Press Kit for Call Me Stan

A self-described immortal under investigation for a horrific crime takes his interrogator on an idiosyncratic tour of three thousand years of Eurasian history. 

When the Hittites fought the Egyptians at Qadesh, Stan was there. When King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He’s been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime.

As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Eurasian history. CALL ME STAN is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love.  

Or almost everyone.   

Call Me Stan (ISBN 978-1-77183-598-5) was published by Guernica Editions on December 1, 2021. It is distributed by University of Toronto Press (Canada), 5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3H 5T8 (800) 565-9523 Fax (800) 221-9985 and by Gazelle Book Services (UK), White Cross Mills, High Town, Lancaster, United Kingdom LA1 1Xs, 0-152-46-87-65 Fax 0-152-46-32-32 

Call Me Stan is structured as a series of reminiscences by its first-person narrator, Stan—who claims to be more than 3000 years old—during a police interview in the present day. He intersperses stories of his life at various points in Eurasian history with reflections on the more recent circumstances that have led him to police custody. The plot points of these sections are as follows:

Now: Stan sets the scene. He tells the interviewing detective that his story will require some context.

Six Weeks Ago: Stan is in Kyiv for a meeting with a Chechen geneticist when he spots Nicca, a woman from his past.

The Hatti: Stan describes growing up in the Hittite Empire, including his role in a pivotal battle between the Hatti and the Egyptians, the tragic marital consequences of his infertility, his discovery of his own immortality, and his flight from his home when he is accused of sorcery and blamed for a famine.

The Aesir: Stan falls in with Troan, a pregnant Trojan princess fleeing the sack of her city by the Greeks. He helps deliver her son, Tror (Thor), and travels with them to Thrace, where Tror grows to manhood. After Troan’s apparent death, Tror usurps the leadership of the community and is soon driven out. He and his followers—including his wife Sura, their son Woden, and Stan—become river pirates, moving gradually north until they settle on the Baltic coast. When Tror’s brutal rule goes too far, Stan beheads him. Stan moves on, and Tror’s people become the foundation of the Norse pantheon of gods.

Four Weeks Ago: Stan meets with an employee to discuss the immigration of the Chechen geneticist and the importation of certain specialized lab equipment.

The Dharma: Stan leaves his life as a Silk Road mercenary to join a series of Buddhist communities in present-day Afghanistan. In the Bamiyan valley, he sees a woman whom he suspects may also be immortal, but they don’t meet.

The Teacher: Stan joins an ascetic Jewish community in Galilee, and eventually accompanies a charismatic teacher named Yeshu and his disciples on a preaching tour of the region. Bits of Stan’s Buddhism seep into Yeshu’s teachings. When they part company, Stan moves to Jerusalem and is hired as a moneylender by a retired Roman soldier. When Yeshu later confronts him in the courtyard of the Temple, a riot ensues. In the aftermath, Stan is crucified next to Yeshu at Golgotha, but is rescued by Joseph of Arimathea. 

The Abbot: Stan becomes a monk in the original monastery of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino. He develops a talent for music, and ultimately takes over as music director. When the monastery is sacked by the Lombards, Stan reverts to his soldierly ways and saves its most precious relic.

The Family: As the Black Death creeps across Europe, Stan meets Nicca—the woman he’d glimpsed in the Bamiyan valley—in a market in Augsburg, Germany. They rescue an infant whose parents have died from the plague. They settle in Essex, where they raise the boy, and ultimately become embroiled in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. When their son dies, Stan and Nicca react in such different ways that Stan leaves her and moves on.

Three Weeks Ago: Stan’s employee takes him to the site of their proposed genetics lab. The employee proposes that they use it as a drug lab as well, but Stan refuses.

The Composer: Stan acquires a windfall fortune and retires from the army of the French Republic to life as a sheep farmer on the outskirts of Zurich. As years pass he accidentally finds himself passing himself off as his own daughter. His efforts to help composer Richard Wagner with a proposed opera about the Buddha end up destroying Wagner’s marriage, and Stan has to leave his comfortable Swiss life.

Ten Days Ago: Stan’s employee re-pitches his drug lab idea, but Stan still refuses. Inexplicable obstacles have arisen to both the importation of the lab equipment and the immigration of the Chechen geneticist.

The Cabaret: In the aftermath of World War II, Stan finds work as a singer and dancer-for-hire in a Berlin cabaret. He sells information to the spies of the various occupying powers to raise enough money to get back to his fortune in Zurich. When his East German contact turns out to be a still-alive Troan, who is still searching for her son Tror—who she assumes is also immortal—Stan is unable to stop himself from telling her that he killed him. She shoots him. When Allied spies burst in she flees, assuming Stan is dead. Stan later escapes from an Allied hospital.

Last Weekend: The Chechen geneticist calls Stan in a panic. He is at the airport, but there’s no paperwork. Stan tracks down his employee in a shed where he has set up his drug lab, and finds him semi-conscious. Stan’s phone alerts him to an intruder in his house. He dumps his employee in the back of his car and goes home to investigate. The intruder is Nicca. She has figured out that his plan is to identify and reproduce the genetic basis for their immortality, and she has been blocking his efforts. Their confrontation grows increasingly heated. Stan lifts a sword from his mantlepiece. His employee—now awake—sees what happens next through the window, and calls the police.

