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Ilya Rozanov, The Art of Fiction No. 381

Interviewed by Michaela Kerrigan

This interview was originally dead in the water following a disastrous morning with a supposedly seasoned writer for the Review. I suspected, however, that the debacle was rather one-sided; not the enclave of the interviewer’s questions so much as a function of Ilya Rozanov’s studied superciliousness. It was thus a surprise to learn that he agreed to grant us access to his life one more time, though perhaps the decision was not so shocking after I revealed my identity. 

We first met when I was a child in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He stayed at my family’s bed and breakfast, shortly before the news of Shane Hollander’s return broke over the country. He dedicated his second novel, Velocity of Fantasy (2043), to my great-grandmother, and when we met again on a salubrious afternoon at his home in Eastern Quebec, he said, “You look like your father.”

At sixty-eight, Rozanov was no longer the wild, imposing silhouette from his youth, nor the stiff caricature of himself that dominated his forties. Rather, he was loose-limbed, taking up space confidently and with the lumbering quality of an old, much-loved dog. He wore a knit cardigan over a leopard-print shirt, sweatpants, and bedazzled Adidas slides. His voice, an accented tenor, curled lovingly over the vowels of Hollander’s full name as he called over his shoulder. 

Hollander himself—Rozanov’s husband and childhood sweetheart—accompanied us on a tour of the property, so-named the Cottage, which sits by a lake with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the sunrise. A mansion more than a log cabin, the Cottage stands as a concession to Rozanov and Hollander’s combined wealth from their many years as professional hockey legends, and remains one of the only tributes to their past lives. When not in Quebec for the summer months, the pair spend their time in Ottawa. 

On the way up from the dock,  Rozanov and Hollander reminisced about their non-literary adventures and the success of the Irina Foundation, a household name charity in Canada, the origins of which they described as quixotic. 

“It was part of our love story,” Hollander shrugged, then turned visibly sheepish. Also sixty-eight, Hollander’s famous swoop of black hair was grey and tied in a neat ponytail, and he sported a linen button-down over staid, straightened jeans. In their athletic prime, they were a study in opposites; now, they are what Rozanov gleefully calls, “both boring grandpas.”

Boring is far from the word I would use to describe either man. In addition to the Foundation, Rozanov and Hollander, along with their neighbours, have spent the last several years battling property owners and Quebec itself to transfer the vast lands surrounding the lake back to the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka nation. “People should give less fucks about public policy,” said Rozanov. “Why is public policy always about Canadian economic growth? The law has a chance to do good. So many ways to go about this and people want to fight every possibility. Okay, so we fight.” 

It was this stubborn determination that won them championships and pushed the NHL forward in time. If anybody could compel a nation to change, wouldn’t it be them? But Rozanov is not interested in the grandeur of such a task; he believes in the united efforts of many. 

Hollander retired from the conversation, citing an imminent call with their daughter. Rozanov and I made our way upstairs and sat across from each other in his office, which housed a typewriter and overlooked the lake. I decided to start there.

INTERVIEWER

Is the typewriter your preferred writing implement?

ROZANOV

What, this thing? It’s a piece of junk. Look at these pages.

INTERVIEWER

I didn’t know typewriters could be misaligned like that.

ROZANOV

Right? But I like it all the same. My editor fucking hates me, always says, "I can’t read this shit, Rozy." I tell him, "Literacy is hard, but you’ll get there someday." The words only make sense when they’re imperfect. 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been praised as an unexpected wordsmith. People love your imperfect prose.

ROZANOV

Do you?

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

ROZANOV

Flattery will get you everywhere. What do you think of this word, "unexpected?"

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of it?

ROZANOV

I think there is an expectation that I write about hockey, or Russia, or Shane, and that I hire a ghostwriter to cement my accomplishments as legendary. There is an expectation that I am stupid or bullheaded. I am obnoxious, but I try my best to be honest.

INTERVIEWER

I can think of some people waiting on a tell-all biography.

ROZANOV

Hah! Fuck them. I told Random House that everything I write is a biography. You don’t need me to narrate my own life. You don’t need to adapt me into something I’m not, or something the world thought I was. I’m just me.

INTERVIEWER

Is lived experience your greatest inspiration?

ROZANOV

Sure, in the sense that my lived experiences mirror everybody’s experiences. Sure. I feel everything, oftentimes too much, if that’s possible. The smallest moments can bring me to tears. I hold my husband’s hand and fill to the brim with emotions too weighted to eloquently describe. But I think life is better this way. What is the opposite? Indifference is the soul killer. Apathy is worse than death.

