Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; John Banville: The Infinites

This evening we're gathered for a reading with John Van Vogt from his latest novel The Infinities the infinity is as Mr. Daniels first novel citizen Booker Prize winning novel The Sea. It is a story of mortality and immortality of a family gathered for the death of its patriarch with a pantheon of Greek gods hovering unseen. The Sunday Telegraph calls the infinity as quote a Beethoven string quartet of a novel. It deals with huge ideas and in doing so breaks new ground in its own medium. The book has also been called a beautiful immersive read by the Sunday Business Post and The same review goes on. The studious and occasionally hilarious. There's no doubt that the author's imagination is an infinity of worlds where all possibilities are fulfilled. Mr Vandel is the author of 14 previous novels. He's also written several plays and a nonfiction book about Prague. His awards in addition to the 2005 Amanda Booker Prize for the sea included the Allied Irish banks prize the American Irish foundation literary awards and literary awards and the Guardian Prize for

fiction. His book The Book of evidence was also short. For the Man Booker Prize many of you know Mr. Venable also publishes amazing thrillers. His alter ego Benjamin Black and Mr. Black for Thriller entitled elegy for April later this spring. It is gentlemen thank you so much for joining us this evening. Please join me in welcoming John Daniel. Hello. Thank you all for venturing out of this. Cold evening. Made a short. Passage from the book. A rather complicated narrative around your beloved And this is a very. Simple passage. The central character is. Called Adam Godley He's a. Mathematician who has made some extraordinary discoveries. But in this passage he's. Remembering a much simpler past.

His remembering his childhood. Oh Adam counters propelled diver into the past. Going down deeper with each dive. There is a lost world there. He sees the sunken roofs and spires the street where currents glide. The people of phosphorescent as a fish drifting in and out of houses to how familiar rooms are sea horses eyes wide open. He is frightened. He does not want to drive as they have drowned. He knows that he soon well. He fears the tide drawing him on. Drawing him out on. The grass turned once but they slip through his hands slimy and cold. There was a gleam a glint. But when he's covered in the sand he finds nothing.

Only showers and jagged coral and bits of bone in or around him ISU Norm's and. His breath is running and. He feels his heartbeat hears the blood in his veins a hollow rushing. He struggles. In the water coins around and having his chains and ungraspable. The great bubble burst from his. Mother. He wakes. But when he wakes to is not waking. He is once again in the hunt back towel above the estuary. With its church its ruined her steep grooved just wing houses. He sees it in raw April weather against blue sky was smudges of cloud ice white bruise gray fall. From all the chimneys floors of smoke fly back as if a coast packed flotilla were putting out to sea from here. The wind ruffles the widening river

pricking up white. It is all compact internally like a toy Terminus No. He is a child trudging up the hill beside the high gray stone. He wears a tweed coat with a half at the back and a peaked cap. And thick on stockings the tops of which are turned down to hide home and so are white and gnostic. He has his satchel on his back. It is four o'clock. There are houses on the other side of the shark he took to the street each one said a step higher up than the other. And the front door of want a black crane bow is tied to the knocker with a pasteboard card attached with the name on it and date written in black ink. The door is ajar. Because someone has died and anyone may go into the in the corpse. The town drunk so was there first for a free drink in which to toast the dead

man on his way. He stops and stands for a moment looking at her as. He could go in. He could just push open the door and walk straight into the parlor. And there would be someone there a woman wearing black standing with her hands folded in front of her her pink grinned and her nostrils inflamed along the edges. He would shake a ten Chile hand and murmur something and not hear the words. He would cross the room his school shoes squeaking and gazed down sternly at the person laid out in the coffin in his own real looking suit. His works and not gowns wound round with a rosary. And there would be that smell of lilies and ashes which they recently gave all of which are placed as always there when someone has died and. The woman would offer him cake on a plate and a tumbler of tepid lemonade. There would be others there before him sitting in the gloom and straight chairs ranged against the wall gripping whisky glasses and red

fists or dancing cups and saucers on their knees sighing and shifting murmuring pious complacency is that set his teeth on arrange. That he does not cross the road. Instead he turns and walks on up a long hill toward home. Spring wind flows through the streets like waiters water. The blue of April. The trees tremble. There were like branches powdered with cups of green. The tarmac showman's. The strongest pummels the window panes making them a shiver and throw our finances of light. In the priest's car passes its tires whizzing on the way. The boy salutes dutifully and in return as gravely blessed as a reflected slide smoothly fishlike over the windscreen. The fellah own black coat and corduroy trousers are bald on the knees comes out of the church gate with the spade over his shoulder without stopping. He leaned

