Your parents were both eminent cardiologists. What drove you to become a writer?
Actually I was very drawn to medicine. I grew up with bits of human heart in the family fridge because when mother lost a patient she needed to understand what had happened. When someone is sick I have to resist the urge to tell them what they need to do, prescribe medicines and as a matter of fact, I quite fancied doing a bit of surgery... However it was not to be, literature was my great love.
Some people become writers because they want to be an author, they are beset with dreams of smoking in cafés in Paris and Hemingway-esque or Woolfe-rine fantasies of heroic solitariness and boozy lunches and others like me cannot imagine being themselves any other way - thus it becomes a privilege.
What gave you the idea to write a book with such a difficult and controversial subject?
As soon as I heard about the terrible bomb which begins the book, something about this particular tragedy grabbed me. News stories of innocent Israeli civilians killed by bombs were as familiar in 2001, as tales of the slaughters in Iraqi market places today, but for me the Dolphinarium attack, a night club in Tel Aviv in which 23 young people were killed and hundreds injured, was different. For once this modern tragedy touched me as it should - rather than the depersonalised shrug, or perhaps a brief frown, with which I heard other such terrible news.
I did not at the time have any particular connection or even sympathy with the state of Israel. The Jewish people I knew, my neighbours, friends, and colleagues, I did not associate with Israel. They were no less "London" than me, and those with two English parents were more so (my father was Irish). But I could not stop obsessing about those young people waiting outside the night club on that Friday night, a child called Sasha who lost both his sisters, a fifteen-year-old girl celebrating the end of her exams, a social worker (the oldest of the dead) walking past at random. Haunting me most was Sheva-Moffat, the high school in a Tel Aviv suburb where there would be six gaps at assembly when school resumed.
How many years of research did you undertake in order to become so familiar with the Dolphinarium tragedy and your characters?
About seven years. I spoke to as many people as I could who had been at the Dolphi that night. I spoke to the medics who treated them; I spoke to the family of the suicide bomber; I spoke to taxidrivers, paramilitaries, people you might call terrorists, priests, rabbis, mothers, strategists, children, journalists... everybody I could... And then of course there was the South Africa chapter. I found out everything I could about the first heart transplant in South Africa in 1967. I researched apartheid and what it meant philosophically and actually and how it related to identity, and how it was compromised by the first heart transplant between a black and white person... It was difficult to speak to the victims of the bomb, it was difficult speaking to the family of the suicide bomber, it was amazing and not without challenges to watch a heart transplant.
How would you describe Beat to someone who was considering reading it?
This is a book, a real story about a heart that moves between the bodies of enemies, it is the story of grace and hatred, it is a story of understanding and misunderstanding, a story of doing the worst thing you can to anybody (killing their child) and story of giving them your own heart.
Tell us a little about your literary pilgrimage to Israel in order to unearth the truth first hand.
You must have been moved many a time as you interviewed various people. Was there one particular instance which stands out even today?
There was a moment when I was interviewing a young girl who was present at the bombing and lost her friends and recalling the body of the boy she had kissed two weeks before, the first boy she had ever kissed. There was a moment when I started crying and she was amazed and smiled at me. It was not my story. There was a moment when I was speaking to a man I called Bashir, but in fact his name was Bassam (only now do I have permission to name him) and he explained how his only daughter was shot in the head by the IDF aged nine and he still believed that peace and reconciliation was the only way forward... that Palestinians should go to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum) so they could understand the pain of the Jews, and the Israelis must understand what they had done to the Palestinians and what they were still doing....
There was another moment. I'd been spending many hours with the father of the suicide bomber who was so stricken with grief at the loss of his son...but also full of the justifications of his action in killing 22 young unarmed people and I asked him if he ever thought of the pain of the parents, the 22 sets of parents of children younger than his who had lost their beloved ones from his son's actions... These were all big moments in my life.
Give us three 'Good to know' facts about you. e.g. Do you get up every now and then to do sit-ups when you are writing
I normally sleep every day at some point when I'm writing. As soon as I feel sleepy I lie down on the floor. I don't allow myself the couch or a cushion. I sleep like a baby for 15 minutes and wake up feeling wonderful.
Writing is hard, most of the time it's very uncomfortable and only very occasionally do I feel pleased with what I've done.
I am a good cook and a good reader.
About the book
On 1 June 2001 Saïd Hotari detonated a bomb outside the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv, killing himself and 21 Israelis, most of them teenagers from former Soviet states. On 2 June in an apparently retributive act of random violence, an Israeli settler shot the Palestinian pharmacist Mazan Al-Joulani in the neck, rendering him brain-dead. Out of this violence came an extraordinary act of humanity, when the family of Al-Joulani agreed to donate his heart for transplantation to an Israeli man dying of heart disease.
Rowan Somerville was on the popular Richie Allan show on which they rarely feature books. Allan's assessment of Beat was "One of the best books I've read for many years. I have never read anything so descriptive, emotive, evocative. This is an incredibly honest book which deserves to be read."
from The Malta Independent http://ift.tt/2BUvF0s
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