Another Wednesday, another BOOKSPO, this one with Nadia Ragbar, whose debut novel The Pugilist and the Sailor is a beautiful treatise on (dis)connection. It’s the story of a pair of conjoined twins who just happen to be a force to be reckoned with in the boxing ring, but the brothers also dream of vastly different destinies. And how do they reconcile that? A singular problem, it’s true, but one that’s analogous to challenges we all face in terms of how we can live our own lives while relating to others. Ragbar’s novel is also about community, difference, expectations of conformity, and the difficulty of fitting into the world.
In our conversation, we talked about Katherine Dunn’s cult classic Geek Love, how differently Ragbar reads the underlying message of that novel as opposed to when she encountered it first, and how it helped pave the way for her to write The Pugilist and the Sailor, which is similarly about characters whose bodies mark them as other. We also talked about mother in Ragbar’s novel, and how she became a more important character after Ragbar herself became a parent, the character allowing her to grapple with the awesome responsibility of parenthood, and the impossibility of ever getting that job completely right.
The Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins' physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie's sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of "The Reuben Beast," though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents' deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor.
A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world.
Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel.
