Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 78) F A C U LT Y P R O F I L E Scientist, author Paul Verhaeghen is as content as ‘Cheddar Melting on Grits’ By Leslie Overman “Omega Minor,” Tech professor Paul Verhaeghen’s second novel, was published in the Netherlands and his native Belgium in 2004 and in Germany two years later. After receiving rave reviews from critics, spending several months on best-seller lists and racking up a bevy of literary awards, the nearly 700page tome was translated from Dutch into English by the author and hit U.S. bookstore shelves in November. Hailed by Time magazine as a “sprawling, provocative, nuclear nightmare of a novel,” the book’s action skips back and forth from the 1930s and ’40s to the 1990s, with scenes played out everywhere from pre- and post-wall Berlin to the Los Alamos National Laboratory to Auschwitz to Boston. In May, Verhaeghen picked up the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the translation and donated the prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union. From the start, Paul Verhaeghen was both a budding scientist and a storyteller. As a child, when he wasn’t reading books on astronomy or gazing at tadpoles swimming in mason jars, Verhaeghen could be found hard at work penning “quirky little stories.” Now an associate professor of psychology at Georgia Tech, Verhaeghen also is an award-winning novelist. He recently spoke with the ALUMNI MAGAZINE about the miracle of getting published, the attention “Omega Minor” has brought him, the difficulty of landing a job in Europe and the shelf life of memories. Did you ever imagine “Omega Minor” would receive the acclaim it has from the literary community? I do realize I got tremendously lucky. Nobody in this country is really lusting for a Flemish novel in translation. To get published in any language is a miracle, to get translated into American is even more unthinkable, to get good reviews … is fantastic. Now if we could only get The New York Times to review it, and people to read it, I’d be happy. How did you end up at Georgia Tech? I spent about 10 years at Syracuse University. Last year, I got restless for a number of reasons, including falling in love with someone who was only visiting town. So we looked around. I never dreamed Tech would have me, it’s one of the top places in the world for the kind of research I do. But here I am, happy as a chunk of cheddar melting on grits. Your research focuses on cognitive aging and working memory theory. What is working memory? Working memory is the workplace of the mind; it’s the mind’s RAM, if you want. Human beings live in a small moving time window of about seven seconds or so; that’s all we are aware of unless we load some permanent memories in that window. I am interested in what happens when we need to temporarily hold on to some fleeting piece of information and retrieve it later — we call that “focus switching.” A day-to-day example would be having a conversation, realizing you want to make a point and then waiting to find the opportune moment to make that point while the conversation rattles on. The problem with aging is not that you forget that there is something you wanted to say, or even knowing where you stashed it, it’s that the information has often disappeared by the time you go to retrieve it. Do Americans respond to the book differently than Europeans? Anglo-Saxon reviewers highlight the sex a lot; the continental European readers seem for some reason much more interested in the moral questions that arise from the novel. It’s also a bastard novel, perhaps because I am a bastard of the two continents. This bastardization seems to make it a book without a country — Europeans say it’s very American, Americans say it’s so European. Does your research show up in your stories? “Omega Minor” is, in essence, a book about memory — the tension between what happened and what is remembered. We are what we remember, and that is true for both individuals and societies. You received your doctorate from Belgium’s University of Leuven in 1994, and you’ve been living in the United States since 1997. What brought you here? Simple: Someone offered me a job. In Europe, with its small and tightly controlled linguistic communities, it’s near impossible to find a job outside your home country. The system in Belgium is such that it is even hard to find a job outside your alma mater. Given my then adviser’s excellent health, it seemed prudent to apply elsewhere. Do you know if any of your students have read the novel? One of the things you, alas, learn as a professor is that the student-professor relationship is so fundamentally asymmetrical in its power dynamics that you cannot take at face value anything your students tell you, either about yourself or about your work, unless it is preceded by an expletive. GT 78 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008
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