From Hungry with love (language) with Rebecca Makkai

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Adam Sockel:

You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast. For each week, I interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work.

I'm your host Adam Sockel, and today's author guest is the fabulous Rebecca Makkai. Rebecca is the author of the novels, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and her newest book that is taking the literary world by storm is, I Have Some Questions for You.

If you are unfamiliar, Rebecca's work has made her a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. And also, she has received the ALA's Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among many, many other honors.

We get into her work a little bit later in the episode, but before we do that, we talk about her current passion, which is learning the extremely and ridiculously difficult language of Hungarian. We get into why she's learning Hungarian, what makes this language so persnickety and challenging.

And it's really, really fascinating as someone who is currently learning a language myself, I really enjoyed having this conversation with someone who is much further along on the path. And I'm also not learning Hungarian and I'm learning French, we get into that as well.

I think you're really, really going to love this conversation. It's extremely fascinating. And Rebecca is one of those authors who every single one of her books when they come out there is something that is just so well thought out about her stories.

Obviously, every novel that comes out, a lot of thought goes into it, but there's just a really interesting way that you can tell she crafts every single sentence. It's as if every single word is in the place it is supposed to be.

I think you're going to love this conversation. And before we get to that, I want to give you a book recommendation. I am currently reading The Family Morfawitz by Daniel H. Turtel. I have been describing it as like a Jewish succession, realizing that lately I have been talking a lot about books that are similar to succession, that was not by design. The books that I have been picking just sound really good. And then as I listen to them, I'm like, “Wow, this reminds me of the family intrigue that is littered throughout the show Succession.”

So, The Family Morfawitz tells a story, our narrator's name is Ezekiel, and he is basically the family chronicler. He is sitting with a man named Zev, who is kind of the elder patriarch of the family who is about to pass away it seems. And he is telling his life story for the first and only time.

And his story starts in a way that basically his whole family escaped the Nazis in Germany just like their parents had escaped the Kazakhs at Russia. Long story short, the whole family ends up in New York and they begin to build a massive empire in New York City, kind of dotting the skyline with places that they own.

And what ends up happening is you get this story of all of this intriguing kind of infighting situations that happen amongst siblings and cousins and all these different family members. It is so delightfully Jewish, as a person who has Hebrew in my own blood. I'm really enjoying this story.

But it is a kind of combination of The Metamorphoses, if you're familiar with Ovid's tale there. But it's also just a really incredible multi-generational Jewish family saga, which very much of my — that's, The Family Morfawitz, if you are interested.

If you'd like any other book recommendations, you can always email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from everybody. And if you let me know what your particular passions are, anyone who does that, I give away a random bookshop.org gift card every single month to somebody who does that just as a thank you, mainly because I love hearing about your passions.

Okay. That is all the housekeeping. I'm not going to keep you any longer. I am so excited to say that today's episode is with Rebecca Makkai on Passions & Prologues.

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Okay. Rebecca, what is something you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah. At the moment, that would be learning Hungarian, or rather Hungarian, which I am learning, let's put it that way.

Adam Sockel:

So, I love this so much. I'm also learning another language, which I will get into later. But first things first, I did a little research, so I think I know why, but what is the reason you wanted to learn Hungarian?

Rebecca Makkai:

Oh, yeah. No, I mean, great deal of my family, including my dad, Hungarian, my dad … I was raised in Chicago but then my father and all these other relatives who were living with us sometimes or living nearby, they were all speaking Hungarian.

And my dad never taught it really to me or my sister because he figured, he didn't think he could ever go back, let alone that we could go back or would want to, it's not like a useful language in the world particularly.

And so, I grew up knowing a lot of words and some baby talk and hearing it a great deal. But unless you speak it to a kid, they don't learn it. That's why the Einstein videos never worked. Like that's why those kids aren't all walking around speaking French.

So, at different times in my life, I have made an effort and then given up because it is by almost all accounts the world's hardest language to learn as an outsider. And we can get into why. I mean, I have the leg up that the sounds make sense to me, words that ring a bell.

But I would like start with a book and give up and start and give up. And I finally just got over this clunk, this hurdle sort of in the past year or so where it's starting to click. And I'm starting to make connections between words and be like, “Oh, I get it, I get it.”

It's a very logical language, even though it is incredibly arcane. So, I'm at this point now where I'm like, I'm really kind of obsessed with it and with filling spare time with doing any number of language apps to practice and just … vocabulary. And really kind of changed from something I always wanted to do and thought I ought to do this, to something that's actively exciting and fascinating and really into it.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. That's so interesting. I know to a very small extent what you're talking about. I'm learning French and I've been doing it for less time, about half a year now. And same thing, I'm using a language learning app and I will say those apps very much gamify the process. It makes you want to keep going.

