A 'medieval monk' visits Rockville Centre

Whether it’s to celebrate a retirement, a birthday or a communion, the Rockville Centre Library Endowment Fund receives financial donations. Anyone from the local community can contribute, and for as much as he or she wishes. Each contribution allows the library board to invite famous writers, as it has since 1971, who speak at its endowment lecture that is open to the public.

Held in the South Side Middle School auditorium on May 5, this year’s lecture featured acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Chris Bohjalian who has written 13 novels. “Midwives,” perhaps his most famous work, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a selection for her 1998 book club.

“He’s one of my favorite authors,” said Sarah Siegel, adult program coordinator at the library and an avid fan of Bohjalian. “His themes are entirely discussable and he’s highly praised.”

Bohjailan, who lives in Vermont and writes about everyday life, visited the middle school last week to speak about his two most-recent novels — “Secrets of Eden” and “Skeletons at the Feast.” Bohjalian mixed grace with humor when he opened the lecture: “It’s a privilege to be with you all on this magnificently spring evening,” he said. “All of you are the medieval monks of the digital age,” he added, to rousing laughter.

With that remark, Bohjalian referenced the declining trend of reading a novel in the 21st century, and thanked attendees for still reading hard copies of books in an age popularized by Amazon Kindles, Barnes and Nobel Nooks and iPads.

He prefaced the lecture by discussing a National Endowment for the Arts study, called “Reading in America,” which every decade polls adults to see if they have read a novel or a short-story collection in the preceding 12 months. In the late 1980s, it was 57 percent. But by 2008, it had dropped to 48 percent.

Bohjalian described these statistics as dispiriting, but he said they did not discourage him from continuing his craft and encouraging others to read works of fiction. He explained to the audience about how ideas germinated for his recent books.

“Secrets of Eden,” which was published in 2010, had its origins on an April afternoon in 1998 when Bohjalian met with a victims’ rights activist. The activist showed the author images of head indentations in sheetrock, and this image “stayed with him” for a long time. In the late 2000s, the images eventually inspired him to write the novel and set it in his home state, which he said has a high amount of domestic violence incidents against women. The book presented the murder-suicide of Alice and George Hayward, who both die in the opening pages.

The author said his theme in “Skeletons at the Feast,” published in 2008, was not so much inspired by an image as much as it was by a concept. “This was another book that had an elephantine gestation period,” the author said.

That novel also had its origins in 1998. Bohjalian was picking his daughter up from kindergarten when a good friend asked him to read his grandfather’s diary that had been translated from German to English. The last 30 pages of the diary described the buckling of the German front at the end of World War II. Years later, Bohjalian would read a historical book called, “Armageddon,” which also depicted the final days of the second World War, and the parallels between the diary and this book became “riveting,” inspiring the plot for “Skeletons at the Feast.” In the book, the author presents a family who escape their home in Prussia and move west in the waning months of the war.

Bohjalian’s personal recollections during the lecture were well-received by fans who were invited to a book signing near the entrance of the middle school afterwards.

Harold Rosen, a Valley Stream resident, was delighted by Bohjalian’s explanations of how he constructs a story. “It was very engaging,” said Rosen, who stills reads fiction and wants to read more books by Bohjalian. “His themes are real and they’re important.”

“Chris was very connected with the audience,” said Maureen Chiofalo, director of the Rockville Centre Public Library, who has read several of the author’s works. “It was a pleasure to have him.”

Chiofalo said that Bohjalian was among the best speakers invited to the library in the last 40 years. The library board spent a little more than $5,000 from its endowment fund to have him visit the village, a notable departure from the $250 it spent in 1971 when historian Barbara Tuchman spoke at the lecture in its first year.

Bohjalian concluded his speech by saying he was in the planning stages of an aviation novel he hopes to release within the next couple of years. He said it is another story that will focus on human nature, and his inspiration for this story was the Hudson River incident in 2009 when Captain Chesley Sullenberger successfully ditched a U.S. Airways’ flight into the frigid waters of the Hudson saving the lives of 150 passengers. Bohjalian kept the details of the book a secret, but he said there would be a rescue landing in the story that wasn’t as successful.

“I do a lot of research for my books,” said Bohjalian. “My sense is that human nature is spectacularly diverse.”

Comments about this story? TSteinert@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 282.