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David Plante
Memoirs
Diaries
Fiction
Critically acclaimed novelist and gifted modern diarist, with background similar to Jack Kerouac, brought up in a French-speaking parish.
BOOKS:
The Ghost of Henry James (1970)
Slides (novel) (1971)
Relatives (novel) (1972)
The Darkness of the Body (1974)
Figures in Bright Air (1976)
The Family (1978)
The Country (1980)
The Woods (1982)
Difficult Women (1983)
The Foreigner (1984)
The Catholic (1986)
My Mother’s Pearl Necklace (1987)
The Native (1987)
The Accident (1991)
Annunciation (1994)
Prayer (1998)
The Age of Terror (1999)
American Ghosts (2005)
ABC (2007)
The Pure Lover (2009)
Becoming a Londoner : a diary (2013)
Worlds Apart: a memoir (2015)
Difficult Women
American Stranger
Biggest literary influencers:
Perhaps the biggest influence on me was Rachel Ingalls, when we were young and both starting out as writers and talked about writers we admired, among them Ernest Hemingway. Rachel developed her style to be as clear as water and yet with a deep movement in the water. I have tried to write in a similar way. An example of her mastery is the short novel Mrs. Caliban.
Last book read:
Steven Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople. I am reading a lot about Byzantium.
The book that changed your life:
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. It was read to me by my father, one chapter an evening after supper, before I could read, and the suffering and the compassion of the novel instilled in me my first awareness of the suffering in the world and the compassion for such suffering.
Favorite literary character:
I would say the most lawless characters, and among them Becky Sharpe from Vanity Fair. I was all admiration for her when she threw from a carriage window the dictionary she was awarded, and she went on recklessly from then on, and survived.
Currently working on:
A short novel, Fantasies of the Body, a love relationship between a don and an undergraduate, set in King’s College, Cambridge, where I was in residence.
Words to live by:
“Don’t expect anything.”
Advice to new and aspiring authors:
Go on, go on, go on, but don’t expect anything.
Testimonials:
For American Stranger
“Plante’s exquisitely sensitive novel of displacement, isolation, loss, and longing is rendered in intimate, darkly enrapturing scenes of snow, haunted rooms, and desolate wanderings.” —Booklist
“This emotionally gripping and mystery-swathed novel will keep you entranced, uncertain and feel compelled to read on. We may all be strangers ultimately, and Plante nails that vision in his beautiful, often lyrical prose.” —Providence Journal
“A questing new work from an accomplished writer – elegant, cerebral …” —Kirkus Reviews
“…[A] riveting novel of wandering souls.” —Library Journal
“An impressively crafted, narrative-driven novel of exceptional emotional complexity, American Stranger by David Plante is an inherently absorbing read from beginning to end.” —Midwest Book Reviews
“American Stranger is a beautiful novel, profound and subtle, on the rootlessness of people in worlds foreign to them and their search for self, or what remains of them in that search.” —Le Monde
“The novel bathes in a strange light, like an aquarium whose water is scandalously clear. It is modern, fast, painful, and reminiscent of some small independent movies, stylish and smart movies like John Yates’ 1969 film John and Mary. The author has an uncanny ability to slip into the shoes of a woman, to know what she is thinking, what she feels.” —Le Figaro
“There is something magnetic, even hypnotic in American Stranger, a novel born aloft by prayer and incantation. Through the meanderings of Nancy’s journey in love, Plante seizes the eternal theme of the quest for identity, but invests it with a singular aura and transforms a familiar subject into terra incognita. The question of religion, especially Jewishness, nourishes the novel and gives it its full depth of field.” —Les InRocks
