Taymour Soomro’s story “Athena and the Grand Reveal” appears in the autumn 2019 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses drawing inspiration from grand architecture and his protagonist’s complicated relationships with his partner and his homeland.
Preety Sidhu: The setting of your story, La Rondinaia, shares a name with a real villa on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, owned for many decades by the American author Gore Vidal. Similarly, a second century CE statue from the Gandhara region of Pakistan, made of dark schist and referred to as “Athena” because of her helmet, also exists and visited New York City as part of an exhibition several years ago. Can you speak to the relationships between the elements in your story and their real world parallels?
Taymour Soomro: Architecture is a love of mine. I’m a sucker for beautiful interiors, too. Those spreads in Architectural Digest and Elle Decor become so much more interesting if you imagine all the wicked histories they contain and provoke—the vicious fights, the hurt, the affairs that could have happened there, and the jealousy and envy and rage that all those beautiful things inspire.
My New Yorker story, “Philosophy of the Foot,” also features a grand old house that represents to the protagonist a lost fortune, the loss of power and status, a sense of belonging. When I began writing “Athena and the Grand Reveal,” I knew somehow that it took place in a villa in Italy and as I wrote, the villa became a version of La Rondinaia, Gore Vidal’s house. His house is on a steep cliff, but I don’t know if it has treacherous steps down to a beach with black sand. Gore Vidal had a kind of toxic reputation, didn’t he? So there was a fit there too, a cruel old man in his beautiful house on a cliff on the Amalfi Coast. The perfect place for something terrible to happen.
I don’t think I knew that there was a Gandharan Athena! With fiction, I’m trying to keep up the charade—that this really happened, and one of the ways of doing that is verisimilitude—so research helps. Perhaps I knew and forgot.
PS: Have you visited La Rondinaia yourself, or did it come to your attention through the magazines you mentioned?
TS: I haven’t visited Rondinaia yet! I knew of it from somewhere and may have seen some pictures of it somewhere (Architectural Digest or Variety) when I was writing the story. I researched the place a little once I decided I wanted to set the story there!
PS: Do you imagine the statue in the story to be an authentic artifact, a knock-off replica, or is this purposefully ambiguous? How did it come into Amer’s hands, and do Amer and Robin even know for sure what it is?
TS: Athena is the real deal! I don’t know how Amer and Robin got hold of her. They probably bought her on the black market in Pakistan. They got her out of the country in some nefarious and criminal way, which Amer justified by telling himself that she’d be better off in an international institution like the Met. They know what she’s worth but in the end she becomes a much more potent representation for Amer of everything that’s wrong in his relationship.
PS: Amer, who is Pakistani, and Robin, who is not, appear to have very different emotional relationships to the statue. Amer’s insistence that she needs no grand reveal seems indicative of a genuine pride in this artifact, though he also comments that in Pakistan such pieces are “destined for a rubbish heap” and placing them in a Western institution is “almost an act of charity.” Robin, on the other hand, treats the whole thing as business. How do you envision what this statue means to Amer, and what it means for him to place it with a worthy institution, beyond needing the money to pay off his mortgage? What does his behavior in this story tell us about his relationship with Pakistan and with the state of cultural preservation in his home country?
TS: Like me, Amer has a complicated relationship with Pakistan. And the way he thinks about Pakistan, and relatedly, the way he thinks about Athena, is very deeply connected to the way he thinks about himself. He looks down on the place, because he thinks it isn’t sophisticated, it doesn’t value the things he values—but he also has some pride in it. After all, it’s produced something as glorious as Athena.
But certainly Amer projects some of his self-hate onto Robin, so that Robin’s failure to respect Athena (as Amer sees it) is his failure to respect Amer. And that baggage, that Amer brings to his relationship, makes him doubt Robin’s feelings for him.
PS: How do you see the intercultural (and likely interracial, though the text does not make this explicit) nature of their coupledom as impacting Amer and Robin’s relationship?
TS: Robin and Amer are very different, in ways other than just their race or culture, but it’s why I love them as a couple. They’re so unlikely and yet I think there might be a genuine affection between them.
Without wanting to be too pseudointellectual, perhaps Amer is something of Frantz Fanon’s self-hating colonial subject and perhaps the fact that he’s in a relationship with an American is in some way a symptom of the colonialism of desire. Or maybe it’s just what he likes.
PS: The story ends with Robin identifying what looked like a scrap of fabric in the tree halfway down to the water as a plastic bag. How did you decide this moment in the action was the right place for the story to end? In your mind, in Robin falling to his doom, or will he make it back safely to the terrace, or is it purposefully ambiguous?
TS: I knew where this story would end when I began it, so I was writing towards this point, and once I reached it in a way that made sense, I knew I’d reached the end. I’m not sure what happens next to be honest. It seems a rather treacherous moment—but not entirely without hope. There’s something beautiful and tragic to me in the way that Amer and Robin connect right at the end.
PS: A character named Amer also appears in your New Yorker story, “The Philosophy of the Foot.” Are these stories part of a larger collection about Amer?
TS: I struggle with naming my characters. Amer sounds a little like Taymour and my protagonists are sometimes stand-ins for myself or, at least in early drafts, are versions of myself. As I write into a piece, the protagonist becomes distinct but by that time, the name has stuck. The Amer in this story isn’t necessarily the Amer in The New Yorker—no more than both are Taymour-ish.
PS: What are you working on next?
TS: I’m currently finishing a novel set in contemporary feudal Pakistan that engages with the themes I love—men and power and betrayal. The juicy stuff.
Taymour Soomro is a British Pakistani writer. He is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia, where he is a Chase doctoral fellow. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Ninth Letter.
Preety Sidhu is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in fiction at Louisiana State University. Originally from the eastern shore of Maryland, she earned a BA in Astronomy at Swarthmore College before working as an independent school math teacher in the New York and Boston areas. She is currently hard at work on her thesis, a novel.
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