Richard Zimler - A quest for meaning

By MARGIE THOMSON

Could it be that we are all androgynous spirits - angels - given earthly form to help our loved ones at their most difficult times? Or that we are all, without exception, God's self-portraits?

To consider possibilities such as these, particularly the latter, is to enter the imaginative, mystical, mythic realm of novelist Richard Zimler.

This charming, talkative, expressive man is intrigued by such questions. His three novels, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Unholy Ghosts and The Angelic Darkness, are dramatically constructed around them. Such interests add complexity and a personal stamp to his work and define the point at which real life and fiction blur.

"The books are both all me and very little about me," Zimler says.

His novels are not autobiographical. Nevertheless, he says, real-life experiences can end up coming out in his fiction in distorted ways.

For instance, the death of a brother from Aids in 1989 left him preoccupied with the meaning of an individual's life - a matter very much present in the minds of the central characters of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and The Angelic Darkness.

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, published in Portugal in 1996 after having been turned down by 24 American publishers, chronicles the massacre of Lisbon Jews in 1507. Interwoven with dense historical detailing of Jewish life and custom and overshot with kabbalistic mysticism, it is a murder-mystery which has been compared with Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose.

The Angelic Darkness jumps forward almost 500 years, to 1980s San Francisco, where the narrator, Bill, is coming to a crisis-point in his life following the departure of his wife. He takes a room-mate, the exotic and possibly supernatural Peter, whose influence begins to transform Bill's "pale and repugnant inner life into a colourful source of wonder."

Says Zimler: "The experience of Bill meeting Peter was very much my experience of falling deeply in love 21 years ago with my partner.

"I had the feeling, because I was so fragile and vulnerable, that he was a very powerful person. So Peter, in a sense, is a representative or a metaphor for the power that people who love us have, and his supernatural powers and abilities are in some sense maybe a magic-realist interpretation of love."

Bill's journey of self-discovery takes him into some pretty seedy parts of San Francisco, where prostitutes tell their sad stories, lonely "ice women" act out their false desires, and also, as part of a parallel story, to the death camps of the Second World War. In all these places it is possible to ask, as Zimler does directly and obliquely, whether there is a watching God.

"And if there is, what was he or she doing at that point? Sleeping?" he asks, somewhat rhetorically.

Zimler is gay and Jewish, which puts him in a prime spot to be asking questions about identity, justice and the meaning of life.

All his mother's family except one was wiped out in the Holocaust and he acknowledges that period as a central reference point in his life.

"But it's not a Jewish question for me at all. Maybe the Holocaust is unique in its dimension but not in its emotions or tragedy.

"Bosnia Herzegovina, East Timor ... What's it all about? How can people permit this?"

Zimler grew up in suburban Long Island, New York, in a family of secular Jews. His mother had a library of about 4000 books and read widely and with erudition. His father filled in the gaps, reading science books, Dashiell Hammett and so on.

But if you think you've got Zimler pegged, think again. Zimler was at that stage a "jock," and his family was desperately dysfunctional, his father violent and abusive and his mother depressed, which is all good material for Zimler to drew on for the emotions of the young Bill, whose father is similarly emotionally abusive.

Zimler escaped to Duke University, where he studied comparative religion and music. He worked as bus-boy, waiter, and buyer's secretary for the now-famous Victoria's Secret lingerie retailer before going to Stanford for masters degrees in journalism and communication.

After a few years in corporate communications, though, he asked himself one of the tough questions: in his life, would he rather achieve a stack of corporate journals or 10 unpublished novels?

He came down on the side of the unpublished novels, worst-case scenario as they were, and tossed in his day job.

He now lives in Porto, Portugal with his marine-biologist partner Alex, whom he met in 1978. He teaches journalism and is a sought-after translator from Portuguese to English.

Mostly, though, he writes novels which, despite that devastating start, are published in several languages and sell in the tens of thousands.

When he gets home, he will keep going with his next work, another historical novel, this time set in Portugal and the United States in the first half of the 19th century. It will address slavery and other issues, he says, without giving too much away. The style, as usual, he will fit to the period.

The central questions are likely to be typically, recognisably Zimleresque. And that's just as well.