to inhabit them - to smell what they smelled, to feel what they felt, to see what they saw, and then to see what they did. And they constantly surprised me. But also, it enabled me to really get into their heads. And their world is the world I saw when I wrote that section of the book.
SIMON: Yeah. I'd like to ask you to read a short, really very startling paragraph from the book, and it's from Charlotte Sauvin.
AUSTEN: (Reading) The occupation of Brussels was immediate. But the constraints, the impositions, the curfews, the ostracizing, the marking, the bands, the roundups, the deportations, the murders - these happened so gradually, they might be called cunning. For just as you got used to one thing, there was another. It was always happening to someone else, until it wasn't. And by then, it was too late.
SIMON: Is that how a society is taken over?
AUSTEN: I think sometimes, yes. I had, as I mentioned, the extraordinary privilege of working for Vaclav Havel, and I always had great admiration for him. He has this notion of personal responsibility - the idea that the bonds of society are only strong if we all uphold our own part of it and that the person who walks past a sign in a shop window that says no Blacks or no Jews or no women or no gays is just as responsible as the shopkeeper who puts up the sign, who is just as responsible as the apparatchik who tells the shopkeeper to put up the sign, who is as responsible as the government official who decides that this will be done. And that has always had a very profound influence on me. And I ask myself, would I measure up to Havel's standard? Who does? How do we? And at what point do we understand that that is the metric?
SIMON: It strikes me - the story of the novel and all the ways in which the lives are intertwined is the challenge they have of surviving but also helping each other. And those paths are not always clear, are they?
AUSTEN: No. Writing this novel - I always knew I would write it. It stuck with me the way stories I ultimately write do. It felt quite urgent in our increasingly polarized world, where you see that people hold such strong opinions, and they don't even entertain or listen to contradictory opinions. And yet, very often they live in communities and neighborhoods with neighbors who hold those contradictory opinions. So what if you're dependent upon those neighbors for security or food, as the residents of Place Brugmann were? Who do you trust? What will you do? Who and what matters to you most? Are you willing to risk your life, the lives of your family? Why does art matter? These questions absolutely consumed me as I wrote the book.
SIMON: Alice Austen's new novel, "33 Place Brugmann." Thank you so much for being with us.
AUSTEN: Thank you. It was such a pleasure.
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