John Irving, bestselling author, in Ottawa to talk about Avenue of Mysteries
Author in process of turning his most famous book, The World According to Garp, into HBO series
Magic, sex, death, tolerance and childhood trauma are some of the familiar obsessions served up in John Irving's 14th novel, Avenue of Mysteries.
He was in Ottawa Wednesday, for the first time since he was a boy, to talk about his latest work at the Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Avenue of Mysteries is the story of Juan Diego, a Mexican "dump kid" working with his sister as a scavenger, picking up and sorting through garbage, in a city dump. (Diego is also a self-taught reader who eventually becomes a famous author.)
Along his journey, Diego encounters a string of characters including a clairvoyant, prostitutes, cross-dressers, circus workers and Jesuit priests, all of whom have profound influences on both his boyhood and his life as an adult.
Like many children who make their precarious way through Irving's novels, Diego's early life is rife with experiences of poverty and tragedy that will inform his entire life.
Avenue of Mysteries took 25 years to become a novel, beginning as a screenplay set in India about children working in the circus, but for a number of reasons the action was relocated to Mexico.
"Realistically it had to be a place where children were also principally the performers in the circuses, and like in India they were chiefly at risk because there was no safety net," Irving said in an interview at Southminster United Church.
"The corner these children were painted into, you could make the case that their chances would be better in a circus, even one without a net."
Irving is that rare combination: an internationally bestselling and award-winning novelist, as well as an Oscar winner for his screenplay for the movie The Cider House Rules (1999).
His second book, The World According to Garp, catapulted him onto the world stage and earned him the National Book Award in 1980.
The book was made into a movie starring Robin Williams in 1982. Now the author is currently working on his own screenplay of the novel for an HBO miniseries.