Jennifer said:
when I saw the interview, I'd just finished a story much along the same lines and got rather depressed that she'd beaten me to it.
Heh. Been there on many different occasions, but not with writing (necessarily).
I think she wrote an article on the issue for the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1504973,00.html
However, I may be judging the book by its author, but I did get the same sense that clueless mentioned; she knew exactly how clever she was and wanted you to know too.
I get lost on this a bit, so if an intelligent person writes a book they shouldn’t write it as they would normally?
It does seem like everything is getting Dumbed Down of late, but this would really be a shame…
Also, as I should have and meant to go into more with Clueless’ post -and Jennifer, as you say you write I’d certainly hope that you never want to be confused with your characters. Yes, the slightly biographical sometimes slips in, but the character in this book is named “Eva”. Not Lionel.
LS herself:
“Any number of readers and reviewers have conflated me the author and Eva the narrator. But we are not the same person. We have completely different family histories, and Eva, to me, is a discrete creation.
Nevetheless, I did stick the poor woman with some of my own least attractive qualities, which I carved out and put on the table for dissection. For example: It has taken me many years to come to terms with being American and to stop apologizing for my nationality (hey, everyone has to come from somewhere, there’s something wrong with every country, and we don’t get to choose where we’re born).
So I gave Eva an arm’s length, superior attitude toward her countrymen, a disdain that her son learns fatally to ape. I am fully aware that being ashamed of your origins, and imagining that you can opt out of your own culture by acting haughty about it, is unattractive. Yet I find that especially among leftwing Americans this self-hatred-disguised-as-elitism is endemic, and therefore worthy of inspection. The fact that I have erred in this direction myself on occasion gives me a sense of access. But you make a big mistake if you think that the author and the narrator are one and the same.
I recently heard a couple of TV reviewers declare fiercely to camera that not only did they not like Eva; they personally disliked the author. I laughed aloud. (It’s impossible to take it personally when someone claims to have taken a scunner to you and you’ve never met.) Eva = Shriver is a naïve reading of the novel. Like most of my fictional characters, Eva is a casserole, made of a variety of leftovers in my psychic fridge - a drizzle of acidic dressing, a few ambrosial florets of broccoli with orange sauce, and (since she is a fearful woman at core) a chunk of cold chicken.
As for Eva’s unreliability: she is not deliberately dissembling. She is telling the truth as she understands it. But she is, as are we all, compulsively self-justifying. It suits her purposes for Kevin to seem out of kilter from birth. Her story is rigged.”
From:
http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/2005prize/winner/interview.html
I'll have to read the book to decide whether this is justified,
Please do. I’m curious what you’ll think.
j