» Overview of the book

An Interview with Claire Berlinski...

Your new novel tells the story of an American woman who falls in love with a mysterious Iranian archeologist over the Internet. Did this idea come from personal experience?

Oh, yes! I've had so many strange relationships entirely on the Internet! Not just romantic ones, either. I live in Istanbul, far away from most native speakers of English, so I end up using the Internet not only to keep in touch with my oldest friends, but with quite a few people I've never met, some of whom I think of as close friends. Until recently, I'd never met my editor or my agent. I knew them entirely by email.

Yes, but what about romance on the Internet?

Yes, yes, I've had one. Didn't go so well in the end. Neither did the next one. Or the one after that. I was surprised to discover when I'd regained my wits that I wasn't alone — it seemed everyone I knew had had a similar experience. Then I found survey data, I can't remember where, suggesting that some shocking percentage of Americans have had full-blooded electronic love affairs with people they've never met. Psychotherapists report that their practices are filled with patients who have been disappointed or even devastated by Internet romances.

So, obviously, this is a very interesting thing, from a novelist's perspective. I started doing some research. It seems this kind of love affair has characteristic aspects: It happens at an unnatural speed — correspondents move with astonishing rapidity from flirtation to exchanging their most intimate thoughts. Lovers tend to describe these affairs as something spiritually profound, a union of souls.

But is it?

Almost never, frankly. The lovers can't see one other, so the exercise is inherently a sham. These delicious, flirtatious exchanges are appealing because they're disguised acts of narcissism: We're presenting ourselves as we wish we were. We're thrilled when our idealized selves are adored, as we long to be. But in truth, we are not adored as the fumbling, flawed creatures we truly are. The one thing lovers on the Internet are not is spontaneous. They're not viable, functioning romantic actors.

Moreover, transference is apt to crop up when you engage with a physically ambiguous figure with no body language or facial expressions. This is axiomatic in psychoanalysis — to the extent that the analyst is a silent and neutral figure, to the extent that the patient knows nothing about the analyst, to the extent that the patient, lying on the couch, cannot even see the analyst, transference is more likely to occur.

So on the Internet, transference, fantasy and projection run riot. We don't really see the person we're writing to, we see a fata morgana. We unconsciously create a complex image of our interlocutors in our minds. We sit alone in our bedrooms, in our stained T-shirts and our underwear, hair unwashed, dirty dishes in the sink, and believe that we are communicating with our lover's very soul, unencumbered by our vulgar corporeality. We congratulate ourselves for our honesty as we slowly reveal ourselves, unaware that we are also editing ourselves, presenting ourselves in wiser, wittier, more wonderful avatars — and what a gratifying response those perfected selves receive! Rarely does it occur to us that our interlocutors are doing precisely the same thing.

This is true of most communication on the Internet, by the way, not just romantic correspondence. Before I destroyed my knees I used to be a member of a forum for distance runners. I spent many happy hours discussing my shin splints, my plantar fascitis, my pre-marathon tapering and the perils of overpronation with my friends on the forum. Although they knew me only as cb759, I was nonetheless well-known: No one else in the world, not even the closest members of my family, was so familiar with my views on glycogen depletion — or even remotely interested in them. I quite liked myself as cb759. I was proud of the sensitivity I display to new and struggling runners discouraged by their slow progress. I was gently encouraging; I counseled patience and urged them to focus on what they had achieved, not what they hadn't. In real life, of course, nothing pleased me more than seeing new runners gasp and struggle, except, perhaps, seeing them quit altogether. The Internet, I've noticed, has that effect — it's easy to present yourself as you wish you were, without even being fully aware that you're doing so. The positive response to your improved persona is so flattering that only rarely does it occur to you that it is not, in fact, a positive response to you, but to a fictional character modeled loosely on reality.

Actually, I suppose that's true of writing just about anything.

So is it impossible to develop a meaningful relationship on the Internet?

No, no, that would be an exaggeration. Not everything we glean about our correspondent is a fantasy. If that were true there would be no point in reading or writing anything. That's the interesting part — where the reality and the fantasy intersect.

Tchaikovsky, you may be interested to know, corresponded daily with his wealthy patroness, Madame Nadezhda von Meck. As a condition of her largesse, she prudently insisted they never meet in person. During their fourteen-year relationship, they never once spoke; when twice they met by chance at the symphony, they passed each other in embarrassed silence. Yet Tchaikovsky revealed himself completely in those intimate letters. It is by means of them that we know his inner life. Was that nothing but transference? No one who has read them would say so.

So that's one part of the book. But there are other themes — espionage, the CIA, Iran. Let's start with Iran. Where did you get your knowledge of Iranian history?

