Douglas Anthony Cooper is not an author you will find anyone reading under a beach umbrella. His novels are structurally complex, metaphysical, sometimes visionary; they report on existence at the boundary between reality and imagination. They have been described as “architectural.”
Born in Toronto, Cooper has been a global wanderer for decades, travelling and living in countries on both sides of the Atlantic, though you sense he has never belonged to any of them. Most recently he spent ten years in Italy, moving from one city to another, from Perugia to Florence, from Syracuse to Palermo, and finally to Rome, where he was living until a year ago. Now he is back in Canada, in Montreal’s Mile End, and is already trying to figure out where he will live next: he has been studying Japanese and is considering Tokyo.
Cooper’s most recent novel, The Strangler Fig, was published in Italian translation this May under the title Afasia by Readerforblind, translated by the novelist Nicola Manuppelli. The book took seventeen years to write and weighs in at nearly six hundred pages. Like the tree in the title, it is composed of numerous vine-like strands, which wind together to create a new entity, unified but intricate.
One narrative strand features an ex-fighter turned choreographer. His dance troupe, “The Perfect Men,” consists solely of other fighters who have been so severely damaged in the ring that they are incapable of ordinary movement: some are perpetually in mid-seizure; some can barely walk; one is blind.
Another strand, increasingly tangled with the first, is a contemporary distortion of Don Giovanni. The seducer is a female pornographer, an artist whose photographs are both magnificent and appalling; and her victims are the ordinary people she convinces to pose with her in these not-very-arousing tableaux. As in Mozart’s version of Don Giovanni, the arc of the narrative bends towards Hell.
The Strangler Fig documents the fraught encounter between these two characters, and the reader wonders whether the choreographer, considered until then indomitable, will survive.
Jennifer Bloomer, an architecture professor and an expert on Joyce and Piranesi, writes about Afasia/The Strangler Fig: “I am drawn to books with entangled plots; with narratives that are puzzles resembling cities built of allusion, magic, suffering, and hope… [Afasia] is a tour de force, a masterpiece. It is a puzzle crafted by an exquisite intellect. It is provocative to unexpected and sometimes shocking degrees.”
The English-language manuscript was purchased by a London publishing house, but after a few years of waiting, Cooper decided to take the rights back and move ahead with the publication of Afasia in Italy, giving rise to an unusual situation – an English novel published in Italian, while the English version continues to search for a publisher.
Not simply a novelist, Cooper is also a photographer, journalist, and travel writer. He has written fiction and poetry for children and young adults, as well. He has had success in all of these fields and has received awards internationally. All the while, he has not hesitated to tackle controversial issues, and to take aim at revered institutions and figures of power.
His education includes an M.A. in Philosophy, a year of architecture school, and continuous collaboration with famous architects and specialized publications. His first novel, Amnesia (1992), was celebrated by critics and was longlisted for the Commonwealth Prize.
Michiko Kakutani reviewed Amnesia in the New York Times, where she writes: “…A chilly, chilling first novel…. Its elliptical narrative style recalls works by D.M. Thomas, Paul Auster, Sam Shepard, and Vladimir Nabokov… One gradually comes to appreciate Mr. Cooper’s copious gifts: his ability to manufacture odd, cinematic images; his talent for creating a musically patterned narrative out of repeated symbols and motifs; his willingness to tackle ambitious intellectual themes.”
Salvatore Lo Iacono commented for the Giornale di Sicilia: “Dreams, loves, pains, questions, in a grotesque and dreamlike atmosphere, and in a fascinating Toronto, mark the rhythm of a book of great value.”
Cooper followed-up Amnesia with Delirium in 1998, the first novel to be serialized on the Internet. In 2007 Cooper released Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help, a gothic novel aimed at a young adult audience; it has recently been translated into Turkish. In 2017, he published Galunker, an illustrated rhyming book for children.
The release of Afasia in Italy has been uniformly positive, which has surprised Cooper, who was convinced that it would be more controversial.
How will this work be received in Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world? I had a chance to speak with Douglas Anthony Cooper about this and other topics unfolding in the two countries he has lived in recently – so distant and dissimilar in culture and language. Our conversation is transcribed below.
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Douglas, what motivated you to live in Italy for so many years?
