“This is insane. Someone saying they were you just called me looking for money to be wired to California. What is going on?”
This is not the e-mail message that I anticipated from a local bookseller stocking my translation of Osip Mandelshtam‘s Tristia. But it followed a call from my Santa Monica-based brother Keith, who just met the same bookmonger at this year’s Book Expo America in Los Angeles. So I took the double mention at face value. Keith had been approached by a woman at BEA who had mistaken him for me. “Kevin?” she had asked. We’re identical twins, so it’s not an unusual assumption.
Two months ago, I had read from my book at Word bookstore in the Polish-occupied Greenpoint section of Brooklyn with novelist Anya Ulinich, so it wasn’t unexpected that I would receive an email from Word-owner Christine with the subject line “money situation.” I assumed that someone had bought some of the copies that I had left behind and that Christine wanted to make arrangements to get me some money. But it turned out to be quite the opposite. Apparently, I had called her asking for money, offering my wife’s “3-carot” wedding ring as collateral. It seemed that my car had been impounded in Philadelphia and I was in a bit of a jam. Christine offered to call my wife and even my brother to help but--inexplicably--I had rudely rejected her noble charity.
“Kevin,
I have spent the last 15 minutes calling around the Philly impound lots trying to find you and was told that there is no way you wouldn't be able to access the items in your car to pay for the impound. Whether that is the case or not, I clearly offered to help you by calling someone else, and you hung up on me. I am here alone and have to help customers but I could have called your brother or anyone else you needed. I don't know what else I could do. I hope you're ok.”
I am OK. Thing is, I haven’t been to Philadelphia in nearly 20 years--nor have I owned a car within the same duration, let alone, unfortunately, proposed to my new wife with a 3-carat ring. Christine was the unknowing, yet incredibly generous victim, of a scam in which my good name had been impugned. But I’m in good company. Apparently, the same fraud has been committed in the names of established novelist Russell Banks--whose collected short stories I am, coincidently, reading--and new novelist Mark Sarvas, of The Elegant Variation blog:
"There is this sense that bookstores have this special relationship with authors," Kerry Slattery, manager of L.A.'s Skylight Books, told the Los Angeles Times after nearly being bilked out of $200 by someone pretending to be novelist Mark Sarvas.
As tickled as I am to have been cited in the same scam as Russell Banks and Mark Sarvis, I implore readers and book mongers to remain skeptical of *starving* writers begging for money. Still, if you do indeed owe them some money, then, by all means, send it to them. But please don't let on to my wife that her ring might be anything less than 3 carats.
I just finished reading Irina Reyn's ambitious and immersing What Happened to Anna K. I think I enjoyed it more for the different take on the Russian immigrant story than its association with Anna Karenina, but it was great to see how the story converged with AND diverged from Leo Tolstoy's 1873 break away novel .