What I love about books is what I also love about travel. When I travel, I search for the new. That new food. The way script or currency looks. The lilts and lingers in different dialects. When I read, I also look for the new. A place I have not been. People in that place with a different worldview from mine. The infinitesimal ways in which one human connects to another. Or doesn’t. But here’s the thing I find when I do these interviews for Carve. About ten steps into the new, I find myself feeling the familiar. No matter how different a person, place, or situation may seem at first blush, I always find a way to relate. And relating—the act of it—is the beating heart of writing and reading.
Anita Felicelli’s book Chimerica offers us a great many “something new”s, starting with this—a talking lemur. The protagonist, a Tamil American trial attorney named Maya Ramesh has lost her family and her job. When a painted lemur escapes a famous mural in Oakland and comes to her for help, she sets out to rescue the lemur—and inadvertently herself—in an adventure taking us from the streets of Oakland to the courtroom to, finally, Madagascar. The book delves into the legal system, divorce and infidelity, ethnic identity, feminism, and ultimately, what it means to find one’s sense of home. Felicelli is the author of a short story collection called Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Robert Rinehart Award, and she has published numerous pieces of fiction, essays, and reviews.
Thank you so much both for your beautiful story and for taking the time to talk to the Carve community, Anita. Let’s start with the talking lemur. “Lemur” in latin means “ghost.” Can you tell us why you settled on this animal as the subject of the mural and how it (as opposed to any other animal) relates to your protagonist, Maya?
The lemur arose from a Tamil legend. The story goes that Kumari Kandam, a lost continent of ancient Tamil civilization, a utopian cradle of civilization, was drowned in the Indian Ocean. For a period, Tamil nationalist writers claimed the legend was related to a nineteenth-century zoologist’s later-discredited theory that India and Madagascar were once part of the same land mass; Madagascar was thought to be a part of Kumari Kandam that had drifted away. When I visited Madagascar twelve or thirteen years ago, I fell in love with the indri, a kind of lemur, and in particular, its ghostly song. I love that you mention the Latin etymology of “lemur;” that haunts this story as well. I want to suggest a shadow self, a ghost of who Maya might have been—her Tamil origins, the story she’s told herself about who she is—in the lemur. Why does the lemur show up after her family has left, and why does he, on some level, take the place of her children? Why is his own origin story so suspect? Is he even real? Are the events of this novel real? I wanted everything in the novel to feel surreal, to feel unsettling, in the same way the indri’s song is unsettling.
Much of Maya’s story here is about her experiences as a trial lawyer. She is told at the very beginning that she is being fired because she doesn’t have “it.” She also described her career in law to that point as leaving her a “shriveled, desiccated husk” of her former self. Of course, the lemur starts to deteriorate as well near the end of the book. Tell us how you thought about linking these two concepts together.
Thank you for this brilliant observation. From the start, I wanted to critique the American legal system. Both Maya’s career as a trial attorney and the lemur’s physical deterioration mirror a breakdown in society that I associate with a litigation-based approach to problem-solving. Often, the cost of American freedom is that we, as a society, don’t address problems prophylactically; we don’t provide a social network that would catch us in case of failure, disease, misfortune. Instead, we wait until relationships are completely broken down before trying to find a Band-Aid to put over the wound; that Band-Aid is often money via litigation. Instead of talking differences through in a non-combative way and trying to see other people’s points of view as a matter of social norms, our society encourages everyone to take solipsistic, self-indulgent individualistic stances that eventually result in head-to-head combat in a courtroom. Many litigators love this combat, of course, but it’s not clear that placing so much value on it is what is best for society.
Anita Felicelli’s short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. Her novel Chimerica was published in 2019. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Catapult, the New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area, where she grew up, with her spouse and three children.
Read Anita’s full conversation with Sejal in the Winter 2021 issue of Carve, available for preorder.