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

And I'm enjoying the process so far. But you mentioned how it is a very challenging language to learn. What is it about the language itself that makes it so difficult?

Rebecca Makkai:

Okay. I'm going to start off with telling you the easy things because these are like the only things that are easy, so we should appreciate those.

One is it's very phonetic with its alphabet, used to be written in runes, but that was ages ago. So, it's just like phonetic alphabet.

And the one other really easy thing is that there's no grammatical gender, so you don't need to worry about that. Thank God.

That said, God, it's everything else. It's not just different rules, it's different kinds of rules where for instance, the verb changes, not based on whether it's a transitive or intransitive verb, but whether with a transitive verb, the object is definite or indefinite, meaning I use a different verb to say I want a water than to say I want the water. The verb want would change.

Adam Sockel:

Oof.

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah. So, I mean to a different ending. And they're already infinite ending. So, it's like on top of the first, second, third, singular, plural, and then all the tenses, then for every one of them you have a definite verb ending and an indefinite verb ending.

And then there are these rules of vowel harmony where, because it's a very agglomerative language, like there's a lot of suffixes and stuff that you stick on words.

But depending what suffix you put on, you have to add a certain — okay, so like whether I'm adding an em or an om to put on the certain suffix depends on the previous vowels in the word you're attaching it to.

But then when you add a suffix, all the vowels in the original word, sometimes flip like little dominoes into other vowels. Does that? Like …

Adam Sockel:

No, you're describing it very well. Sorry, no one's going to be able to see this because obviously, we're doing a podcast, but I have had this gob smacked look as you've been describing this, this like jaw agape, oh my God. That sounds so complex.

Rebecca Makkai:

Yes.

Adam Sockel:

Is Hungarian … forgive me for not knowing this. There's a lot of languages that polyglots, people who know a lot of languages talk about being able — if you can pick up one, it's easier to learn-

Rebecca Makkai:

No. Okay. I mean, so here's the thing, it's not even Indo-European. English has more in common with Hindi and Norwegian and everything else than it does with Hungarian, which has basically no relatives except kind of sort of finish, but not really.

So, it's definitely not that … like I studied French in high school and college, started learning Spanish with my kids and I'm like, “Oh, got it.” I got it, right?

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Rebecca Makkai:

This is nothing like that. So, both of my parents were linguistics professors. This might have been relevant info for this conversation actually. And they both spoke many, many languages. My father's passed away and my mother's alive.

Yeah. For my mother who learned Hungarian as an outsider, I think it was definitely easier because for instance, she had studied Latin, which has cases, and then you need to have that information, like just to know what those things are.

So, you have these file folders for certain things, and you go, “Oh, it's a agglomerative like German.” And it has the vowel sound, its vowel sounds are kind of like Spanish. And so, you could do that, but there are really no cognates, meaning there's like … so, like the word table in most languages it's either like tabula or table and things related to that.

Hungarian it's asztal. It has nothing to do with any other, so this is where that's easier for me because I've heard a lot of those words, not all of them, but it's like, okay, that sounds familiar whereas if I didn't have that going, it would be a mess.

And then the vowel harmony thing, because it's all sound based, that's a little easier for me too. So, I just know what sounds right. It's just Hungarian people do it. It just sounds right. That's a little easier.

But yeah. No, God it is super idiomatic where like I'll be typing one thing into Google Translate and it'll be — and I'm making this up. I'm kidding. But it'll be like, you'll type in the word and it's like horse, but then you add suffix and it's like horsey. And then you add a different suffix and it's like, your mother is Spanish or something, it's like how could that come from …

What? And I'm kidding. But you just suddenly are in this other thing. I don't know. It's wild.

Adam Sockel:

So, what has kept you — this is like a bad question, but so you said you've tried before and abandoned it.

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

What has sort of kept you going this time?

Rebecca Makkai:

I mean, partly it's that it's like, okay, I'm 45, if I'm going to learn this, I need to do it now. My grandmother, my father's mother was a novelist and Hungarian, she wrote 40 books and I've never been able to read them.

So, I would really like to be able to do that within my lifetime. That seems important to me. And they're not translated into English. And I could like pay someone. It's not the same. Right?

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Rebecca Makkai:

My father did move back to Hungary and then he passed away, but that was sort of … I started to travel there a lot more often and I still go over there a lot more often now because my stepmother is there.

