From the Desk of David Bergen:
Dear Reader,
Years ago, I spent time with my family in Phanat Nikhom, Thailand. We lived in a duplex surrounded by rice paddies. A dirt road passed by the front of the house, and our upstairs bedroom window gave out onto a watering hole where young boys led their buffaloes to wallow. To the rear of the house was a thatched-roof gazebo where we took our meals, which were often cooked by a woman named Deng. It was bucolic, very very hot, and we were constantly taking cold showers in the upstairs water closet. One of our water sources was a cistern that lay under the kitchen floor. It was accessible via a lid that closed over a four-foot-high concrete base, and when one opened the lid, there was only darkness and the sound of water dripping. I imagined rats and snakes down there swimming in the water, though we only saw snakes in the house (one time a baby cobra), never rats.
At the time, I was beginning to figure out how to write stories, working late at night after the children were sleeping, bending toward a spiral notebook, scribbling by the light of a weak bulb. I wrote a few stories set in Thailand, one which took place in the refugee camp where I was teaching. The others were set in the cold prairies of Manitoba, my previous home.
Twenty years after returning to the prairies, with a few novels under my belt, I began to write a crime novel set in Phanat Nikhom. The house my main character lived in was a duplex surrounded by rice paddies with a dirt road out front and a watering hole and thatched-roof gazebo out back. And, of course, the cistern. I titled the novel Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, which reflected the absolute pleasure of Thai food, but also the feasting that takes place after a murder, much like what happens in the Old Testament Book of Esther. The irony, in my case, was intended.
My main character, Esther Maile, whenever anxious, or when she has done something “bad,” tends to seek out food, just as she is constantly showering or seeking out a beach to swim at, as if eating and baptism will wash away her sins. Water is crucial in the novel, just as it was crucial when I lived in Thailand. Thirst drives you. The heat makes it so. I had also just reread The Stranger by Camus, and I was aware of the overbearing sun as a factor in Camus’s crime. And so, the insistent sun is referenced in the early part of the novel when the first crime takes place.
In my novels, characters don’t just arrive unformed. They are often taken from real life and then pieced together from my observations of actual people. There is a Thai detective in the novel, Net Wantok, and Wantok was shaped by my friendship with a young man who sometimes delivered goods to us and drove us to Bangkok, and as a side gig, just like detective Wantok, raised dogs. His nature was calm. He was analytical. He dressed in suits and polished black shoes. He did not sweat. And so I am forever grateful for the world beyond the typewriter, for the flesh and blood folks I encountered.
One final thing: I was an expatriate like many of the folks I ran into, and the expat world is a mystifying one. What are we all running from? Why are we spending three years in a foreign country? What sense of privilege are we bringing with us? My character Esther is one of those expats. Only she ends up in a place I did not go. Which is why she makes for such a fascinating character. And lucky me, I got to watch Esther act, and kill, and hide, and make herself into a delicious double.
David Bergen is the bestselling author of twelve novels and two collections of short fiction. Among his most acclaimed works are The Time in Between, a national bestseller; The Age of Hope, finalist for Canada Reads; and Out of Mind, a follow-up to The Matter with Morris. He has won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award five times, and his writing has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize. In 2018 Bergen was presented with the Writer’s Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life. He lives in Winnipeg.
