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We are delighted that Alice Austen made time to chat with us about her stunning debut novel 33 Place Brugmann, publishing March 11. Learn how living at the historic Number 33 sparked her interest in this time and place and how she used that experience to bring its fictional residents’ interwoven stories to life.
Ingram Library Services: Can you give us the elevator pitch for 33 Place Brugmann?
Alice Austen: My novel is about the residents of eight apartments in a beaux arts building at 33 Place Brugmann in Brussels. The book opens on the eve of the Nazi occupation, following the residents across Europe, to the UK, and America. When confronted with a cruel choice—submit to the regime or risk their lives resisting it—each resident discovers the truth about who and what matters to them most.
ILS: What kind of architectural and historical research did you have to do to bring 33 Place Brugmann alive?
AA: I actually lived at Number 33 for some years. At the time, I was working as a lawyer and writer, but I was also translating competition entries for a Belgian architect friend, and came to understand how fundamental art and design are to the Belgian identity.
It’s true that you could hear everything in Number 33. As my neighbor across the hall told me with a wag of her finger, “We hear everything in this building, you understand—everything!” I learned that Number 33 harbored secrets. There were two elderly women residents who would invite me to tea with my newborn baby and tell me stories of residents who lived in the building before, during, and after the war. One of the ladies had remained at 33 through the occupation and something she said stayed with me—that they were all starving.
When I began to research the novel, I learned how terribly the Belgians had suffered—the average Belgian lost around 13 pounds in the first year of the occupation alone. I had a remarkable older colleague who was an architect of the European Union, a fearless member of the Belgian resistance, and a spy for the OS during the war.
Of course, when I began to work on the book, I did a great deal of research, taking deep dives into every detail of life: what people wore, ate, listened to, read, the cost of a glass of wine in a café, what goods were available when, and how they were wrapped and packaged. There were also countless military and war facts and details: how wounds were treated, the number of crew on RAF bombers, movements of troops, timing of attacks, and the history of the wildly courageous Belgian and French resistance, how the British and others saved the art.
ILS: You’ve chosen an unusual setting, one that might give American audiences a new perspective of life under German occupation. What made you want to tell this story, from this perspective?
AA: The more I learned about the decisions civilians confronted during WWII, not unlike decisions people confront in some places in the world now, the clearer it became that Number 33 was a microcosm that told a much larger story.
When I was a kid, Ken Kesey admitted me to a writing class of adults he was teaching. I’ll never forget something he said – that writers gather our acorns, let them germinate, sprout, grow roots; the trunk, the branches, the leaves of the tree would come in time. My characters in Number 33 are all fictional but the stories I learned and the experience of living there and in Brussels were the acorns for my novel in exactly the way Ken had described.
I knew I would write this story, but it took a long time to figure out exactly how to do it. Because what had also become apparent to me living in Number 33 was that during the occupation none of the residents knew exactly what any of the others knew or were doing, they only knew that the others were up to something. That was the danger of the situation. And for me it was an exciting part of writing the novel. How to communicate that utter fear and suspense. As well, the heroic tragicomedy of the residents. It was paramount for me to bring a sense of immediacy to the novel because I think it is an urgent story for our times.
ILS: What do you hope readers take away from this story?
AA: I hope readers will have had a visceral experience and feel that they are walking in my characters’ shoes, experiencing with them how time seemed to move slowly and lose shape. But also: race. The sense of the world closing in. Choices becoming fewer. Contemplation of the nature of love and friendship, and proximity and distance, even death, in those relationships. How architecture and community shape our lives and ideas. And above all, the importance of art and communication. How we must keep talking.
In theatre actors have an expression—don’t play the end!—and the challenge for them is, night after night, to go on stage and convince the audience they have no idea what’s going to happen or what they will do. I don’t think my characters had that problem, because they didn’t know the end, or what they’d do. Often, I didn’t know what they’d do, and they surprised me.
I want readers to be surprised too.
From the moment Raphael’s paintings disappear, my characters grapple with the importance of art and with Wittgenstein’s proposition that what is thinkable is also possible. It’s an idea that’s at the core of what makes literature unexpected, heartbreaking, and profound. I think ultimately literature is an exploration of the mystery of who we really are with the understanding that none of us is playing the end. This exploration is at the heart of my book.
ILS: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
AA: I can’t name only one. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese; Cormac McCarthy’s last linked novels, Stella Maris and The Passenger; Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. And I’ve just started Aurélien Bellanger’s audacious, new novel, The Last Days of the Socialist Party.
ILS: What’s next?
AA: I’m working on my next book, The Geometry of Chance. It opens in the south of France in 1982, on the day the newly elected president of Lebanon is assassinated. Three university students—Anna, Katib, and Isaac—meet by chance, setting into motion a lifelong, deadly rivalry between the two men. Framed by the 1917 British capture of Jerusalem and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the novel tells the story of three generations of a family whose lives are connected by history, fate, and desire. And yes, there is a connection to 33 Place Brugmann.
I also have a film on Emilie du Chatelet in development in France, and two films in pre-production that are to be shot in the U.S.