sideways and shuts one nostril with a finger pressed along the side of it from the other expertly injectables whose. Own last roll while. The house stones a new crooked street waged knurling between its taller neighbors as if it Seidlin there one day and staying put. He signs his hand through the letter box. It gives him a sure terabit. And fishes up the key that hangs inside on a string. In the hole. The familiar smell is medium. Floor punish black lead so. From the kitchen stove. He hangs his coat and cap on a hook throws his satchel on the floor. His mother in her apron a strand of hair come loose from the divan wipes the back of the hand across her cheek. She gives him the look that she always does. Suspicious skeptical thinking desperate. He walks his fingers on the table and. His father

is in the back room propped against pillows on a makeshift bed made up for him in the brown leather sofa in the corner his hands spread out flat in front of him on the blanket. The boy. Thinks of the crane on the door knocker. And of himself. Standing in the parlor here in his Sunday suit him in this now with ashes and only as. His father stirs sighs and makes the slithering sound in his throat. The band car in the grate has a frightening glare at its heart. And the cokers of a hot stinking cat. You know in the window there is a patch of late afternoon sky. Milky blue and a bit of the most well on top of which is mother's hands making this nest and hind shoes. The gooseberry bushes are there to tend to drill and cabbages. Gone to seed and grown as tall as Pascual candles. Then the fields behind them the rocky hills and then beyond that again elsewhere.

The first present that he can remember getting is a clay pipe. It must have been his birthday. His sister took him to the back of the shop and voted for him with money. The mother had given her. It came with a wax cardboard part of soapy stuff for blowing bubbles. In the garden by the hen house. He tried it. At first he could not get the hang of it. Then suddenly. The bubbles hesitated on the rim of the pipe bowl wobbling flabby and then broke free and floated sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves as if the top was always too heavy and the iridescence surface kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and formed a fact trembling shape something like an hourglass only a squatter. They were made of an unearthly substance a transparent Quicksilver impossibly fine undeveloped of

rainbow hue. They parked against his skin like a wet cold cases. They were another kind of square. His father died at Christmas time. In the back room. The dead in the corner was dismantled and leaving the strip so her standing in what seemed a gaping hole in the air and no more fires were lit and as a December day it went down. The light in the room congealed grew steadily dimmer. At the end the dying man had suddenly lifted himself up from the pillows with starting eyes and called out something a voice so strong and deep it shocked everyone. It was not his voice polluted so many unspoken through him. And Adam's sister burst into tears and ran from the room. And it's true brother with her. Gratian bloated to damp looking faces glanced at each other quickly and seemed to see. What her father had shouted had seen the

name but known and been able to make it out. He kept on glaring upwards his head shaking and his lips thrust out like a trumpet players and then had fallen back and there was a noise as if he were drowning. His mother said the master Christmas as usual. She said his father would want it so the Christmas was his favorite time of the year. She baked a cake. Adam helped her measuring out ingredients on the black grain scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined the blues today. It was night. All outside a frozen stillness the leaning roofs purplish gray with hoarfrost and the giant stars glittering like splintered ice and the moon high up in the middle of it listening blue black sky and a small As if shrunken by the cone and. His mother's turning the table with her sleeves rolled mixing in a brown lo the dry ingredients he had laid out for.

Her head was bent. And he did not realize she was crying until he saw the tears fall into the bowl. First one and then quickly two more making three tiny grave craters in the white mixture. Without a word she handed him the wooden spoon and went and sat down by the fireplace with her face turned away from him making no sense. And. He held the bone by the rail. Encircling it with his fore arm in the way that he had seen her do. When He swirled the spoon in the flour mixture. The tears became three grandparents. But they were quickly absorbed. He did not think he'd ever seen his mother cry in a hole. In the side of his father's grave she had stood drier. But now he felt embarrassed and uneasy and wished she would stop. Neither spoke. They were alone in the house. He wondered how long it would take before

everything in the bone was completely mixed. But what did that mean. Completely mixed. Every Grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly. The particles of salt and baking soda space just so throughout the flour. Each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it a solid three dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. What about the flowers have no two grains of which were alike. Have been that they completely mixed. Even if there were no other ingredients present GeneDx making their own pattern. And how would you know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved. How would you know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the Librium and throw everything back into disorder. He watched the spoon going round and round making troughs and peaks and crumbling cliffs in the soft pale powdery

mixture. Where were those three tears and. How well into the mixture where they mixed. Was everything in the world so intricately linked and yet persistently disparate. His mother stood up and blew her nose on her apron and without a word to back him in the bowl. And the wooden scone and began mixing it again. His aunt came down from the city for the funeral and stayed on for Christmas. She took over the house directing the putting all putting up of the decorations and the trimming of the tree ordered in a crate of stout and bottles of port wine and whiskey. Almost all the distribution of presents even cart the turkey. By his mother her back tight lipped and watchful saying nothing. His aunt was not married and worked in the city for a solicitor. And she were done with great coat with a faux fur collar and Fox for training on the helm.

