Add New. Combine Editions. Rivka Galchen Average rating: 3. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rivka Galchen ,. Elena Megalos Illustrations. Adam Stennett Illustrator. Related News. Readers just can't get enough witch stories in The aproned woman, now detached, used to sway to and fro on a swing beneath the tree.
Accused of witchcraft by her own neighbors, Katharina is soon facing torture by thumbscrew and death by burning, yet her account is often lighthearted, irreverent. How did you approach comedy, however dark, in this book?
What considerations or influences went into calibrating the tone? Galchen: Detached from her swing, she appears to be doing a Schwarzenegger flex? Maybe that aspect of her posture, latent, patiently waited years to reveal itself. What a clock. We were also cuckoo for cuckoo clocks in my household. How else to respond when a hospice nurse pulls her discreetly aside to say he thinks her husband may soon suffer an aortic rupture, and so she should dress him in dark clothes, and put dark sheets on the bed, so that the sight of the blood will be less traumatic for everyone?
Meanwhile, one child is skateboarding indoors, and the cat is chasing a marble. Your clock is reminding me of the famous clock moment here in the silent film comedy classic, Safety Last! And also of this bit from Chaplin in Modern Times. Those old movies, which as a child I remember showing on the TNT channel — they were present in my mind for the writing of this novel. Among them: Katharina needs a male escort.
But how accurate is your depiction of the legal proceedings of the era, and how did you navigate the fictionalization of court documents? Would we be correct in entertaining the suspicion, as I often did, that the miscarriages of justice outlined in Everyone Knows might rhyme just a tiny bit more than is comfortable with contemporary standards of legal justice?
I condensed documents, and also integrated character information into testimonies — but I still strove for emotional and contextual accuracy. We know variants of this form of confession extraction are still around.
And the law, written up by people sensitive to the cadence and seductions of logic, but also constrained or ruled by power structures, often ends up generating paradoxes. Same for the ego, I think. The news cycle must have dispatched an awful lot of radio interference as you were drafting Everyone Knows , a book about an actual witch hunt, manipulation of the courts, female testimony, and distrust of science.
It even ends with a plague, specifically, the second wave of the Black Death, which swept through Europe in the s. This is all to say that, like all good historical fiction, Everyone Knows carries the shimmer of an eerie, evergreen kind of relevance.
But how did you deal with the frenzy of the news cycle and its echoes with the novel during the drafting process? Galchen: I was fleeing from the news more than responding to it.
But of course what we run away from often determines where and to what we run. But you can sort of nose around for them. I try not to be in control of the meaning of my writing, or even the themes, and try instead to obey the sound of them, the form of them. You know a Galchen story when you spot one: Her structures are asymmetrical and ruminative, her prose cool. Her sentences all have excellent posture. Meanwhile, her narratives thrive on unreliability.
What they are most frequently is unorthodox. Galchen started reading everything she could about the woman, an illiterate widow who raised a world-class scientist and owned her home, before being tortured in a drafty prison cell for 14 months during the same period her son wrote and published Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae.
Galchen wanted to know how this could happen. And they know that her son is so powerful.
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