It made you very self-conscious. . . But we couldn’t really say anything after a while – I mean after a certain age; I imagine at three I didn’t mind – but at a certain age we couldn’t speak without being aware of how we were saying something, how it was being phrased, as well as what we were saying. So if we made a sort of clumsy repetition, one of them might very well point out, sort of lightly with a smile, but it was a very language saturated household . . .

. . . my father would consider very carefully what I had said and that made me feel very insecure. I don’t know if this is a good example, but I remembered it just the other day. When he was in the nursing home – you know how you want to say the things that you don’t want to have forgotten to say . . . our family was not, as you can imagine, given to spontaneity – I said to him, “You’ve been a very good father,” I just wanted him to know that, and he said, “In what respect?”

Source: Brick Magazine

Significant human activity is usually considered to take place where the cultural arbiters and publishers are. But in the long run, you know, I’ve felt that they weren’t quite figuring out what it was I was trying to do. I’ve read impossible reviews of my work and I’ve thought, What are they reading? In the long run it seems to level out. You know when Faulkner was at the height of his career Newsweek magazine still referred to him as a farmer. When Melville died, his wife put on his gravestone, “Herman Melville, writer.” And everybody thought it was touching that she actually thought he was a writer! They were so moved by it, they said, “Now, that’s real loyalty!” [laughter] In the short haul, I don’t really think you can be expect to be understood. And you shouldn’t worry too much about it if you’re allowed to go on and publish. I remember Updike saying that in any case, the reviews are inexorably mixed. So it is. When you’re younger and your ego is fragile, you just get devastated. But I just reviewed a new book in the New York Times by a Norwegian writer named Per Petterson. His book is called Out Stealing Horses, and it’s a great book. It sold more than 230,000 hardcover books in Europe and he couldn’t find a publisher here. It then won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award – which is the most remunerative fiction prize in the world – won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, won a whole bunch of things, and until now everybody was saying, “Who wants to read about Scandinavia?” Now it’s out, it’s got a kind of boutique publisher, but it’s gradually been taken notice of. Categorically, it was considered as being too out of town to be of any interest, and those days are over. But anyway, it’s very tough in literature these days. When T.S. Eliot came to the U.S. in the fifties to read, they had to put him in a football stadium, that was the only thing that would hold the crowd. If he came now he couldn’t fill this room.

Cormac McCarthy, the most celebrated recluse in American literature since J.D. Salinger. Before he emerged to speak to Oprah earlier this year, the seventy-four-year-old author had granted only a handful of interviews in his fourdecade career. He lives so far off the beaten path, he drives a flatbed truck. His self-imposed exile goes beyond the scraps of popular legend – sleeping in cars, bathing in lakes, too poor for toothpaste. He has never voted (“poets shouldn’t vote”), doesn’t read fiction (“it seems like an odd thing to do”), and forsakes book signings, e-mail and cell phones. For years, little was known about him beyond the breadth and power of his work. His violent Western No Country for Old Men has been made into one of the year’s most acclaimed films, and his post-apocalyptic novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Few living authors are as admired by their peers: When the New York Times recently asked more than 100 prominent writers, critics and editors to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twentyfive years,” one of the authors whose work was cited most was McCarthy.

McCarthy’s own list of great novels is unusually short: Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury and Moby-Dick. Later in the interview he talks about the extreme violence of our time and his apocalyptic vision of the future.

SPIEGEL: Are you a fan?
Pamuk: I was in my childhood. . . . . .

and later:

Radio reporters taught me to listen to something and imagine something at the same time. In the late 18th century, Goethe traveled to Italy, where he saw Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” At the time, people in Germany had heard of the painting but had no visual concept of it. He returned to Germany and wrote about it. There is a Greek term for this called “ekphrasis,” or expressing an image in words. Football reporting on the radio works the same way. Of course, it’s also clear that the reporter always lags behind the event itself and therefore constantly has to edit his words. Football is faster than words.

and later still:

SPIEGEL: What does Turkish football say about the condition of the country today?
Pamuk: The former Portuguese dictator (Antonio) Salazar also used football as a tool to control his country. He treated the game as opium for the masses, as a way of preserving the peace. It would be nice if it were that way in our country. Here football is no opium, but rather a machine to produce nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarian thinking. I also believe that it isn’t victories but defeats that promote nationalism.
SPIEGEL: How so?
Pamuk: Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars. In his novels, Tolstoy writes about how the war against Napoleon helped shape the Russian identity. A 0:8 loss against England is a similar catastrophe.

