Is it hits you want, anyway? Is a writer's blog simply a marketing device aimed at selling more books, or is it a way of engaging with readers, as Angela of the entertaining Literary Minded blog suggested when for a short time I stopped blogging?
I must admit that sometimes blogging is a bit of a chore: it takes up time and I don't really have the spare hours to spend linking this blog to all the things I should be linking it to, or to be doing guest posts, or reading all the things in cyberspace I should be reading or attending to. I don't have enough hours in my days.
I must admit, too, to finding the anonymous aspect of cyberspace slightly creepy. Anyone could be reading this! Disgruntled former lovers, husbands, friends, your mother. It is true that once I had an email from a man I met twenty-five years ago who kindly remembered how young and hopeful my eyes once were.
The best part is how this blog shows people are still passionate about books. The world may indeed be going to hell in a handcart but it's going with people holding books in their hands. Let this quote from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet speak for us holding them: 'Art gives the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of living. Whilst feeling the slings and arrows of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we do not feel our own...Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start. One does not wake from art because, although we dream it, we are not asleep.'
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to post comments, or to email me privately. It's been a very happy experience getting to meet so many interesting people, albeit in cyberspace. Happy birthday, blog!
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This is the view from the desk in Dieppe where I just spent a very productive time working. I went to write, undisturbed by the needs of two children, house, dog, partner, aka the whole catastrophe (Zorba). (Thanks to kindness of said partner in giving me leave though).
Got a lot of work done, about another 7,000 words of MY HUNDRED LOVERS.
One of the most thrilling things to happen while I was there was that my visit happened to coincide with the American election. I was staying in a fisherman's cottage in the old part of the port, with French TV, and the French went absolutely crazy about Obama. To hear chanting outside in the streets of 'Yes, we can!', in heavy French accents, while watching on televsion elderly black American women celebrating in Paris was a strange, exhilarating experience.
The French have a long and honourable tradition of supporting black Americans, artists mainly, from Josephine Baker to James Baldwin to many others in between (of course the less said about the French treatment of its Jewish and Algerian citizens the better...) French television ran a series of documentary/montage/interviews, some overlaid with Billie Holiday's STRANGE FRUIT, one of the finest anti-racist songs ever, eerie, plaintive, mesmerising, and there was also footage of King's unforgettable I Have A Dream speech.
The morning of the actual election I raced to the television to see if the results had been announced. It was so moving to see black Americans in tears, and white Americans, and Latinos and Italian-Americans, live from all across America, and in Paris, and all around the world. There were celebrations in Kenya, North Africa, Hawaii, and I sat there in a little kitchen in Dieppe, miles from home, weeping with joy.
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Here is the transcript of a forthcoming interview in The European English Messenger journal, by English literature academic Carmen Rosillo from the University of Granada.
Q1: Life in Seven Mistakes reached number three on new entries list of the bookseller last August when you attended the Melbourne writer’s festival. Can you explain what your experience was like?
A: I always find writers’ festival rewarding, because it connects writers with readers in a very intimate way. You can sometimes feel very shut off from readers – writing a book for two or three years, in a room, alone --- and meeting your readers is like a shot in the arm, a joyful thing that sends you scurrying back to your room, renewed. It is exhausting though because I think temperamentally most writers are introverts, but it is good for introverts to pretend to be extroverts sometimes!
Q2: The idea of a writer struggling to combine the demands of creation with a child and husband is a common floor in some of your books such as A Better Woman, The Broken Book and Life in Seven Mistakes. Can it be seen as a gleam of your own life? Read More...
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I might as well post it. A student has asked this question (see below for answer):
What do you believe is the role of a 'critic' or reviewer? How does reviewing or criticism affect your work (if at all?)
Answer: 'Just this week I was reading a review of the UK’s Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s new book (WAYS OF LIFE: ON PLACES: PAINTERS AND POETS, Faber) in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and there was this quote from Motion’s forward to the book: ‘Reviewers stand at the gate between the solitary creator and the wide world: their response to a book not only affects its short-term life, but plays a pivotal part in the establishment or otherwise of its long-term future.’ I think Motion is largely right here, in that the books that we celebrate are very often the books celebrated by critics (think Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf, whose literary reputations are indivisible from their critical reputations – they have been reviewed by all the ‘serious’ critics in Australia for many years – Andrew Reimer, Peter Craven, Peter Pierce mainly – which subsequently enhances an author’s literary standing, and hence literary prizes, readerships etc. And yet it might also be argued that sometimes the occasional wild, unfettered, surprising book – and author -- somehow fails to be caught by the critical net, and a reputation is only built years after an author’s death (I’m thinking Christina Stead here). It is easier to see the effect of criticism given a decent period of time: George Gissing, for example, was generally critically underrated during his lifetime (he was well reviewed for only a short period) but since his death his literary reputation has grown.
I remember reading somewhere that most novelists pass out of cultural memory within fifty years, sometimes even the most popular novelists of their day (in the second half of the nineteenth century R D Blackmore was one of the most popular novelists in the English speaking world, with a huge readership, and he is now virtually forgotten). So, yes, while reviewers play a pivotal part in the establishment or otherwise of a book’s reputation, but it is actually time which is the final judge.’
‘In answer to the second part, yes, I think writers do respond to reviewers, either consciously or unconsciously. I used to read every single one but now I don’t: a bad review can knock the stuffing out of you, and since writers are working alone, often for many years, you have to maintain a kind of confidence or nerve. I find I can very easily lose that, although paradoxically I think a lot of writers also respond like Patrick White did: ‘I’ll show ‘em!’ If this sounds that, psychologically, a writer is a kind of wounded, narcissistic teenager, I wouldn’t argue: writers are big babies. Have I ever written something differently because of a review? I can’t think of any example but I know I wrote A BIG LIFE as a straight ahead birth-to-death story because my dad said he didn’t like the chopped-up time-change structure of FLYING LESSONS.’
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