And so, that's just kind of increased exposure. And then yeah, having the apps, I will say with love, Duolingo, Hungarian is terrible. I like Duolingo a lot. You know like other languages on Duolingo, they have little lessons, and they explain stuff.

Someone slapped up a Hungarian course and they have exercises, but zero explanations for anything.

Adam Sockel:

Oh, God.

Rebecca Makkai:

So, you're kind of in the chat with other people being like, “Wait, why?” And they're like, “I think it's because …

Adam Sockel:

Oh, my gosh.

Rebecca Makkai:

But it's not good for learning. And I love Duolingo. They need to get their app together on the Hungarian, please.

Adam Sockel:

So, I am super fascinated. I always tell people that I have a love of reading because I had a mother who taught for 40 years, and she gave me my love of reading.

You have just told me in the last like 10 minutes that both of your parents were linguistics professors and you had a grandparent who was a novelist.

So, I guess my simple question first is what was it like growing up with two parents who were so fascinated, interested, studied the concept of languages and words? Was that something that they brought home to your conversations?

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah. And I should say they divorced when I was 10. And before that they were living separately. So, it's not necessarily this …

But with my mom she was really interested in child language development. That was one of her areas. She did an inordinate amount of nursery rhymes with me, letting me fill in the last word of the line of the nursery rhyme was when I'm like, “One, two,” because I've heard it before.

So, she's like, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a,” and having me say it and so just lots of books. So, she was really great on that end of things.

My father was the one who you'd get him started and he'd start reciting poetry in Russian or something or Latin . Or he'd go off on the etymology of one word for like 45 minutes.

So, the first time that my husband had dinner with my father, met him, I think it was about 45 minutes on the word apricot. Hold on. Like, okay. Nobody asked but thank you. It was that …

I don't particularly think that any of that made me a writer because I'm not into writing because I “love words.” I think people who are, then poetry is great for them.

I'm more allergic to bad sentences, if that makes sense. I'm never like, “Wow, you know a word I love is cellar.” I'm just not one of those people.

I take it for granted, I think. And it's just that more that like, I can't — I get really unhappy with a sentence that I don't love the sound of, but I'm in it for the storytelling, not for the language.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. That does make a lot of sense. I know what you mean about like, thinking about your books, I definitely — if someone were to ask me, how would you describe Rebecca Makkai’s writing? I would say like, I can tell you care about, like you said, the sentence structure and how something sounds and, but more specifically, obviously like the story itself. I'm laughing, I'm allergic to bad sentences. I feel like that should be a T-shirt. I love that a lot.

But would you say that this … even if it isn't your lifelong passion, like you said, it's something that your parents spoke to, but having been surrounded by this concept of other languages and if nothing else, having a kind of tangential understanding of structure of languages and things, do you think that does affect your writing or how you try to structure your stories at all?

Rebecca Makkai:

No, I don't.

Adam Sockel:

No?

Rebecca Makkai:

I like the question, but no. I think there's been influence just in like my father was a really fascinating storyteller, just socially, but more about charm and exaggerating and fabrication and it was that.

But no, I'm interested in — I think you learn storytelling from what you read and neither of my parents … I say that about my father, but it was much more like at dinner parties with other adults. You’d just hear him go off. We weren't like a storytelling family. We didn’t make up stories together or anything. It wasn't like that.

But I from a very, very young age would just do that. I'd be alone in the room with my little dolls and just making up stories. And having that instinct, you still have a ton to learn. But yeah, I don't think it has much to do with how I grew particularly.

Adam Sockel:

Okay. So, twisting the question a little bit then, for me, when I'm writing something or I'm currently querying a manuscript and the story that I wrote despite, regardless of what the plot is, for me, what fascinates me is human interactions, human connections, kind of the relationships between two people.

Honestly, that's why I've been interviewing authors for 10 years. Because I love the fact that you and I are having like a half hour, 45-minute, human interaction right now that will never be repeated. I love those types of things. And so, that's what I seek out in stories, either the ones that I'm writing or the ones that I'm reading.

So, for you, what is kind of your impetus for writing a story? Is there an action that comes first? Is there a character that you think of? What kind of is your impetus for wanting to write?

Rebecca Makkai:

I’m now getting into the question I’m asked all the time, which is fine, but yeah, no, I usually start with plot. I start with scenario, that's the stuff I write down in my notebook is like a scenario and I have no idea who these people are.

And then I kind of reverse engineer that from their back into character. Okay character, who get themselves in this mess or what character would be the most susceptible to these circumstances, the most changed by these circumstances, the most vulnerable to these circumstances. Figure out who that is. And that's usually where I go.