But there’s much more to the interview. Go see.

Deep within me, however, was a wondrous joy at receiving this Prize, and I tried to dispel my anxiety by thinking of those who would rejoice at my good fortune. There were my good friends, my brothers and sisters and, first and foremost, my old mother who, sitting back home, was happy to have lived to see this day.
But then I thought of my father and felt a deep sorrow that he should no longer be alive, and that I could not go to him and tell him that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize. I knew that no one would have been happier than he to hear this. Never have I met anyone with his love and respect for the written word and its creators, and I wished that he could have known that the Swedish Academy had bestowed on me this great Prize. Yes, it was a deep sorrow to me that I could not tell him.
Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder. All rustle and bustle cease and the sound of the wheels becomes a soothing, peaceful melody. The coaches no longer seem to run on rails and sleepers but glide into space. Well, that is how it was as I sat there and thought how much I should like to see my old father again. So light and soundless was the movement of the train that I could hardly imagine I was on this earth. And so I began to daydream: «Just think, if I were going to meet Father in Paradise! I seem to have heard of such things happening to other people – why, then, not to myself?» The train went gliding on but it had a long way to go yet, and my thoughts raced ahead of it. Father will certainly be sitting in a rocking chair on a veranda, with a garden full of sunshine and flowers and birds in front of him. He will be reading Fritjofs saga, of course, but when he sees me he will put down his book, push his spectacles high up on his forehead, and get up and walk toward me. He will say, «Good day, my daughter, I am very glad to see you», or «Why, you are here, and how are you, my child», just as he always used to do.

Selma Lagerlöf will be remembered for a book she wrote as a primer for elementary schools, now recognised as one of the world’s most charming children’s books: Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906) (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils).

*

Deborah Hope in The Australian talks to Peter Carey about the Australian view of his work:

“If I’ve ever had characters that start off being a little close to life, they’ve never come alive for me until all that’s destroyed and got rid of. So I really don’t do it.”

Novelists are “magicians” and “magpies”: “All the time I pick up little things, but they’re little things.”

“I’m just trying to make a work of art.” “I’m trying to make something that’s very beautiful; I’m trying to make something that’s a really nice river of prose.”

*

Tobias Buckell discusses the pros and cons of giving books away for free on the internet. I might be attracted to this kind of behaviour myself if someone else wasn’t doing it for me already.

*

The Tyler Morning Telegraph features a row between Peggy Sue, an old friend of Buddy Holly, and the late singer’s widow. Maria Elena Holly is trying to keep the other woman from selling a book – Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue? – detailing her relationship with Buddy Holly.

The author’s wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening when the couple were taking a walk in the country outside Baltimore. Mrs Fitzgerald, so the story went, threw herself on the tracks before an oncoming express train. Fitzgerald, himself in poor health, rushed after her and narrowly saved her life.

and

. . . for some months Fitzgerald wrote slogans for street car cards.
“I remember,” he said, “the hit I made with a slogan I wrote for the Muscatine Steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa – ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine.’ I got a raise for that. ‘It’s perhaps a bit imaginative,’ said the boss, ‘but still it’s plain that there’s a future for you in this business. Pretty soon this office won’t be big enough to hold you.’”

The book I’d been writing, like its predecessor, was turned down – that this happens frequently these days to writers of my generation was no comfort at all. I felt too discouraged to start another. But I am a writer still; my blog’s audience may not have been huge but it had one; it wasn’t like writing to the wall, the way I was beginning to feel.

Through the blog I came across other writers. One of them invited me to join her group of writers, all bloggers, all with books already published or about to be, all years younger. Reading about the triumphs or rebuffs met by the group members made the group’s resident old trout – me – start feeling like a writer again.