Funke has recently started to change her mind on her heritage and come to terms with it, in a literary way. Adult English speakers, particularly in North America, pick up translated fiction as reluctantly as they watch subtitled movies. Children, though, care only for the story, and far from being put off, have always found a hint of foreignness enticing, from Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas novels in the 19th century to Funke’s contemporary fantasies. “They come up at signings,” Funke laughs, “and ask me, ‘How do you say this word or that in German,’ and I tell them and they go ‘oooh.’ ” For the kids it’s like asking J.R.R. Tolkien to say something in Elvish.
Her German roots have also infused her writing with a tragic view of history, Funke says, “a sense of how things fall apart, how neighbour can turn on neighbour, how you have to hold on to hope even when it seems nothing can be trusted. That’s very useful for a writer.” And also for her personally three years ago, when her husband went from cancer diagnosis to death in two short months. In the open letter Funke wrote to her fans after Rolf’s death she said that, as someone who had always believed herself lucky in life, she had naturally kept an eye out for the “sad times to come, for they eventually come to us all.” Funke had already finished Inkdeath when Rolf fell ill. “So it’s not like some people think, that the dying and the loss in the novel came from my life. It’s more like the writing prepared me for what was to come. I’m sure it will change my writing in the future; it will be tighter, less sentimental.”
That effect, along with the ongoing push-pull of what she calls her Anglo and German tendencies, seems already evident in the book Funke is writing now, Jacob Reckless. Shortly after Rolf’s death, Lionel Wigram, a friend and the producer of the last two Harry Potter films, asked her if she was interested in co-writing the film script for a fantasy version of The Nutcracker. “Of course I was interested. It was originally based on a German story by E.T.A. Hoffman and it has all kinds of dark motifs for older children that are almost never brought out in the ballet.” But soon after they finished writing, the project had to be shelved when another Nutcracker movie was announced. “For Lionel it was, ‘That’s the movie business!’ But I wasn’t about to shelve my part.” Funke began to turn the script’s themes and characters into a book, and because she had written in English with Wigram, embarked on her ?rst English-language novel.
It wasn’t to last, though. Funke decided she was spending too much time and effort on the language as opposed to the story. “I wanted to bring everything I had to this book.” And that meant returning to her mother tongue. No longer a take on The Nutcracker, Jacob Reckless is a tale that Funke believes “reflects the longings of Europeans in America,” a longing for the world they’ve lost. “The world of the story, which you enter through a door in New York, is a mix of medieval and Victorian fantasy—there are iron bridges and there are gingerbread houses. And some very dark fairies. I see it as taking the Grimms’ fairy tales that scared me to death in childhood and having them meet early industrialism.” It sounds as brilliant a concept as Inkworld’s reading magic, in fact like its mirror opposite. This time it’s not characters coming alive off the page, but the author inserting herself as metaphor: Germanic and Anglo influences clashing in the New World. Just like Cornelia Funke.
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