Anderson, Paul

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Anderson, Paul

(W. Paul Anderson)

PERSONAL: Married.

ADDRESSES: Home—Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Carroll & Graf, 245 W. 17th St., 11th Fl., New York, NY 10011-5300. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Worked variously as a sailor, construction worker, farm worker, and teacher.

AWARDS, HONORS: Novel of the year designation, Writers Guild of Alberta, 2005, and notable book selection, Kiriyama Pacific-Rim Prize, both for Hunger's Brides.

WRITINGS:

Hunger's Brides: A Novel of the Baroque, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: For fifteen years, while in his twenties and thirties, Paul Anderson traveled the world, working variously as a sailor and deckhand, a construction worker in Australia, a farm laborer in Switzerland, and a teacher in Latin America. During these travels he spent some time in Mexico, where in 1988 he got the idea to write a book about seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Anderson ultimately combined de la Cruz's story with that of a modern character he created, Beulah, a graduate student studying the Mexican poet's writings. The result became Hunger's Brides: A Novel of the Baroque, a book that ultimately took him twelve years to complete.

Anderson uses Beulah's modern life and neuroses as a framework in which to place de la Cruz's story, which emerges through a combination of seventeenth-century voices. Beulah finds many similarities between her own life and that of the Mexican poet; hunger, beauty, the difficulties of living as a poet and scholar, and the relationships between women and men are central themes.

Nearly all reviewers commented on the novel's length of 1,500 pages, and several suggested that the book was much longer than it needed to be. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly disliked the framing story, claiming that "there are hundreds too many pages of her [Beulah's] interior life." Other reviewers, however, thought the novel excellent. David A. Berona, reviewing the book for Library Journal, wrote, "This is an extraordinary debut, with depth of detail and narrative skill presented effortlessly throughout its staggering length."