Indies Introduce Q&A with Alice Austen

Alice Austen is the author of 33 Place Brugmann, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and March 2025 Indie Next List pick. 

Austin Carter of Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, served on the bookseller committee that selected Austen’s book for Indies Introduce.

Carter said of the title, “Austen’s debut novel is a stunning portrait of community and hope, following the inhabitants of one apartment building in the nightmarish early days of the second World War. Each character is trying to do their best and hope for better, all while trying to make sense of a world that seems to have lost all rationality. A treasure of a book!”

Austin Carter: Hi, I am Austin Carter. I am an owner and operator of Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I'm here to chat with Alice Austen, the author of a fabulous new novel called 33 Place Brugmann. I loved reading this book, although in revisiting it, I realized how scary and prescient it is to be reading at this particular moment, which I think we will get into.

Before I even jump in with your bio, Alice, would you like to give your elevator pitch of what the novel is?

Alice Austen: The book opens in 1939, in a building in Brussels — the address is 33 Place Brugmann — and it follows the residents of this Beaux Art building during the occupation and through Europe. It follows their lives, their struggles, and their interactions. And I'm told it's suspenseful.

AC: It is! It's suspenseful and it feels expansive, yet cozy. Sort of. Cozy is maybe not quite the right word, but it's something. It's intimate.

AA: There's coziness to it.

AC: Yeah, intimate is probably the better word. But yes, that is a perfect summary. We'll back up now and do your bio, so that our listeners know a little bit more about who it is that they're listening to.

Alice Austen won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (as writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre, and Girls in the Boat (Dramatic Publishing). She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard, where she received her JD, after which she moved to Brussels and lived on Place Brugmann. Austen currently lives in Milwaukee and is working on a new film and her next novel.

I am going to jump in with what I hope isn't a trite question, or one that you haven't had to answer a million times yet, which is: Though 33 Place Brugmann is your debut novel, you are normally in a different realm of media. You're a filmmaker and playwright — which is not at all surprising considering how cinematic the novel is, both in scope and structure. Can you talk a little bit about your transition from stage to page, and how your filmmaking experience affects your writing?

AA: It's a great question and thank you for your very kind words about the book. It is honestly such a pleasure to be here, and to me, it's enormously exciting that booksellers have gotten behind 33. It's just a complete thrill.

I began as a writer of fiction, and I continued to write fiction as these other paths opened up to me. I wrote my first play on a pub bet. It was produced, and I went on to become a Chicago playwright. But I'd never studied theater, and as a playwright, I had to learn a lot on the fly about dramatic structure, how to build tension and suspense, and how to keep an audience engaged. It was really fun. Theater is so alive. Everything happens in the moment. Things go wrong in the course of a performance that have to be righted. Actors pull crazy pranks on one another. I have so many wonderful colleagues from theater.

To me, film — in particular screenwriting — is the bridge between theater and novelistic writing. While theater is all about telling a story with these extraordinary constraints, film gives you the big canvas that you have as a novelist. But there are constraints in film, and writing screenplays is a very precise métier. What is the camera seeing? What are the different characters seeing? When does the action build? What triggers the action in the first place? How do you keep the third act from sagging?

I've also produced films, and the work of a creative producer  — which I think is one of the hardest and most underappreciated jobs in the business — is novelistic in its own way. You have to keep track of a lot of stories and details, both within the narrative of the film and also outside it — in the production, the crew, the drama going on between crew and actors, and so many other details. All of this has deeply informed my fiction writing.

AC: That’s a really good answer. I love thinking about film as a bridge between theater and literary fiction. That's so smart in so many ways.

I want to talk about structure, because that's kind of where you're thinking in terms of how does a play work? How does a film work? How does a novel work? An important aspect of that, of course, is where are we? Where are we putting this story?

33 largely takes place within the confines of the building. Although, like you say, we do kind of move around Europe. So that setting can feel both expansive and claustrophobic, and community is such an important through line in the novel, but it ends up being a bit of a double-edged sword? The closeness of the building's tenants means safety, there's aid nearby and they can rely on one another, but that also becomes difficult when there's a lack of privacy and there's potential danger as tenants and their loyalties become unreadable to one another. So, talk, if you will, a little bit about that closed-in setting and what it does for your novel.

AA: What I love is you've described 33 Place Brugmann the book, and you've also described the world.

So, I lived in that building, and I knew I wanted to set the principal action of the novel there. When I lived there, I learned stories. There were two elderly tenants in the building who had lived there before — and in one instance, during — the occupation. I heard their stories, and I had gotten to know many people in Belgium, and really was embedded there. I loved it. I lived there for years.

And so, I knew I wanted to write this, and I knew I wanted to set it in the building. The idea became even more compelling to me after COVID, and also on witnessing the political polarization that we see around the world today.