That was a lot less hard-earned then my knowledge of Internet romance, let me tell you. I used to teach Middle Eastern politics. I wrote my doctoral dissertation, at Oxford University, about US arms transfer policy to the Middle East. And I also learned a lot of what I put in the book from my Iranian pen pals. I met them on the Internet.

What made you decide to situate the other side of the correspondence in Iran?

I needed to use a genuinely interesting country that was also genuinely wicked. Arsalan represents everything that's fascinating about Iran: He's the heir to a magnificently rich culture. His relationship with the heroine isn't about politics; it's about art and poetry and history and mystery. And yet the regime under which he lives is, of course, barbaric and bloodthirsty. It sponsors terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. It executes dissidents. It oppresses women. It hangs Jews and homosexuals. It chops off limbs. It hates America. It wants nukes. It will probably get them.

Moreover, Iranian intelligence officers are particularly villainous — in 1989, Iranian intelligence officers assassinated the secretary-general of a Kurdish political party in Vienna. In 1992, they assassinated four more Kurdish leaders in the middle of a Berlin cafe. In 1996, they assassinated Reza Mazlouman in Paris, as well as seven other dissidents in Turkey and northern Iraq. They assassinated the translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in Japan. You may be sensing a common theme here. This list is not remotely exhaustive; Iranian intelligence officers have assassinated hundreds of people around the globe since the Revolution, and this does not even begin to compass the violence committed by proxies of Iranian intelligence officers, who, for example, bombed the American Embassy in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. In other words, if it need be spelled out, Iranian intelligence officers (good-looking though the fictional ones may be) are savage, murderous thugs. I don't want to give away the plot, but I'll just say that I decided the heroine had to be aware of this and make decisions accordingly. If she had simply acted out of fantasy and infatuation at every juncture, she would have been an unpardonable idiot.

Why does the main character in the book share your real name? Is the book true? Are you trying to confuse people?

In the end the book is fiction, and I think people understand that. Of course, there are always people who get confused about fact and fiction. The odd thing about writing my first novel, Loose Lips, was that even though it clearly said "A novel" on the cover, many people assumed it was autobiographical, and couldn't be convinced otherwise. I received an extraordinary number of letters from men and women who claimed to have themselves had unhappy experiences working for the CIA, and who wanted to commiserate. I think many of them were telling me the truth. They sounded credible, anyway. I also received a great many touchingly earnest missives from the kind of people who believe the CIA is conspiring with United Fruit and the Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Fleet to steal their eyeballs. Who knows, maybe they were telling the truth too. In any event, those letters gave me a great idea for Lion Eyes — which is why the heroine is a novelist named Claire Berlinski, author of Loose Lips.

Was there a particular reason you chose to set the story in Paris and Istanbul?

The book is a love letter to my two favorite cities in the world — cities that are famous for espionage, both in fiction and reality. Istanbul in particular lends itself to scenes of intrigue. In 1,500 years, long after the decline of the American Empire, an ancient New York will feel like Istanbul — dark, brooding, ruined, a city clearly once at the very center of the world, once the world's beating heart of commerce and trade and power and passion, but no more. Istanbul is spooky, really spooky, the haunted Gotham of the East, the Byzantine set of a Batman movie. You can hardly step outside without convincing yourself you're walking through a spy novel come to life.

As for Paris, where I lived for six years before moving to Istanbul, the challenge was a bit different. Everyone knows charming Paris, tourist Paris, with the cafes and the baguettes. I wanted to show a side of Paris that people don't read about all the time, the kind of Paris you only get to know when you live there a long time. The Paris behind the charm.

We see a lot of non-fiction themes in Lion Eyes. Does your work with non-fiction titles assist you in painting an accurate portrait in your novels?

Well, no. In fact, it's kind of the reverse; I'm always fighting the temptation to just make up the non-fiction — once you get a taste for making stuff up, it's hard to shake the habit. The problem with non-fiction is that it has to be true — you can't just make an event sound more dramatic than it was because it would be more interesting that way.

That said, I do find it extremely annoying to read fiction that demands too much suspension of disbelief, especially if the physical details and jargon are all wrong — like spy novels where employees of the CIA are called "secret agents" instead of "case officers." I like the technical details of a novel to be as realistic as possible. So, for example, the scene in which the heroine of Lion Eyes encounters a CIA case officer is based on real CIA recruiting techniques. It's a bump — that's what the CIA calls a meeting it has staged to appear accidental. I wrote a scene about the way case officers practice that technique in Loose Lips, in fact. Intelligence officers talk about getting "time on target." If the target shoots birds, you shoot birds. If the target eats worms, what a coincidence, you just love worms. So in Lion Eyes, what a coincidence, Sally just loved running. That's the way it would really happen.