INTERVIEWER

As a writer, is the act of writing a cathartic exercise for you?

ROZANOV

Louise Glück once likened it to emptying a well. I think it’s the same for me, or at least very similar. Writing hollows me out. Though, I should add, I don’t like to call myself a writer. I don’t like to distill myself into categories. I write because I need to write, I read because I need to read, I eat because I need to eat, and so on. I imagine it’s the same for everyone who feels compelled to put words on a page. It’s not about the appetite for catharsis through reminiscence—which, as I get older, turns out to be rather anorexic anyway—but about capturing a moment in time or place, like a photograph. 

INTERVIEWER

Can I ask what moments particularly inspired Velocity, if there are any you can name specifically at all?

ROZANOV

Been dying to ask that one, have you? To be frank, I saw your great-grandmother’s obituary. I was inconsolable. Grief, I think, compounds itself, and it is unrelentingly constant. So, if anything, the "moment" was the amalgamation of many sad things in an otherwise extraordinary life. How lucky I am to have so many people I love so fiercely in the same plane of existence again, and to be certain that they love me back and aren’t only imperfect memories, but imperfect beings—this, too.

INTERVIEWER

What do your loved ones say about your works?

ROZANOV

I wish they were mortified. They’re sincerely and unfailingly supportive. Shane tells me he loves me every hour of the day, but he has a weak stomach for gory things, which I suppose my writing is. I like to be honest, as I said. As well, before he passed away, my father-in-law, David [Hollander], he’d devour every publication and sit me down to discuss formal elements for hours on end. My first short story in the New Yorker, he framed the cover of the issue and put it up on the wall next to Shane’s yearbook photo from Grade 4. Marley [former teammate Cliff Marlow] reads me like religion, because I send my manuscripts to him before they get published, and he calls me every time to say, "Jack Kerouozanov, you motherfucker—!" Then he’ll give me an honest review. Svetlana [Vetrova] too, without the theatrics. When she opines, I listen.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it hard to evaluate your own work? How often do you fight with your editor?

ROZANOV

All the damn fucking time. I have a lot of love for him. I’m fastidious with my voice—when something feels true, I think it’s more justifiable than something that is simply digestible. I dislike the part of publishing that demands audience engagement and wallets. That’s certainly not a new thought, though.

INTERVIEWER

You and your husband run a book club that's open for everyone, is that right? What are you reading?

ROZANOV

Yes. It’s my favourite shared hobby with him. We’ve run it for, oh, it must be almost twenty years now. Wow. It started as a way to keep in touch with our friends outside of holidays—you know, keep our brains thinking. Now, it’s a popular blog and less of a monthly potluck, but I get to read the most delicious words straight from Shane’s brain. He writes like he’s making a mess, all magniloquent ideas and pithy syntax crammed within and around the labyrinthine constraints of English grammar. I fucking love it. I love him. I love that we’re drowning in books no matter where we live, and that we can spend entire days in silence together, reading in each other’s company. I love how he reads aloud as well, the way the timbre of his voice takes on a startling and recitative quality, meditative and mellifluous and… what was the other part of the question?

INTERVIEWER

What’s on the reading list?

ROZANOV

Right. Anything and everything—poetry and romance and nonfiction and comics. We’ve tried to avoid the famous dead white guys, though I insisted on Dostoyevsky in the early years, which is as classic as we ever got. Right now it’s A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib. Next is Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back by Leanne Simpson. I’ll need to check the blog for the rest.

INTERVIEWER

You must be inundated with recommendations.

ROZANOV

We are.

INTERVIEWER

Does the public scrutiny of your life ever get overwhelming? How does it impact your writing, if at all?

ROZANOV

When I was an infant, probably, yes. For most of my career, I was painted as this womanizer; this unserious, Gatsby-like character, all hockey and no depth. I did smoke, and I did fuck around, but I also fell in love before I was twenty. The attention was uncharitable. But it’s been a surprisingly pleasant experience since Fender Bender (2041). I don’t think people can justify denying my humanity anymore. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel pressure at all to explain your humanity through your novels?

ROZANOV

I stopped trying somewhere between Velocity and Traitors (2049). It’s a useless exercise. People read exploitatively, always fishing for gems they can scuttle off with. I did the same when I was younger. No, I’m of the opinion that I know what I wrote, and I know what I meant when I wrote it, and I wrote it for me. It is not the endeavour of the artist to hold the audience’s hand like a toddler and walk through Hell together. Art requires active participation; art does not happen unless you let it happen to you.