People have such strong views; they don't entertain contradictory views. And yet, often they live in communities where their immediate neighbors hold those contradictory views. I imagined the world of the novel as it was for people in a close community holding different views, and yet dependent on their neighbors for security, sometimes food.

I thought a great deal about the relationship between community, one's immediate environs — your block, your building, your immediate neighborhood — and the larger political state. What if actions that make sense and seem moral in the one context don't and aren't in the other? This was more often than not the case in Belgium during the occupation. How would we react? How did they react? Then there is the very important question of whom to trust, and how you know. And do you ever know for sure? It becomes a deadly game. I was thinking of all of those things when I was writing the book.

AC: Absolutely. We, as the reader, get the benefit of being inside of everybody's head, so we get a better sense of who to trust. But not every character is going to tell us everything. They're definitely hiding, and they're telling their stories in their own ways. It's a novel with so many excellent characters.

At first, I feel like novels that have so many perspectives are a bit of a challenge, because you have to keep a lot of things straight. So, I appreciate that this novel has the list of tenants at the beginning. I found myself flipping back and forth to be like, “Who lives in what apartment? What's their occupation, and how are they related to these other people?” But over the course of the novel, of course, I grow fonder and fonder of each one. I loved Masha, she's the Russian seamstress who escaped to Brussels after the first World War.

There's so much to say about these people living in the shadow of the Great War, not knowing that they're about to be embroiled in another one. This is an impossible question for you, but is there a perspective or character that you hold a little bit dearer than the others? Is there one that you're hoping readers will latch on to or get a little bit more out of than the others?

AA: I should predicate this with the fact that I did contemplate the structure of the novel a great deal. I landed upon this idea of having multiple voices, because you know what one character thinks and knows, and you know what other characters think and know. You know that some characters don't know what the others know…It was this way to create a verisimilitude of what people were going through at the time. I think it makes it more nerve-wracking for the reader (apologies).

But I have to say, I love all the characters. You may doubt me, but I do. For me, the key to writing a character is to really get in their shoes, to see what they see, to feel their inner struggles, and to empathize with them. Not to judge. If I were to judge my characters’ actions, rather than to try and understand — even if they're what we might call “evil” — that character would inevitably become two dimensional.

That said, there are characters who are closer to me and characters who, by the end of the writing process, drew closer still. I do love Masha, and I don't want to give any spoilers, but I love the characters who, as I wrote, surprised me with their complexity and moral compasses. I hope they'll surprise the reader too.

AC: I love that. I loved thinking about all of these characters relating to one another. There were so many times where I just wanted to jump in and be like, “No, no, you don't know, but this actually is happening over here.” Or like, “No, don't trust him! He actually has these kinds of loyalties!” If I want to drop inside of the book, that's how I know it's one that I need to get in the hands of my readers as quickly as possible.

Now I'm moving toward a question that I don't even have an answer to, so don't feel bad if you're not sure where you want to go. I was so obsessed with the characters’ obsession with a philosopher called Wittgenstein — who I read in graduate school, but cannot say that I comprehended in graduate school. A lot of these characters, or at least a core trio of them, are turning to this book-length work of philosophy called the Tractatus.

Honestly, I don't even know how you pronounce it, because nobody can pronounce it, nobody can read it, nobody understands it. But maybe you do! I'm really interested to know if you're the one who's cracked it.

The characters are trying to make sense of an increasingly frightening world. Charlotte turns to the book throughout the course of the novel, because her father and his friend are obsessed with it. So, she tries. She just keeps reading it and being like, “What? What am I supposed to be getting out of this? Is it comfort? Is it a sense of knowing? I'm not getting anything.”

Which is how I feel when I try to read it. But if I'm parsing correctly, it’s a call for precision in language, or at least an assertion that if there's a thing we cannot speak about precisely and clearly, it doesn't have an effect on our reality. The only things that matter are the things we can speak about clearly, is what I think it is about. That's a very difficult line of thought. It's a challenge to add into a novel that's otherwise very accessible.

 So, why Wittgenstein? What is the novel saying about language and understanding? Or what is the novel saying about the impulse that these characters have to turn to the written word? Or they turn to art — music, hat-making, even seamstressing. What are you and the book saying about the impulse to turn to art and philosophy in times of cultural and societal uncertainty?

No pressure.

AA: No pressure! My favorite quote about Wittgenstein is that “no one understood him, and then he changed his mind.” This book, Tractatus, is a series of 525 statements that Wittgenstein wrote during World War I, when he was fighting for Germany in the trenches. It's a book I've long been fascinated with, and I pulled it out when I began to write 33. Interestingly, another book written by someone during combat and war is Catcher in the Rye. I think there's something that happens to a book when it's written in that moment. It becomes almost more than itself. Somehow, some of it is more than the words on the page. Anyway.

Wittgenstein was this brilliant mathematician and thinker, and he fought in this war that was caused, in large measure, by a failure to reach a common understanding among cousins (because all the leaders of Europe at the time were cousins). His book, I think in part, is seeking to discover and articulate the relationship between language and reality, as you said, like how to find a common understanding, if not through philosophy, then through logic and deductive reasoning.