Adam Sockel:

So, when you are seeking out books to read, what are the types of stories you are drawn to as a reader?

Rebecca Makkai:

Honestly type does not matter much. I tend to go on, honestly, it's a couple things, recommendations from very, very smart people. I need to know, I have a very low tolerance for writing that I don't like, or I'd say bad writing and/or writing that I don't like.

I'm not going to sit there and read something that I don't think of — because there's so much stuff that is well written. It's like, why would you waste your time on something that's not great?

And very often, it's also just like I need something that's not going to bore me. I do have ADHD, I'm not the person for a really quiet, meditative novel where not much happens. That's just not for me.

And then I'm not a good reader for fantasy sci-fi stuff. And I don't mean something has to happen in the real world. I just mean like, when we get into other realms and portals and stuff, honestly, it bores me. I tune out, I zone out. I'm just not into it.

And then like before, so I don't get canceled by new listens to this, of course there was good stuff, blah, blah, blah. And that's brilliant. And I didn't mean it and it's all great and I'm probably just jealous or something.

Anyway, so yeah, within that is does this look completely non boring. And have I heard that it is amazing, then I don't care what it is. Just a little bit of a veto in certain subjects.

But you assume like other people loved it. But that doesn't mean I will love it because I tend not to get into this genre. Right.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. No, you're in a safe space here. I know what you mean. There are some Sci-fi fantasy I do like, but I found, as I get a little bit older kind of the same thing, like I think my brain works a certain way where I can't fully visualize the world that these authors have built. And like, that's not on them, that's on me.

So, I find myself skimming through those passages about very important world building. And then when they talk about a magic set or something that happened, I'm like, “I don't know what the hell you're talking about.” And it's on me. It's not on them. So, I know what you mean. I'm the same way.

Rebecca Makkai:

No, that's it. It's not that I don't think that those are great or have merit. It's like, I don't like them. It's me. It's like, I also don't like beats. There's nothing wrong with beats. They're very healthy. I'm glad that people love them. I don't like beats.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah listen, you can DNF a book, you can DNF a beat. It's totally fine. Don't worry about it.

Rebecca Makkai:

Great.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. So, I will say one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is because you write books that I absolutely adore. And so, with your new book out by the time people hearing this, either have already gotten or will be able to go get, I have some questions for you.

So, for people who may not have had a chance to read it yet, can you kind of give them an introduction to the book?

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah. This is the one minute one. Because I've got all lengths of description, believe me. Yeah, no, we have a 40-year-old woman, her name is Bodie Kane. She is invited back just for two weeks in the dead of winter to teach at the boarding school that she attended as a pretty adrift scholarship kid in the 90s.

And while she's back there, her mind is of course, back on the 90s, very specifically on the death in their senior year of a young woman named Thalia Keith, who had been her roommate briefly. Thalia was found dead in the campus swimming pool, but with significant injuries to her body. And very quickly a young black man who worked at the school as an athletic trainer was arrested and imprisoned with what seemed like a lot of evidence against him.

There are a whole lot of people online who believe that he's innocent. One of Bodie's students in those two weeks is among them, believes the wrong person is in prison and wants to do her class project on this.

Bodie is both really terrified of that concept of poking her nose in and also very eager to learn things she doesn't know. And we go from there. Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

First off, I love the structure of the story and I want to ask and I'm going to be kind of vague with a question because I don't want to give much away off the pop.

Are there aspects of not so much modern society, but modern content in the ways that people are learning about stories and everyone in 2023 is a murder mystery expert now.

How much research did you want to do into the ways that people take in stories like the Serial Podcast and things like that to write a story where there is some of that aspect in there? How much are you looking at the way that we as a society connect with stories like this now in real life? Or is it something you separate?

Rebecca Makkai:

Right, right, right. No, I was interested in taking sort of the true crime industrial complex as a subject of the book. And I'm fundamentally writing fictional crime, of course, not true crime. But basically the idea here in some ways being, okay, let's take the kind of crime that seems custom tailored to become clickbait.

Like beautiful, young dead girl, wealthy, at a boarding school, blah, blah, blah. And let's degenrify that. There's this sort of a genre of like oh, the perfect, it's perfect for true crime. Let's actually look at that realistically.

This book kind of has it both ways in that it is a murder mystery, in that by the end of the book, we basically know who did it. But other than that, I'm not very interested in participating in the conventions of the mystery genre. I'm not against them. It's just not what the book is — of the book.