After the publication of my first novel, I spent time off and on in Rome. Mostly as a quasi-indigent backpacker. I didn’t speak a word of Italian, but I stumbled across a Jamesian community of expats, mostly Canadian, who hung out near Piazza Navona: writers, filmmakers, artists, seducers. It was glorious. I decided back then that my goal was to spend the last half of my life in Rome. Seems I didn’t quite succeed. I’m too restless. Although I did end up living, decades later, in an apartment three blocks from Piazza Navona. Much of The Strangler Fig was written there. It is, in its own odd way, an Italian novel.
What are the main sources of inspiration for The Strangler Fig?
I’m obsessed with Baudelaire’s notion, now deeply unpopular, that art has its roots in the fragmented soul. This is associated with a certain kind of artist, no longer approved; some years ago Byronic heroes were banished from the sphere of the acceptable. This makes them that much more intriguing, of course, and it would be silly to pretend that they don’t exist. The analogous heroine is still welcome, I suppose, thanks to the likes of Sylvia Plath. Luckily, my novel features both versions.
Did you use aspects of your experiences about life in Italy in your novel?
Not so much my experiences and life, but Caravaggio would have recognized my choreographer. I can imagine a violent encounter between them: a knife fight between brutal artists on either side of the mirror. When I think about it, Don Giovanni is an Italian opera composed by a man whose Italian wasn’t much better than mine. He leaned on a native speaker — the greatest librettist of the age — just as I depend (desperately) upon an Italian translator, Nicola Manuppelli, who happens to be a celebrated novelist. But all of this is a bit tangential.
You had many opportunities to meet the Italian public at your readings and during the recent launching of Afasia. In your view, what are the main differences between the cultural and literary scenes in Italy and Canada?
I’m more familiar with the Italian literary world. I’ve recently returned to Montreal, but I haven’t lived in Canada for years. I find the literary community in Italy far more welcoming, to be honest, than what I’ve found in Montreal these days. Maybe I’ve been away so long that I’m considered something of a traitor?
My first novel was written in Montreal, and I was embraced back then as a local; I now feel that, to an extent, in Rome. It could be that I’m the kind of writer they want to eradicate in North America: I’m not a moralist; I’m not an ideologue; it doesn’t matter to me in the slightest whether a reader agrees with me, or — more precisely — with the me they’ve projected into the novel. Ideally, half of my readers will find the novel disagreeable. (I expect that statement will sell whole container ships full of books.)
When Victor Hugo premiered his play, Le roi s’amuse, the audience split into opposing mobs and threw things at each other. I hope this isn’t apocryphal. And I hope it’s what my book incites.
Why did you decide to leave Italy?
As I say, I’m restless; I rarely spend more than a decade anywhere. The cliché is likely accurate here: I’m running away from my problems, which are eagerly awaiting me wherever I arrive. Alcoholics Anonymous calls this “the geographic cure.” I don’t happen to suffer from alcoholism, but I’ve been meaning to take it up as a hobby. My intent to spend the last half of my life in Rome was sincere, but half a life is a long time. At the moment I miss Italy profoundly, but I seem to have set myself in motion again.
Will you ever return to Italy, not as a visitor but as a resident?
Hard to say. The highlight of my plan was to die in Rome, and it does have one of the very best expatriate graveyards. So it’s always a possibility. Then again, I’d probably be happy decomposing in Père Lachaise.
After the tour of Italy, what are your next projects?
The next project brings me back to Italy, in fact, this time to Venice. I’ve been making a slow transition from words to images, and I have a photography show opening this year on the Zattere. Some of these photos have already been exhibited in Pistoia.
The novel I’m working on now will incorporate photography, although I haven’t figured out entirely how. Various writers have attempted this — most famously W. G. Sebald — but I’m determined to arrive at a new strategy. All my life I’ve been influenced far more by visual artists than I have by writers, and it’s not surprising that many of the artists most important to me have produced work that seems as if it wants to be literature: Sophie Calle, Louise Bourgeois, Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer (who has suggested that he is a novelist manqué). Maybe I’ll decide finally to make the images central to this new work, with words a secondary medium. Ideally we should approach silence as we get closer to death.
I do have a title. It will be called The Wrong, though I may have to invent a different title in Italian, since a novel called Il Torto has just been published. It’s apparently based on the career of a real serial killer: a kind of Italian Jeffrey Dahmer. How can I compete with this?
Anna Foschi Ciampolini was born in Florence and lives in Vancouver, B.C. An award-winning short-story writer, anthology editor, translator, and freelance journalist, she is a founding member of the AICW and co-founder of the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize. She was inducted in the Vancouver Italian Cultural Centre Hall of Fame as a cultural and humanitarian activist .