Click on the photo above to listen to the author discuss his novel.
Love, art, fascism, and the approaching Holocaust collide with comic and tragic results in The Eighth Wonder of the World (Handsel), a recently published novel by Leslie Epstein, the director of BU’s Creative Writing Program. Set mostly in pre–World War II Italy, the novel takes its title from a monument intended to represent Benito Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia.
The brash American architect Amos Prince wins the design competition with his mile-high tower but grows mad with his fervor to complete the project as the war looms. Meanwhile, his assistant, a young Jewish architecture student named Max Shabilian, is torn between his admiration for Prince and his concern about the fate of Italy’s Jews.
Your protagonist, Max Shabilian, is devoted to Amos Prince, a legendary American architect and flamboyant anti-Semite. What led you to create that relationship?
One of the issues is, what is the relationship between art — architecture — and morality? The architect in my book is based on Ezra Pound, the whole issue of the Bollingen Prize for poetry. Pound was a traitor to his country [during World War II], no question, and he might well have been hanged if he didn’t get off on an insanity defense, and while he’s in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in lieu of jail, he’s awarded the highest prize for poetry in the country. What do you make of that? The claims of art — do they supercede the claims of morality? I can’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I can try to explore them in some way, and that’s what the book does.
As a novelist, what keeps bringing you back to the Holocaust and its effect on the world?
I hate to use a cliché, of spiritual vacuum, but it may apply, and one seeks things out in life. I had a secular upbringing, and if I’d had a religious one, I think I might well have rebelled and not been drawn to the Holocaust.
Jessica Ullian
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