Rather like, what does an actual criminal investigation look like under these circumstances? What happens within the Carceral system in these circumstances? What happens to a case when there is significant public attention on it? At the time, over the years, what does that do to the family? What does that do to the police? What does that do to the family? The suspects.

So, I'm already someone who is both drawn to consuming true crime media and alarmed at that and questioning it. Like there's good that's come out of that, bad that comes out of that. And so, I wanted to write about that. I don't have a thesis statement on it. I just wanted that to be kind of what we're mucking around in, in this novel.

Adam Sockel:

Do you feel differently from when you started writing the novel to now about kind of just those aspects of society in general?

Rebecca Makkai:

No, not really. I think I knew going in, that there’s I think it's human instinct to be interested in that, than we over-indulge in it. And I also think I knew going in that there's a lot of damage that attention can do. There's also a lot of good that that attention can do.

And for instance, the Murdaugh murder stuff in South Carolina recently. That was a set of circumstances in which without the broader national interest, I don't think that guy would've been brought to justice at all because of who his family was within that tiny community.

But when you have everybody looking at it, it looks really different. And then you get these other murders starting to get reinvestigated of this young queer kid who like was really swept under the rug. That wouldn't have happened if it weren't for these podcasts and things really shining a spotlight on it.

So, there's that. There is Adnan Syed was released from prison and now there's a whole other thing going on with that. But that public attention has done a lot there. A lot of other times when it's like, why do we need to keep talking about Jeffrey Dahmer though? What good is that going to do? It is over, it's done, it's solved. These poor families, like what are we doing?

And it's hard to know, of course going in, which one it is necessarily? Is it done? I don't know.

So anyway, I think that the novel ends up saying things that I maybe hadn't articulated to myself before, but it's not like I had some big revelation or reversal of the way I think about it.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. No, I was mainly just curious because I know how much time you as an author have spent with this story and it wouldn't have shocked me if you were like, “Yeah, I needed a break from all that at this point.” But I'm always curious if having dug so deeply into the content of your story, like what it would lead to.

So, I want to be respectful of time. I always end my podcast by having the author who's come on give a recommendation of any kind. It can be a book, it could be a TV show, it could be a recipe. I've had people recommend going for a walk. I had someone recommend a protein powder. Any recommendation you would like more people to know about?

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah no, I think I'll say since we were talking about Hungarian, I'll tell you this Hungarian novel that I read in English because I'm not that far yet. It's a well-known one. It's The Door by Magda Szabó. I had not read it until this fall. And people had asked me often if I'd read it, just knowing that I'm Hungarian and I hadn't. And God, it's good. It's real. Have you read it?

Adam Sockel:

I have not, but I am absolutely going to, very interested.

Rebecca Makkai:

It is about a woman's relationship with her very, very strange house cleaner. And the first two thirds, three quarters really of the book are kind of all character study. And it's fascinating, but nothing's really happening. But in a way that I couldn't put down.

And then the last quarter, like all this stuff happens, you know all the way through that something ended in disaster, which I think is the reason it's so compelling. You're like waiting for this disaster to strike and then it does. And it is so good. Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

I lied. I have one more quick question for you. I grew up in a town called Lorain, Ohio. It's actually where Tony Morrison was born. It's like our claim of fame. It is very much a melting pot of Eastern European everythingness. And so, I grew up with many friends who were Hungarian.

So, this is a very important last question. What is your favorite Hungarian dish? What is your favorite Hungarian food?

Rebecca Makkai:

Yeah, I mean, the one that I make would be Paprikash, specifically Chicken Paprikash. And I love that, it's great comfort food. I make my own noodles for it and everything. And that's like, love making that.

The one that I haven't even really tried making, because I think I don't have … I mean I will try it, but that I'd rather just get there would be Halaszle, which is this very, very spicy fisherman soup. It's like a red fish soup that in its spiciest iterations, has literally been a challenge on The Amazing Race.

Adam Sockel:

Oh, my God.

Rebecca Makkai:

And they were like passing out. It's not usually served that ridiculous, it's whatever. And every family has its own recipe.

And then, oh, see, you get me started. I'm going to go on. But dessert, there's this pastry called Kreme … that's like, I have no idea how to describe it. It's like a very like custardy with a crust under it. That is really, really, really good. And I've never managed to make that either.

Adam Sockel:

If I hadn't asked you that question, I know after like when this episode went out, I would get texts from old friends like, “Really? You didn't ask about food.” So, I had to do that.

Rebecca, this was so delightful and informative and fun. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Rebecca Makkai:

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

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Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen Podcast and was created by Adam Sockel, it was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen Podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.