INTERVIEWER

Did you learn this solely through experience, or did you have mentors?

ROZANOV

Mostly experience, but David, my father-in-law, he was my sounding board. I wrote the majority of Fender Bender while our family got reacquainted, the months after Shane returned to us. He and I would go back and forth between Montreal and Ottawa, just like old times—only, I’d write pages of ideas and lines in the car, a mix of Russian and English and French. I was a leaky faucet back then. David helped to direct the stream.

INTERVIEWER

He taught you how to write?

ROZANOV

I’m not so sure writing can be taught. I think you can learn grammar; I think there are rules and conventions of genres you can toy with. Certainly, I would not be half so articulate in English if I didn’t study its foundations. The actual act of forming sentences, paragraphs, or stories, however—I think that can only be learned through constant failure, or countless iterations of the same ideas.

INTERVIEWER

Who else inspires you to write?

ROZANOV

Shane, always. I write him silly sonnets in English and Russian; I cut deep into myself for him, so he’ll always have the truest parts of me. My daughter as well. I will never find enough words to outline the sheer depth of my love, not in any language. But I can keep trying for as long as I have words in me, I think.

INTERVIEWER

You once claimed your versatility was a disadvantage. Do you still believe that to be true?

ROZANOV

It undoubtedly prevents me from being more consistent. I wish I could be the kind of person who is able to write on command, and set out periods in their day where they achieve so and so number of words. I read this op-ed by Kazuo Ishiguro in the Guardian, once, where he described going on “Crashes” and writing from 9am to 10:30pm. I do this when the spirit overwhelms me. I let the words build, and then I lock myself in my office and chainsmoke my way through the dam bursting in my mind, until every drop is on a page.

INTERVIEWER

You drop everything and write?

ROZANOV

Well, no. I still do the dishes, for example.

INTERVIEWER

If I asked your husband, would he say the same thing?

ROZANOV

It’s probably best that we don’t ask him about this particular matter.

INTERVIEWER

All right. You’ve talked at length about Ishiguro in previous interviews, describing his work as a supernaturally compelling force. Have you recently re-read any of his works, and has your opinion shifted?

ROZANOV

I thought about Never Let Me Go the other day. I am likely due a re-read at some point, but I don’t think I’ve been in the headspace for it. Frankly speaking, the past doesn’t interest me as much as it did when I was in my fifties. I used to think, especially in Fender Bender and Velocity, that writing was like portraiture. It can be, but it doesn’t need to be. These days, I find autobiography to be, altogether, completely boring. It’s probably why I don’t quite tolerate interviews like this anymore.

INTERVIEWER

I’m sorry.

ROZANOV

Don’t be. I saw your name and wanted to know how you were doing. I didn’t think an email would suffice.

INTERVIEWER

I appreciate that. We'll wrap up soon.

ROZANOV

Before we do, I want it on the record that the boat your father showed me once by the Dartmouth ferry—or rather, its marked absence—was called Theodore Too, and was not the original Theodore Tugboat. Precision is important.

INTERVIEWER

I think he might have some choice words for you.

ROZANOV

Maybe he should win a Stanley Cup or six and become a world-renowned author, then get the last word.

INTERVIEWER

Ha, ha. Okay, what would you say to aspiring writers?

ROZANOV

Read. Experience life. A pianist cannot move you through Chopin without first knowing loss. One of the first questions my editor asked me when we met was, "What the fuck do you have to write about?" I liked the audacity. I liked that he meant it earnestly. What the fuck do I have to write about? Dead parents, formerly missing husband? None of those things mean anything unless I make them mean things. So. I think new writers should be imperfect but purposeful. Always, always be aware of the medium.

INTERVIEWER

Have you taught, or have you considered teaching? I know earlier you said it can't really be done, but the puzzle pieces, at least.

ROZANOV

I see. No. I’ve been asked by various institutions, but no. What do I have to offer that the wealth of literature in the world does not already convey? Besides which, I’m happy with my life right now. Between the Foundation, and litigating this case, and supporting my daughter, and loving my husband, my life is beautifully full.

INTERVIEWER

Is this the life you envisioned when you were younger?

ROZANOV

How much younger?

INTERVIEWER

Let’s say your childhood self.

ROZANOV

Ah. I think so, in my secret dreams. And I think, knowing what I do, he would probably tell his mother: "Mama, I’m finally home."