The Bay of Foxes (25 page)

You’ve lived in the United States since 1981. In what ways has living here affected your work?

America has been a place of possibilities for me. I’m very grateful for all the avenues that have opened up to me here in the publishing world as well as in academia. I have been very fortunate in the people I have met and those who have guided and helped me so generously.

What are you working on now?

A book on Freud and the Dora case. The title is
Dora’s Freud
.

1. Dawit arrives at M.’s apartment with “a copy of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du mal
; Marguerite Duras’s short stories,
Whole Days in the Trees
; and Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
” (p. 31). Why does Kohler include this detail?

2. Dawit condemns M. as a racist and “[l]ike all colonizers … ultimately the dupe” (p. 54). How do the events of the novel support or disprove his feelings?

3. Why didn’t Michelino and Adrianna tell the police about M.’s sudden “departure”?

4. “These French intellectuals, for all their fancy talk, think about nothing but money in the end” (p. 186). Is Gustave more interested in profiting from M.’s final book or in her safe return? Does he suspect the truth?

5. Should Dawit pay for his crime or has he already?

6.
The Bay of Foxes
reverses the traditional alignment of gender and power, putting Dawit at the mercy of M., a powerful female. How—if at all—did this affect your reading of the novel?

7. What does the unexpected appearance of Maria’s fatherless half-African baby add to the story?

8. How closely do you think Kohler’s
The Bay of Foxes
resembles the book of the same name that Dawit wrote? Would you trust Simone to deliver the manuscript to Gustave?

9. Have you read Marguerite Duras? If so, how would you compare her writing to Sheila Kohler’s? How does being an expatriate inform each writer’s work?