Born in 1989 in Chigasaki, Han Smith grew up in Japan, Russia, the UK and elsewhere. Han Smith, a queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, is the recipient of a 2019/2020 London Writers Award. Her debut novel Portraits of the Palace of Wrecking and Creativity examines historical memory through a series of 77 portraits centring on two unnamed characters: the mercurial “almost daughter” and the “woman with a cave inside her”.
Portraits of the Palace of Wrecking and Creativity is a novel built on the dynamics of language: the text shifts back and forth from conventional prose to sharp staccato sentences, and is scattered with Smith’s reflective questioning of the meaning of individual words. It is a story of the obfuscation of history and political dissidents trying to uncover what has been forcibly erased in an unnamed town that resembles post-Soviet Russia. Throughout the novel the almost daughter is a key observer: she unveils the duality of the society she lives in and finds her voice in the process. Described as a “hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure” by Abigail Shinn, the Chair of Judges of the Goldsmiths Prize 2024, the novel explores how language is shaped by ideology.
Zuzanna Lachendro: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
Han Smith: I think there are two main things that excite me most about reading writing that pushes the elements that have come to be markers of what we call the novel, such as character, plot and mounting action. One is seeing different approaches to structure, maybe with unexpected chronologies or perspectives that challenge our ideas of how stories are pieced together, or even what “story” is. The other one is encountering language that doesn’t settle into easy clichés but instead reaches out for something totally new and is alive and happening even at sentence level. Nothing really beats that.
The novel’s first portrait introduces us to the almost daughter, a central character without a name. Could you tell us a bit more about her? What makes her the “almost” daughter?
This is an interesting question and it’s not straightforward for me to reconstruct exactly what happened when. As I recall it, I initially did not name her at all as I didn’t want to pin her down, but I still needed some way to refer to her. As a temporary placeholder, I just called her “the daughter”, in order to write a scene between her and her mother, but then this in fact trapped her into only that relationship; I countered this by making her an “almost daughter”, again only temporarily at first and as something to revisit later. But from there, this almostness became even more a crucial part of her – she is so unsure of and distant from her own motivations and feelings. That said, I also want to leave some openness to the reader in thinking about what really makes her almost, and whether it is necessarily a bad thing.
The word “portrait” in the book has many meanings, from painted portraits to photographs. At times it serves as a synonym for memory with individual events marked as portraits. What was the inspiration behind using portraits as a framing device in this way?
I didn’t have a conscious plan from the start to use the portraits as a framing structure. It was more that as I worked on the writing, the idea of portraits and images built up, in the modelling portfolio and photographs of lost histories, as you mention, but also more generally in how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how these images overlap between selves and into the past as well. I think I then realised I was beginning to see the writing as a series of portraits myself, so it seemed like a fitting way to hold the structure. Maybe it also keeps the reader aware that all of the images and portraits are mediated in some way.
The novel leaves us filling in a lot of blanks, for example, guessing when exactly the story is set, who the almost daughter is, her relationship to the woman with the cave inside her. Is ambiguity important to you as a writer?
In reading, I’m often most drawn to texts that leave some space and allow you to stitch things together without having everything on the surface, so this probably feeds into my writing in general as well. For Portraits of the Palace of Wrecking and Creativity, some of the non-specificity also has to do with the fact that although the book is partly a tribute to people close to me who are doing vital work on history and memory in the real world, I felt it wasn’t my story to tell in a straightforward, documentary way: I needed to leave some openness to suggest that this is definitely not the only or whole story on this subject. That said, I hope there is enough in the book to be clear that much of it does relate to Russia, and in particular the work of organisations such as the now-banned Memorial in uncovering parts of the country’s history that do not conform with the dominant national narrative, and in exposing the dangers of accepting this glorified narrative. I hope readers might use sources outside what is presented as “the book” to fill gaps as well.
The actions of the characters within the novel are driven by loss, resistance and polarisation within society which at times turns political. Nonetheless, the almost daughter appears paradoxically apolitical through her passiveness and blind following of those around her. What lay behind that decision in writing the novel?
From the beginning, I was writing not just about the concept of historical memory and what is included or left out, but the individuals who get involved in this process, and why they do. I don’t see the almost daughter as passive or blind, but constrained by other pressures and aware of significant risks. She is certainly distanced from any sense that she could or should take action of a political kind, but there are reasons for this.
Language plays a crucial part in the plot – you can tell when the narrative shifts from one character to another purely through the way the language changes. Do you think your experience as a translator has affected the way you write fiction?
This is such an intriguing question. I haven’t thought it fully through but maybe it does. In good translation, you have to have one eye on maintaining the particular tone and voice of the initial text, and then in fiction you need that too, in developing a mode of writing that suits and expands the subject. I’d also say that for me it’s so important to be reading a lot in both other languages and translation: it necessarily brings you out of set (English) phrases and challenges assumptions about what is universal even in things like tense and word order.
You finish the novel with three poems in Russian that touch on many of the motifs in the story, such as ancestors, eyes as mirrors, loss, the daguerreotype and photography in general. What came first, the poems or the idea for the story?
This is another place where it’s difficult to determine what came first. I was definitely aware of one of the poems before I started writing: this was “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova, and when I was speaking to people involved in work on memory and monuments, it was something we discussed. The voice in the section of the poem quoted in the book insists that if any statue or memorial is ever built to her, it must not stand in a beautiful location. Instead it should stand, crying, by a locked prison door, embodying and commemorating the millions who suffered arrest, exile, execution and loss during the Stalinist purges. In writing what became Portraits, I couldn’t not have this in mind. I believe I came across the other two poems later, during the writing, and they formed new links with the themes you’ve mentioned. That said, I’d also like to emphasise that the poems are not meant to be a single key to unlocking the whole book, but are just one other layer of it.
Tell me about a piece of art, literature or music that was important to you when writing this book.
I’ve already talked about “Requiem”, but I’ll mention another of the poems. Marina Tsvetaeva’s “House” suggests a speaker looking at a daguerreotype image of a home and seeing her own reflection superimposed on it, and this idea of present and past inhabiting each other was central to the book. I’m certainly not any kind of expert on Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva, but these poems really stuck with me.
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
We need it because it shines on writing that takes risks and has a different kind of energy, and that in the loud world of mainstream publishing can otherwise drift off the radar. As I’ve said, writing that really pushes and stretches for something new is so exciting in showing how elastic and electric our minds can be, and the Goldsmiths Prize alerts us to all these possibilities. It’s just great to see this kind of work highlighted, especially when it doesn’t have the huge money behind it in advances, advertising and promotion that some books get.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize? Why?
A novel that for me really buzzes with the Goldsmiths Prize spirit is Milkman: Anna Burns bends into a completely unique language and voice here and I feel like I’m plugged into something so charged every time I read it. It did get attention through the Booker Prize (though also some criticism), so for a book that didn’t have as much limelight I’d say Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy, for the structural thrill. And if I can have a more international one too, it goes a thousand times over to any of Yelena Moskovich’s books, which are all so unstoppably wild in both form and language.
“The Palace of Creativity and Wrecking” by Han Smith is published by JM Originals. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 6 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
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