Markus Zusak’s “best idea” is realized
For nearly 13 years, Markus Zusak struggled to write “Bridge of Clay,” his first novel since the phenomenal success of “The Book Thief,” which has sold 16 million copies worldwide.
It wasn’t necessarily the triumph of “The Book Thief” that slowed him down. There was no pressure to write another bestseller; instead, it was the need to get the Dunbar saga right.
The novel centers around Clay Dunbar, one of five brothers, who leaves his home to reconnect with his father and build a bridge made of stone — and of himself.
“It was always the book that I most wanted to write and that I always thought, at its heart, was my best idea,” says Zusak, who, despite his successes, is still gracious and humble. “You want every word to be perfect. Clay wants to make this one beautiful, perfect thing, but he kind of knows that he won’t and he can’t. There is something great and beautiful about the attempt, and in the end, that’s how I feel about writing the book.”
Zusak will be in Denver for a lecture and booksigning on Oct. 19.
He was 19 or 20, walking around the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, when he thought about a boy building a bridge. “I think of the title very early and in this case, I saw the title being ‘Clayton’s Bridge,’ and I went with that as I was thinking about (the book) for the next few months,” he says. “I shortened Clayton to Clay and I thought, ‘Bridge of Clay,’ and in an instance, a whole new depth of meaning came to the idea of it all.”
He had the beginning, but he also imagined the ending, “Clay can be molded into anything, but it needs fire to set it.”
He wrote the book then, but it was not good enough in his eyes.
After another six years of work, he decided he needed a different narrator. The first narrator was a girl named Maggie who lived across the street from the Dunbar boys. It took discipline to let go of her, but he did, and he tried out all the other characters as narrators before settling on Matthew, the oldest brother.
A few years passed, but he still could not finish the book. Stories came together, but he struggled. “I’d write Part One, and thought that everything would be easy, but then I struggled with Part Two,” he says. “Talk about rewrites. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of files on my computer. You always have an ending in mind but when you get there or get near it, you realize that it is not quite right, it is just to the left or the right or a bit forward or behind it. You know where you are going but one last little thing happens that you didn’t quite see coming as you were writing.”
It was a little tough love from his wife that finally pushed him around the corner.
“She said to me, ‘You’ve got one week to get yourself working on this book or you have to quit. You and Clay need time apart,’ ” he remembers. He took her advice and stepped away but was unhappy working on smaller projects. He needed to get back to Clay’s story, to “writing for the world championship of myself.”
Over a weekend, he and his wife read what he had written, declaring the parts that were alive and those that were dead.
By the end of 2016, he had delivered the manuscript to his publisher.
“I always want to make it exactly right at every moment, but I forget that, as a writer, it only has to be right once, and that is when it is finished,” he says.
He has lived with these characters for so long that they all feel like brothers to him. “It’s almost like I grew up with them for 13 years.” But he loves Matthew the most, because, at the end, Zusak knows Matthew is writing the family’s story because it is almost a proof of love. His affinity extends to Achilles, the mule, too, because it is the perfect counterpoint to Clay, who wants to transcend humanness for a mere moment, to walk on water that has flooded the bridge in which he has molded himself.
“I think I am in all of the characters and they are in me in a way,” he says. Clay Dunbar is always running, always training. “When it comes to books or things that I love doing, I feel like I have to train for it. I have to plan for it. I have to prepare for it. Clay is always working for something, but he doesn’t know what it is, and that is how I feel as a writer. He’s always warming up for something, and in a way, writing a book is really just your warm up or training for the next
book.”
Sometimes, a character’s development is plucked from a story he has heard. When he was thinking about Penny Dunbar, the boys’ mom, he remembered a story his parentsinlaw told, about being refugees and landing in a camp.
“They’d never seen a cockroach before, and they had never felt hate like that. When I hear those little details, I immediately see a picture and how that would work in a book.”
Those details became a small part of Penny’s history, but says Zusak, his characters only come to life when je begins to fictionalize them.
With the release of the book and his upcoming threeweek book tour in America, Zusak says he is excited and a bit relieved. “This wasn’t just any other book for me, especially as time kept drifting away. Even when (writing) is hard, it’s still a joy.”
He wants readers to feel hope as they read the book and to feel they are part of the Dunbar family.
“This is a book about a good family, a bighearted family. (At the end) I want people to feel a little bit like they’ve been run over by a truck.”