Pasha Malla parodies a wellness resort with horror and humour in new novel
The Ontario author discussed All You Can Kill on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Pasha Malla's latest novel, All You Can Kill, is an absurdist story set at a wellness resort that specializes in solving couples' martial issues with erotic therapy.
But the main characters of the novel — an unnamed narrator and a woman named K. Sohail — are not a couple — which incites humorous, yet uncomfortable moments. As horror and surrealism seeps into the narrative, Malla creates a world and a story that reminds us how strange people can be.
"There were parts of it that were extremely unsettling to read and quite disturbing," said Mattea Roach during an interview with Malla on Bookends. "But there were also parts of it that were fun and brought me as a reader back to that sort of childlike place."
Malla is the author of several books including the short story collection The Withdrawal Method, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the novels People Park and Kill the Mall.
He joined Roach to discuss the process of writing All You Can Kill and the type of relationships he's interested in exploring through his work.
Mattea Roach: When you're writing these absurdist stories that were just kind of flowing out of you and you didn't even necessarily know at the outset where things were going to go, are there any rules around that?
Pasha Malla: I really just let it go. If there's any sort of parameters for the book, it's the parameter of disabusing myself of preconceived notions of what I think a story should be.
I teach creative writing. I'm very aware of the tropes of traditional storytelling within speculative fiction, within traditional literary fiction, character driven fiction. In this novel, the conventions of causality, linearity, even geographic consistency are tested. The resort is described in ways that are contradictory. There's a description of the inside of the resort that is different at the end of the book than it is at the start of the book, which is what I realized upon proofreading. And then I kept it like that.
The absurdism as a strategy, like an aesthetic strategy or maybe a political strategy, is to me, if I want to put on an academic hat and talk about my own work, it's really a response to a broader culture that I feel like in many ways precludes rational explication or explanation.
I go to absurdism the way that some of the early Soviet writers responded to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union with absurdism. It's a way of undoing the logic, the supposed logic, at work and responding to it in a kind of commensurate strategy. That's the serious answer.
I just wanted to have fun, I wanted to make myself laugh.- Pasha Malla
The other answer is I just wanted to have fun, I wanted to make myself laugh. My partner will tell you that she could hear me up in the office cackling as I was writing. And that's not something that is that common for me in my writing practice. I just finished another manuscript for a novel I'm working on another but they're not joyful in the same way. The joy comes out of different things and this was just like a joy of play and invention that I was trying to capture in a way that I felt was sort of childlike, the way that children play with story.
MR: How would you describe the relationship between the unnamed narrator and his companion, K. Sohail, who end up on a couple's island wellness retreat but aren't actually together?
PM: I think the narrator would have a different version of what their relationship is to what K. Sohail would say their relationship is. They are, per the marketing copy, accidental companions, they sort of escape this mall together. They're physically bound together at the start of the book. And I think they have a sense of sort of duty to one another that is sort of forced upon them by external circumstances.
It's just two people who are lost in this place together.- Pasha Malla
I wouldn't characterize it as like a romantic relationship or even a friendship, but it's just two people who are lost in this place together. So they have each other and they need each other.
MR: What did you feel you could explore maybe through this relationship that, as you say, is not romantic, not even particularly a friendship?
PM: Well, it saved me from having to write any sex scenes.
MR: That's one good reason.
PM: So thank God. A book like this and a lot of my fiction is interested in tensions and in relationships and identities that are like fluid and not easily-categorized people. I find those kinds of tensions really creatively generative.
In this book — I'm making this sound like this was a really conscientious choice, whereas I think I'm retroactively interrogating what happened and then how I respond to it creatively — but there's an energy that's created in a relationship you can't define.
We find that in our lives, when you have a certain kind of relationship with a neighbour whose last name you don't know, there's this proximity and a kind of intimacy and the way that your houses are really close together, a kind of like awareness of what their life is like, but yet this distance and I think that's another kind of relationship I would be interested in exploring in fiction, like something that is like, it's not a romantic relationship, it's not a friendship, it's not family. It's something else. And I think those spaces are really energizing as a space to write into because it's a sort of thing that I just, I don't understand. And I need to enter the space of fiction to try to figure it out.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Ryan B. Patrick with thanks to Ailey Yamamoto.
