All posts filed under: literature

21. In Pushkin’s library

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“Pushkin died romantically, famously in a duel in 1837. He’s often thought of as the founding father of modern Russian literature, which makes him sound rather dusty and old-fashioned, but in fact he’s a great innovator and experimenter…” “His career is very important in the history of Russian letters because he is perhaps the first writer who tries to make his career as a professional man of letters… Unfortunately for him he was an inveterate gambler who dug himself into a financial hole.”

Auster and Aslam

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The latest podcast I’ve produced for Faber has just gone up on their site. In it I talk to novelists Paul Auster and Nadeem Aslam about the books they published this autumn. You can find the podcast here. In Auster’s book, Man in the Dark, an ageing literary critic, August Brill, spends a night imagining a dystopian future in which America is embroiled in a civil war as a way of distracting him from the ghosts that trouble his sleep, not least of which is the death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend in Iraq.

Tiger triumphant

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Congratulations to Aravind Adiga for his Booker win last night for his debut novel, The White Tiger. For those of you who missed it, you can find my interview with Aravind from earlier this year here. And if you want to sample his novel, you can hear him reading from it here and here.

Andrew Sean Greer on San Francisco in the 50s

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My latest podcast for Faber & Faber is now available on their site and on iTunes. In it I talk to American novelist Andrew Sean Greer about his latest book, The Story of a Marriage. It’s a beautifully realized depiction of what happens to the relationship between two people when a third appears on the scene – but in almost every way unexpected. “We think we know the ones we love,” the book begins, but it turns out that our knowledge is often imperfect. The book is full of surprises without straining credibility and it’s also a marvellous depiction of the fog-bound suburbs of San Francisco during the Korean War, when people were dealing with a new war while still living in the shadow of the previous one. In the interview, Andrew also tells me how he became a dog owner…

First Four for Faber

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Over the last few months I’ve been producing a new podcast for Faber and Faber, which you can find on their recently relaunched website here. In the first four podcasts, which are now available on iTunes, I talk to – among others – Hanif Kureishi, Peter Carey, Sebastian Barry (pictured left) and Junot Díaz. The podcast will be a regular monthly feature of the Faber site and there will be “specials” every so often too. I’m hoping to interview Paul Auster about his latest novel, Man in the Dark, in the autumn, for example.

The White Tiger’s Cautionary Tale

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“I see this in a sense as a cautionary tale. What my narrator is is a white tiger – he’s unusual for his time. Very few servants in India actually kill their masters and take their money…” Aravind Adiga’s debut novel was recently selected for the Booker long-list, so I thought I’d make available this interview which I did with him earlier this year in London. Click here to listen to the interview.

Landing the big three

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There was an entertaining piece by Joe Queenan in last Sunday’s NYT about the pleasures of long books (and in particular the three volumes of Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities), and the havoc they can wreak on the normal functioning of life (plus their value as a diversionary tactic):

‘An extended passport application’ – the poetry of Michael Hofmann

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“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German residue about things. It’s something I feel haunted by…” I’m delighted that the first poet to appear on Podularity is Michael Hofmann. I’ve known Michael for several years and greatly admire his work as a translator, but his poetry has been a comparatively recent – and very pleasurable – discovery for me. George Szirtes, reviewing Michael’s Selected Poems in the Guardian recently, said of his work: In the programme we talk about Michael’s relationship with the German and English languages and how he moves between the two; his relationship with his late father, the German novelist, Gert Hofmann, which forms the explicit or implicit subject matter of much of his poetry: ‘these two men meet up to divide the world between them and this is how it goes: my father gets prose in German and I get poetry in English, and we each go away …

11. ‘Gonged on Missy’

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‘You always suppose you’re the heroine in the story of your life; the day you discover you’re the monster, it’s apt to come as a surprise’ Dol McQueen, ‘flash-girl’, 1862 Chris Hannan‘s dazzlingly accomplished first novel, Missy , is published today in the UK (in the US, it comes out in June from FSG). I met Chris last week at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh to talk about making the transition from writing plays to writing novels, how he created the voice of a young American prostitute in a silver-rush boom-town, and how aspects of his own life fed into what seems at first the least autobiographical of first novels. The ‘missy’ of the title by the way is not a character in the book, but the liquid opium to which its narrator, Dol McQueen, is addicted. Dol McQueen is one of the “flash-girls” who forsake the fleshpots of San Francisco to ply their trade in Nevada’s Virginia City, where men are rumored to be newly rich and ripe for plucking. …

Aravind Adiga on ‘The autobiography of a half-baked Indian’

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That’s how the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel reckons he should entitle his life story. Adiga’s narrator, Balram Halwai, believes he is half-baked because, like so many in India, he’s been unable to finish his schooling, and so his head is an ‘odd museum’ of half-cooked ideas. This is the head the reader is given a guided tour of over the course of 300 often bitingly satirical pages. Adam Lively in The Times called the book ‘extraordinary and brilliant’ and another critic said it was ‘the perfect antidote to lyrical India’. Balram is not the sort of character who is normally given centre stage in Indian novels. He comes from a low caste in an almost feudal village and seems destined for a life as a downtrodden servant, abused by his affluent, rapidly (and often comically) westernizing masters. Yet over the course of several nights, Balram relates the steps he took to escape the ‘rooster coop’ of Indian society and turn himself into a ‘self-made entrepreneur’. He offers the wisdom he has gained (‘free …