As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Lara Haworth on the research process behind her novel Monumenta (Canongate, 2024).
Monumenta is an exceptional study of historical memory as explored on the level of the personal, the internal, the reflective. Specifically, the novel deals with the phenomenon of historical memory in modern-day Serbia, with characters reflecting some of the complexities of the ex-Yugoslav diaspora. I’m curious to know what drew you to this place and its history, and how you navigated your own proximity to the subject, either as a researcher, a writer or as a person.
It’s strange, isn’t it. If I had gone into the writing of Monumenta aiming to excavate a study of historical memory on the level of the personal, I would have probably failed. The task would have seemed too grand, too daunting. Luckily, I entered through a smaller, less fancy side door, where the specifics of what is remembered are mixed up with heartbreak, other disasters, and what to have for dinner.
I was drawn to setting Monumenta in Belgrade by my dearest friend, who is Serbian, and her family, with whom I have spent a lot of time throughout my life. The house in the novel is fictional but is also my friend’s grandmother’s house. The sale of this house in 2019 leaked into a parallel and difficult feeling, which was of the loss of my own grandparents’ house. I started to think about the loss of political homes and realities as connected to the loss of familial homes and realities. Monumenta is the first part of a project that takes in the whole of Europe, from east to west, but I wanted to start in Belgrade as the arguments over historical memory and memorialisation there are peculiarly fresh. Perhaps because I’ve spent a good deal of time there, hanging out, speaking to people, I have, over time, ingested some of its ways of thinking and doing about memory and the past without realising it. This enabled a kind of lightness when I was writing that felt a bit freer and a bit more able to stash the heavier parts of the research I had conducted. Mostly into massacres. I also wanted to show readers a longer history, one that goes beyond the wars of the ’90s, which I think, for many in western Europe, occlude the place’s deeper realities.
Tied to this is the theme of memorialisation (and the difficulties of memorialising the past) that underpins the novel. As various characters consider how best to memorialise Serbian history, your character Misha poses a core problem: ‘“There is a fine line,” said Misha, “a very fine line. Between memorialisation and erasure.”’ (p. 55). I wondered if you could expand on that relationship for us. In what sense is society’s memorialisation of itself in danger, sometimes, perhaps always, of also facilitating an erasure of historical trauma?
For me, Misha’s line speaks very particularly to the problems and failures of monuments. We could, I guess, go further into it and say that every time I remember something I exclude something else, which is, in a way, how writing works, but in the case of Misha’s line, I really did mean for a consideration of architecture. First, there’s the question of who decides who to remember, who commissions, which inevitably excludes. Just look at all the dead white men on horses in Whitehall. And the remembering itself is always contested, and changing. Other stories and histories come to the surface, and the monument takes on new meaning. Winston Churchill’s statue on Parliament Square has become a locus of this type of change. For some, an embodiment of racist imperialism in bronze, for others, a war hero in need of legal protection from vandalism (which he duly received). And in a way, the monuments themselves become places to register and sort through this change, which ironically makes them relevant again. And while I think that so many monuments do fail, and do forget, and do enrage and hurt, I also think we still need to try. They are important; they have a vital civil function as emotional architectures. Good examples of this are the ad hoc Covid memorial wall on the Embankment in London, and the Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, in Berlin.
Adjacent to themes of memorialisation, another way that history and the present day interact throughout Monumenta is through hallucination, fantasy, memory loss and nightmare. I was particularly struck by the fantasy of your character Danilo, who imagines that, like the murdered King of Serbia, he is missing his right hand. I wanted to ask about your approach to memory as a literary theme, particularly its relationship to nightmares and the repressed. What is it about that subject which is so conducive to literary drama?
I’m so pleased you noticed this. I enjoyed very much the kind of wild freedom in being able to convey a historical reality through the medium of fantasy. For me, this is very much how memory works. I am flung to different continents and time zones, with people both alive and dead, all while having a meeting with you, or writing this. So it made sense to me to articulate parts of Belgrade’s history this way. As a kind of explosion. The past into the present. For me, literature is memory: it has the unique ability to show consciousness, to show thought and recollection, which is also fantasy, nightmare, and the record. And there is the drama: a character remembering one thing (her ex, let’s say, at a moment of betrayal), while having dinner with her current girlfriend. It’s perfect, it’s all there. The nightmare can spring into the present at any moment, and the novel is the form that can articulate this in the truest, clearest way.
Memory and trauma is further reflected in the central theme of family, with the family home serving (to various degrees of success) as a memorial to the family. In this sense, the motif of a family reunion feels like a purposeful method of evoking questions of family trauma, particularly through the long-kept, sometimes poorly-kept, secrets that bubble up throughout the novel. Again, I’m curious to know whether you feel fiction has a special aptitude for dealing with this theme, and to what extent Monumenta might serve as a monument to your own experiences of family.
Family, yes. Always. If I’m arguing that memory is the primary theme of literature (which I seem to be doing), then family is next, perhaps because for many of us, our earliest and first serious memories have to do with family. Again, I think the doubling of inner consciousness with outward appearance that the novel can do makes it uniquely able to show how it is to exist within a family. The way the power moves, who carries the secrets, who sublimates themselves and who keeps the show on the road. I realised early on that I was writing Monumenta, in part, as a response to the grief of losing my grandparents, their house, and therefore an entire world. My experience of family is inevitably there, too, but shattered between all the characters, only detectable in pieces. There is a scene in Monumenta towards the end, ostensibly it’s a quiet scene, between Olga and her children, Hilde and Danilo, as they prepare food for the party the next day. And yet, internally, for all three characters, it’s very loud indeed. It took careful rewriting to sift and sift the scene and find the balance between the interior and the exterior, the ways in which they let on, or don’t, how they’re really feeling, and where and why their interactions and private grievances might enable shifts in behaviour and affect and grudge-bearing and love.
Finally, I wanted to ask a practical question about your use of multiple points-of-view. The narrative of Monumenta is refracted through several characters, each of whom retain a distinct perspectives on the world while operating broadly within the third person present tense. Could you illuminate some of the opportunities that working with this unfixed POV might have allowed, as well as some of the challenges? Did it feel comfortable? Could the novel have been written any other way?
I had never written from multiple perspectives before, and I had this weird feeling that I never would. Why, I have no idea. Perhaps I was scared. But as soon as I started writing Monumenta, the narrative insisted on it. Demanded it. Came to life in a din of voices. And once I operated from a position where any of the characters could have an inner world, some of them practically knocked me down (I’m looking at you, Karl) and ran off with it. And what I had thought would be a fiddly, difficult process actually became a very fast-moving, instinctive one. The novel could not have been written any other way. Because I think to grapple with the competing voices of family, of memory, and of historical record, it couldn’t really be told any other way.
Lara Haworth was born in Brussels and raised in South London. A recipient of a Bridport Prize and a Café Writers Award, her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Extra Extra, Field, ACME and Feels. Her debut novel, Monumenta, was published by Canongate in July 2024 and has been shortlisted for a Nero Book Award and the McKitterick Prize. A German edition, Das Abschiedsmahl, translated by Stefanie Ochel, will be published by Kjona Verlag in August 2025.
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.