There's a sense in which travel means essentially, you can't go home again.
Olufemi Terry at a Cheuse Salon, launching Wilderness of Mirrors at Busboys and Poets
In this episode of Upstart Crow, with William "Bill" Miller, Olufemi talks about his debut novel.
Here is an excerpt from the podcast, tracing the origins of one of the characters in Wilderness of Mirrors - Bolling:
So Bolling's provenance is quite complicated. I initially saw him as something like the judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. That's the way that I initially envisaged Bolling.
And some traces of that have remained. His ability to perceive things in Emil, that Emil has not shared. His ability to at times know where Emil is.
There's one particular scene in the book where he knows where Emil is and Emil has no idea how. But Bolling also comes from my interest in Germaness, let's say, and German culture. My wife and son are German.
I've spent quite a lot of time in Germany. Spending time in Germany and living in the Anglo world where I am exposed to tropes about Germany, I feel that in the Anglo world, particularly Britain and the US, there is a persisting preoccupation with Nazis and Nazism. Germany is in a very complex position of having atoned, probably more than any other state that has committed atrocities on this scale.
It's worked, I think, extremely hard to atone for that and has now begun to shift back to where you have a sizable contingent of the population who feels that it's enough.
There's been enough atonement and Germany has not done anything that any other state would not have done in its position, which to many people is an unfortunate argument, but this argument seems to be gaining traction in Germany. And from having spent time in Germany and from having seen also, as I say, this fixation on Nazism, which I see as sort of implying that this is a strain in German culture, part of German Romanticism that perhaps is a permanent strain in German culture.
I wanted to explore a little bit about that. And the way that I wanted to do that in the case of Bolling was to make him Haitian-German, you know. He is taken away from his mother when he's very young.
So he has Haitian roots and he has brown skin, but he's been raised in Germany. And then at some point in his adult life, he goes to live in Haiti for a few months. And during that time, he comes to terms with his counterfactual self, of who he might have been if he'd stayed in Haiti.
And in some sense, his transformation echoes Emils in that time, because after he's lived in Haiti for those few months, he doesn't want to return to Berlin. In the same way that Emil doesn't really feel that he can just go back to his life in an e-Geld and resume his medical studies. There's a sense in which travel means essentially, you can't go home again.
From Upstart Crow: Olufemi Terry - Wilderness of Mirrors, Oct 31, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upstart-crow/id1775825493?i=1000734440879&r=351
This material may be protected by copyright.
November 04, 2025