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  • Author trawls net for a Russian bride

    Ninemsn, Australia
    April 7 2006

    Author trawls net for a Russian bride
    Saturday Apr 8 07:01 AEST

    When Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre started trawling the
    internet for Russian brides, it wasn't a wife he was after.

    Rather the Australian-born author was looking for a woman with spirit
    enough to take on the worst the western world had to offer her as the
    central character of his next book, Ludmila's Broken English.

    "I did hours and hours and hours and hours, probably weeks and weeks
    and weeks, poring through Russian internet bride websites," Pierre
    says in an interview with AAP, revealing hints of an Australian
    accent with an Irish overlay.

    "And I corresponded with some just to get a handle on that.

    "And just in the same way that these characters in the book came upon
    a face that jumped off the screen at them, there was one that jumped
    off the screen at me.

    "And that is Ludmila. So it's a real woman."

    Pierre, whose real name is Peter Finlay and now lives at Leitrim in
    rural Ireland, was so haunted by the face while he was writing the
    book that he made up a mock cover with a photograph of the woman's
    face, and hung it on his study wall for inspiration.

    "It's beautiful. A dark haired young woman, and she's looking out,
    her head slightly bent down, eyes looking up under a little fringe of
    hair and there's just something challenging in her eyes," he says.

    "There's a kind of a wickedness, there's a shyness, and a challenge
    there.

    "She's saying come on, come on sucker.

    "And it came to symbolise the whole rest of the world looking at us
    bumbling around, arrogantly, ignorantly, thinking we're going to go
    and organise the world and tell everyone what to do."

    It is clear from the very beginning of the book that Ludmila Derev is
    nobody's fool, when she fights and kills her grandfather as he
    attempts to rape her.

    In a bizarre satire of globalisation, the young woman from a remote
    village in a war-torn region of the Caucasus then sets off on an
    ancient Soviet tractor to save her family from starvation.

    At the same time, Pierre introduces a pair of newly-separated, adult
    conjoined twins, Bunny and Blair Heath, recently released from the
    English institution in which they have spent their whole lives after
    it is privatised.

    The twins fortify their forays into their new-found freedom with
    alcohol and drugs, and it is simply a matter of time before Blair
    discovers Ludmila on a Russian brides website.

    "I came to almost see it as symbolic of our whole culture, you know,"
    Pierre says.

    "Sad and flabby and affluent men, who imagine that just for the smell
    of a dollar we're going to get some beautiful foreign girl to go down
    on her knees and do everything we want without question."

    The tall, dark novelist with a dishevelled air and gold watch on his
    wrist, was born in Adelaide, but spent most of his childhood in
    Mexico, where his university lecturer father moved the family when
    Pierre was seven.

    He settled back in Adelaide in the late 1980s and remembers much of
    that time through a drink and drug haze.

    His pseudonym, DBC Pierre, a nickname which stands for "dirty but
    clean", is also a reminder of those times.

    With debts estimated at $200,000, he won the Booker prize in 2003 for
    his first book, Vernon God Little, and has since led the life of a
    successful novelist, also managing to repay what he owed.

    He claims he has not read the critics on his latest book, some of
    whom have condemned it in part for its confronting violence and
    coarse language.

    However, Pierre justifies these, saying he has actually softened the
    deprivation of communities in war-torn Armenia, which he visited
    while writing the book and on which he modelled Ludmila's home
    village of Ublilsk.

    On the other hand, the most fun he had in the writing was creating
    the Ubli language, with its outlandish and colourful cursing. Unable
    to speak Armenian, Pierre based the rhythm and structure of the
    imaginary language on Russian translations.

    Ludmila's Broken English, which was interrupted when he won the
    Booker prize, developed slowly, he says, as he became fascinated with
    the idea that migration has become the "over-riding story of humanity
    in the last century".

    The idea of globalisation, however, he condemns as a scam.

    "I have a real thing about language," he says striking a match to
    light another roll-your-own cigarette.

    "And globalisation, which is an invented word, connotes a kind of
    coming together, an equality, a kind of a trading which I don't think
    is happening.

    "We're not so much globalising as exploiting."

    The novel is a "sort of splashing" in these arguments, and doesn't
    promote an agenda.

    However, "The promise is Ludmila," he says pronouncing the woman's
    name with a Russian accent.

    "She is the only hopeful character in the end," he says.

    "She's in control and if you take it as a straight symbol, the future
    is woman, and the future is probably foreign woman."

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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