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Bomb: The Author Interviews - Hardcover

 
9781616953799: Bomb: The Author Interviews
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1616953799 ISBN 13: 9781616953799
Verlag: Soho Press Inc, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing on 30 years of BOMB Magazine, this anthology of interviews brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.
 
Here we have a conversation with Jonathan Franzen, still an unknown author, on the eve of the publication of The Corrections; and one with Roberto Bolaño, near the end of his life. Lydia Davis and Francine Prose break down the intricacies of Davis's methods;  Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz discuss the power of Caribbean diasporic fiction. This anthology brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BOMB Magazine, a breakout publication born of the early '80s New York's downtown art scene, offers intimate and outspoken artist-to-artist conversations. For 32 years, BOMB has kept an eager readership informed of and engaged with the most important innovators in art, literature, music, theater, and film. BOMB offers a quarterly magazine and website with a searchable online archive of over 1,200 interviews, 800 essays, podcasts, videos and daily blog posts.

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An excerpt from the Lydia Davis and Francine Prose interview

FRANCINE PROSE Do you remember learning to read?

LYDIA DAVIS Yes, and my memories of the Dick and Jane books are very happy memories. I loved learning the words “look” and “see”: “Run, Jane, run. See Jane run.” It was so clear and easy and unconfusing and neat. Actually I spent my second grade year in Austria. I had one year of learning to read in English and then I learned to read in German. I still have the German textbooks in which the letters got smaller and smaller as the pages progressed through the book.

FP How sadistic!

LD That’s right, very sadistic.

FP Do you think about the rhythms of Dick and Jane?

LD I always liked clarity and simplicity and balance. All rhythms can be seductive. I was attuned to the music of language as well as the music of music. Learning another language when I was seven probably made me hyperconscious of language; also the German language in the classroom was a wall of incomprehensibility around me. Gradually the words began to have meaning. But first I heard the language as rhythm.

FP So do you write for rhythm now?

LD Yes, it’s always rhythm. I always hear it in my head.

FP There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s in them as long as they’re written beautifully.

LD In fact Beckett said somewhere that he didn’t care what a text said as long as it was constructed beautifully, or something like that—all of meaning, all of beauty is in the construction.

FP It’s rare that people pay attention to that any more. What were your favorite books when you were a kid? Do you remember?

LD A turning point for me was Dos Passos’ Orient Express. That was one of the first “grown-up” books that made me excited about the language. It was one of the first I wasn’t reading for plot. Another was The Unnamable by Beckett. I got into that at thirteen.

FP You read Beckett at thirteen?

LD Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing.

FP Where did you find it?

LD My father was an English professor, and somehow it must have been in the house. It made a very strong impression because it was so different from anything I had read. I opened this book and it said on the first page, “I’m lying here. I’ve dropped my pencil.” Later, in high school, I would go through one novelist after another—Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Joyce—and read everything.

FP Do you think about Beckett a lot now?

LD He was very important to me in my early twenties. I studied him. I was really picking apart sentence structures, seeing exactly how he constructed a sentence. Why it worked so beautifully. I suppose I wanted to do it as well as Beckett. So if I was going to do it as well as he did, I had to learn how he did it.

FP So you knew you wanted to write?

LD I knew from a very early age—maybe twelve—but the funny thing was
that it was more of a burden than a pleasure.

FP (laughter) How prescient.

LD Right. I knew it would be a lot of hard work. Like a Chinese emperor, the child knowing he’s going to grow up to be emperor. He may not really want to, but has no choice in the matter. I wasn’t reconciled or really content with the idea until I was in my twenties. As a child, what I really loved was music! I enjoyed writing a story when I had to write one, but what I really sought out was music.

FP Playing the piano?

LD Playing the piano, and I loved listening to music. I would listen to a record over and over again. Then I would go out and get the score and listen to the record with the score because I wanted to get as deeply into it as I could. I didn’t go into my room and write stories or write a novel the way some kids do. I spent all my time on music.

FP If you had to think of a modern writer . . . who’s the closest to music? Beckett and Joyce often seem to be writing more for the music of the language than for content.

LD How about Nabokov? Do you include him?

FP Well Nabokov, yes, he’s sort of like Bartók. What was the first thing you wrote, the first thing you thought was really something?

LD I can remember a day when the teacher read aloud my story and also a story by a classmate. I loved her story. I wasn’t so fond of mine. So I can say her story was a big influence on me, the first thing that I really remember liking. You know the book Iron and Silk where the English teacher asks a class of Chinese students to describe their most memorable experience? One of the students hesitates and hesitates and finally says that his most memorable experience was when his wife went to Beijing and ate duck there. He didn’t go. She went, but that was his most memorable experience.

FP I can remember some dreadful little moralistic tales that I wrote in grade school and horrible little love poems in high school.

LD In high school I was more excited by essays because I was discovering how to think things through and come to new thoughts.

FP When did the stories in Break It Down start?

LD The earliest ones were written about ten or twelve years before they were published. They were written when I was in France after college. I was having trouble writing a traditional narrative story. There was one long story that I worked on endlessly. Looking back at the notebooks, I realize it took me over two years to finish it, trying another version and another version. In the meantime, I started doing these very short stories to break myself out of the rut of not writing or resisting writing. I told myself: You have to write two tiny stories every day. It didn’t matter how silly they were, I just had to finish two one-paragraph stories.

FP This is probably an impossible question, but when you say a story’s “not working” or “working,” what does that mean?

LD It’s flat. It’s dull. There were two stories, one called “What Was Interesting.”

FP Oh, I love that story.

LD The other was “The Center of the Story.” Both of those didn’t work as they were. The core of the story didn’t work. I left them alone for a long time. The way I rescued them was to come back and address the question as a part of the story. Why isn’t it working? The problem with one of them was that it had no center. The problem with the other was that it just wasn’t interesting enough.

FP Speaking of “What Was Interesting,” why do you think that obsessive love is such an interesting subject? It’s not in fact a condition that people find themselves in all the time, or even most of the time. And yet it’s always somehow riveting, and a number of the stories in Break It Down are about that.

LD It’s one of the first things we experience when we’re changing from being children to being adolescents. One of the signs is that we suddenly start falling in love with a camp counselor or with a teacher. Usually the first objects of our affections are at a distance, rather than someone who falls in love with us in return. Maybe it’s so compelling later because of those first experiences.

FP There’s that dreadful familiarity each time you have those first experiences all over again.

LD Obsessive or...

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Verlag
Soho Press Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616953799
ISBN 13 
9781616953799
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
460
Herausgeber
Sussler Betsy
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