Now: Stan apologizes to the interviewing detective for all the blood at his home. He asks if it’s possible to save a sample for the geneticist. He tells the detective he has felt free to share his story because they’ll never hold him, and when he’s gone they’ll never find him. And because every so often he just has to tell someone.

Epilogue: A newspaper article recounts the escape of a murder suspect from an ambulance after he was stabbed in custody and was being transported to a hospital. 

Why write a novel about an immortal? Hasn’t that been done to, um, death?

I was mindful when I wrote it of Highlander (which I haven’t actually seen), and of Timothy Findlay’s novel Pilgrim about the so-called Wandering Jew. My sense of writings about immortals is that they tend to be pretty sombre. I decided to go another way. Stan tells us about the periods he’s lived through from the perspective the present day. After 3200 years, he’s a little jaded. For me, that allowed for a kind of ironic, anachronistic approach to the material that is less common in conventional historical fiction. 

One of the sections of the novel takes place during the Black Death in 14th century Europe. Was that inspired by the COVID pandemic?

That was just happenstance. Call Me Stan was accepted for publication in the summer of 2019, six months or more before the world really became aware of how serious COVID was. I’ve always been interested in the societal changes that came about because of the plague, and felt like this was a nice opportunity to engage with that. 

Another section suggests that the Norse gods were actually human refugees from the fall of Troy. Where did that come from?

That isn’t something I can take credit for. One of the main sources of Norse mythology, the Prose Edda, was written by a Christianized Viking, who seems to have fabricated the connection to Troy as a way to justify telling the stories of his gods without jamming them up against the teachings of the Church. Once I became aware of that, it was just too good a story to resist. 

Jesus of Nazareth—Yeshu, in your book—is a prominent character in one section. You take a pretty secular approach to him. Isn’t there a risk that you’ll offend readers who are Christian?

My approach to Yeshu is humanist, but respectful. I find it fascinating how stories can evolve over time to attribute supernatural causes to what might have been non-supernatural events. I decided to play with that. But at the same time, Stan acknowledges that Yeshu was as close to god-like as anyone he ever encountered, and he doesn’t dismiss the possibility that Yeshu was resurrected after the crucifixion. He just doesn’t know one way or the other, because at the time he was recovering from having been crucified next to him. 

One of the sections focuses on an opera composer in the 19th century. Aren’t you concerned that writing about opera will turn people off?

That section is fundamentally about the characters, not the kinds of dry details that make people cringe when they hear the word ‘opera’. You don’t need to know or care about opera in the slightest to engage with the characters. 

That composer—Richard Wagner—was notoriously anti-Semitic, and his music was appropriated by the Nazi regime in Germany. Aren’t you concerned that a sympathetic treatment of him might offend some readers?

I don’t let Wagner get away with anything. His vile anti-Semitism is front and centre. But he wasn’t just a one-dimensional racist stereotype. Alongside his anti-Semitism, he had a lifelong fascination with the Buddha, to the point that he wanted to write an opera about him, though he never did. That jarring disconnect—how an unapologetic anti-Semite could also be drawn to the teachings of the Buddha—has always intrigued me. I did a lot of reading on it when I was researching this section, and I grappled with it at length while I wrote it, and it still kind of baffles me. 

Is that why you also have a section where Stan joins a central Asian Buddhist community?

That’s part of it. It was structural to the story for Wagner to get some of his understanding of Buddhism from Stan, which meant Stan had to have a grounding in Buddhism. Some scholars have also identified parallels between some Buddhist teachings and the teachings of Jesus, so that gave me the opportunity to make Stan the conduit of those teachings to his friend Yeshu. Plus I was surprised when I learned many years ago that there were once thriving Buddhist communities as far west as what is now Afghanistan. That gave me another opportunity to dig into something that I found intriguing. 

Your narrator engages with the world as both male and female, depending on the section of the book. Why did you make that choice, and you give any thought to how bi or trans readers might take it?

There were both character and narrative reasons why I chose to do that—it seemed to me that over a 3200-year lifetime you’d probably explore a variety of sexual and gender variations, and one key scene in particular hinges on it—but I also saw it as an opportunity to be more inclusive than I might if I just stuck with my own cis-het perspective. I tried to be respectful, but in my ignorance I ended up including a particular scene—and some smaller details along the way—that reinforced harmful trans stereotypes. 

Thankfully a reader caught this, and suggested I consult a sensitivity reader. My publisher, Guernica, was great about connecting me with someone, and agreed to delay publication for a few months so we could get it right. It was initially a hard thing to hear about my work, since I thought I’d been respectful, but it was ultimately a really rewarding experience, It made me more aware of trans issues, and made Stan a better book. Since then I’ve had the same sensitivity reader provide me with comments on another novel manuscript.