#robert kloss

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Robert Kloss

Terzetta

1922

[artsy-dragon-collection]

Terzetta, 1922 by Robert Kloss

[unnamedpress]

THIS INTERVIEW is an edited version of an email conversation between Colin Winnette and Robert Kloss, two novelists who like to mingle the historical with the fictional. Both are drawn as well to examining acts of violence and to the American urge to push westward. Kloss’s new book, The...

"I do think there’s a place for fact in fiction. I think there’s a place for imagination in nonfiction, as well. Melville is my favorite writer, for instance, and most of his novels incorporate fact directly. Moby-Dick is obviously the most famous example, but most of his novels blur the line rather radically between direct experience, imagination, and research — and very often Melville lifts sections directly from his research materials." - Robert Kloss in Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)

[unnamedpress]

There’s that quote of Melville’s that I think is an ideal description—'It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.' Yes, it’s a deadly book, and I appreciate that you read my work that way. I think a work of literature should require a little courage to confront it. A polar wind should blow through it.

Robert Kloss in conversation with Matt Kish in The Paris Review

Read the whole article here.

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Before I could write, I drew—little picture books and little comic books. I had my mother fill in the speech balloons. And even after I could write—and once I could write, that’s really all I did with my time, other than read comic books—I always illustrated my stories, until I reached a point when I knew my illustrations were not sophisticated enough. I didn’t have the ability to create the images I saw, so I stopped. But even now I would say that I write visually, and I would say that I’m more drawn to films than I am to novels. So the foundation of my writing is the image—the attempt to create image out of word and rhythm.

Robert Kloss

[mttbll]

As far as shaping character, my philosophy is that character should move within the narrative, not drive the narrative. We have the illusion that we are in control of our lives, that we determine events, but we do not. We are at the mercy of forces far greater than ourselves. I actually prefer a passive character—observing, reacting, being buffeted around and responding to the world. The universe is active. Society is active. History is active. God moves, and characters respond, grope, search, wander. And slowly, in figuring out why that response happened, the character is revealed. But that revelation is less essential than the drive of historical event.

Robert Kloss

[unnamedpress]

And the police raided your possessions, and the police smashed your icons, and they battered your priests, led them to jail, bleeding from busted lips. And jeering crowds spat. Nights now in feces and blood-smeared cells, listening to flies, skittering rats. And the police fired pistols into your neighborhoods, their faces covered by hoods or smeared with black polish, glinting in the firelight like pooled oil, whooping in alien tongues they believed mimicked native languages. And when the names and addresses of policemen became known now too their bodies were found in fields, fly covered and headless.

Robert Kloss, ‘The Revelator’

Read an excerpt of ‘The Revelator’ at The Collagist.