Whether he does or not, let's leave that aside. I don't know that anyone could possibly really weigh in on that. But yes, I think he's trying to get at the idea of how we can know what's true or actual and communicate that to one another, because it seemed so critical during World War I. And of course, now in 1939, during the beginning of 33 Place Brugmann, it's incredibly important.

This is particularly important in times of uncertainty. Which brings us to his thoughts on how pictures might be the truest representation of the truth, and that becomes a jumping off point for the discussion of art in 33. In 1939, when my novel opens, that devastating first war has given rise to World War II.

Some believe that the boy who was Hitler's antisemitic obsession in Mein Kampf was actually Wittgenstein. They were the same age, and briefly they went to elementary school together, but Hitler was two years behind because Hitler was held back and Wittgenstein was moved ahead. Interesting little backstory there.

In 33, each character who engages with Wittgenstein’s book has a different reason for doing so. Charlotte is trying to understand it because people around her are obsessed with it, and they each have a very different reaction to it. Her father, François, is an architect. He contemplates how he and Wittgenstein, who fought against each other in the trenches, might, in other circumstances, have been discussing ideas and architecture and philosophy. (Wittgenstein himself was an amateur architect, but designed a remarkable house for his sister in Vienna.) Leo, an art collector and dealer, has no patience with the book. It's too abstract, except for this one idea that ethics and esthetics are the same. It's in that context that he talks about art and Nazis, and how they're stealing the art because they can't make good art of their own. Julian is this mathematician, and he hears that there was a famous Wittgenstein-Turing argument about the liar's paradox, which plays into a lot of the book.

I don't know if that answered your question, but those are some of the pieces that were part of my considering the book in the context of the novel.

AC: Absolutely, and I'm going to pretend that I knew all of that, and really this was just my facetious way of getting you to explain to our listeners why Wittgenstein is important, and why you should maybe read that Wiki page if you get confused during the course of the novel. Or you can identify with Charlotte and be like, “Okay, whatever these men are talking about.”

AA: I love her take on coming to philosophy cold and being like, “I don't know if I really need this.” These men are trying to figure out a construct that explains the world, and it's very difficult to do that, if not impossible, because there's some mysticism in the world as well.

AC: Yeah, and she fully understands that. She has a healthy skepticism that this man — or maybe any man — can understand how she sees the world, because she is, interestingly, a colorblind character. She is constantly thinking about how she literally perceives the world differently than other people. Also, she's acutely aware of what it means to be a woman, and how that is coloring her sense of the world in ways.

AA: No, I think that's right. Interestingly, there's this mysticism that's a thread throughout the book, but Wittgenstein acknowledges it. In some measure, it's what modern logic draws from, and yet, at the end of the day, he's sort of acknowledging mysticism and things that just you can't understand.

AC: Absolutely. I feel like that dovetails wonderfully into my last question. It is such an odd, scary experience to read about people feeling nervous in 1939 in Brussels, and to be doing that in 2025 in America. We're recording this at the beginning of February, and I can only guess how we'll be feeling when we listen to this podcast in mid-March.

These characters are very well aware of encroaching Nazism, but they are very much unaware of how bad things might get, and how bad they do get — both in the course of the novel, and what we as readers know what will have happened to these characters. And yet, oddly, weirdly, beautifully, I still found so much comfort and hope and joy in reading this novel.

What do you want your readers to take away from 33 Place Brugmann? Why is it a novel that is important, and why do we desperately need to be reading this in March of 2025?

AA: I think it's critical to understand what happened in the twentieth century as it so profoundly shapes our own and helps us understand this moment.

At the beginning of the novel, it's true, there's a head-in-the-sand reluctance among some of the characters to acknowledge how bad things are or might become. I think we all have this capacity for wishful thinking. It's American exceptionalism, right? The idea that it can't happen here. It's a terrible thing when that illusion is broken, and it so often is broken.

My characters find themselves in exactly that circumstance — what Dickens would call “the worst of times.” And yet each of them struggles and stumbles towards some version of humanity, imperfectly, not always surviving. Some come to a deeper understanding of why ideas and art matter, and what it is about humanity that art embodies.

The novel is at times unsparing with this recognition of how cruel the world can be and how hard won those truths are. Still this hope that art and communication are at the core of our common humanity — François’ conviction that we must keep talking — these are, to me, very useful takeaways for our current moment.

AC: Absolutely. That's a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for answering these questions and for spending some time with us, and thank you for writing this book. I'm so excited for it to be out in the world. I think people are going to find so much in its pages.

AA: Thank you for reading it, and this was just my pleasure.

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33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen (Grove Press, 9780802164087, Hardcover Fiction, $28) On Sale: 3/11/2025

Find out more about the author at www.aliceaustenauthor.com

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