The black talk with a parrot pen and a piece of stiff like a veil at the front and big shoes with chunky high heel shoes. She had an air about her always of angry sorrow. She was lavishly ugly. With a long horse face and a mouth full of outsized teeth. The front ones of which were always affect with lipstick. Her Christmas present to me was a box of. Puzzles made from lengths of shiny steel bent into intricate shapes and linked together seemingly inextricably. And though it took him only a moment motionless concentration to see the trick of each pair and to separate them. Which causes one to sniff and fro and make humming. It was well up to us to satisfy the weather to gleaming skeins in their closely Dep. so smoothly. With what seemed annoyed when his mind would become for a moment a limitless blue space. Calmly radiant through which

transparent forms moved and met and locked and unlocked and passed on to each other in a vast silent and listening. His manner not to be outdone by his sound gave him a little cough and book curious and amusing facts about numbers. Here. He first encountered in the square. How strange it was to add up the numbers in the boxes along each side and down each diagonal and come out every time with the same result the same and yet for him always somehow knew. This impression of novelty among identical venues he could not account for. How could 15 be different from 15 and yet the difference was there a sort of aura on the scene but like air. Like warm. Like the breath he breathes the breath are sometimes caught and swollen suffocatingly in his lungs so avid was he for more fact more conundrums more solutions. He borrowed

books in the library by people with letters after the unpronounceable names. He tried to devise puzzles and problems of his own. The terms alluded him in the square on the rise slipping through the mesh of his mind. He would close his eyes and seemed to be seeming to clear it with the figures doomed but when he reached turn he would grasp nothing with shards shards and surrounds and all become crowded and thick with him and. He can't. And he steps it takes him to walk to school. How many terms in the course of a class the teacher will say a certain word. On the way home encounter many cracks there on the pavement and many many will meet and how many women. An accountant beats it will take to get from one term that pole to the next. How often that bird on the Bowery chirp before he's passed underneath the tree. Like night and day occurrences hark to it. The impossibility of accuracy torments. So many there's so many there. But what if anything is the unit. And then

there is the question of time. What for instance is an instant. Hours minutes seconds even. These are comprehensible since they can be measured on a clock. But what is meant when people speak of a moment while the tick that you feel. Their only words of course. If they hang above soundless death. Does time flow. Or is it a succession of stillness as instance. Moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in and breaking where you. Are or is there only one great stillness stretching everywhere in all directions through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite disperse sea. Why does it vary. Why is to take time so different from the time when he's eating a sweet. One of the so many sweets and time will cause another cavity. And there are light snow in the sky that set out their sources a billion years ago. That Are their lives. No

only light. Flowing endlessly moving every instant. Everything around its edges. Everything seeps into everything else. Nothing yourself and. The waters of time muddy. The flicker and silent. Thinking. Nice to know that I've. Mentioned. People and figures and tropes my previous books are getting old. I forget what I have done before. You know it's on an ongoing process as only one can be in their volumes and in the one large one. I think every artist is aware of this that. What. He or she is doing is assembling a. One great volume on one great. Series of paintings and one great. Symphony great string quartet. The notion that we keep track of what we're doing and separate things has.

To do it. And as I say we're getting older and I think of. Old men for good. Happily you know I think that this is this is always a. Theme park that we imagine that when we act that we make decisions that we are in control of our destiny. Whereas in fact. Life is drift. And gloriously drift. We are. Constantly interlude that we are living our life but in fact that life is leaving us. I suppose when I was younger I thought this was a scandal and I think. It's wonderful. Life becomes more. I can assure you you're not younger than I am. The older one gets the more life becomes dreamlike. This is quite. It's quite sweet I mean my brother who is eight years older than I am I remember about. 10

years ago him saying to me that his dreams are becoming more and more powerful and he felt that these dreams were. The ante room to death or a way of gentlewomen life needing him. Out of life. And. At the time this seemed to me very fanciful but now. 10 years later I think that it is true to a certain extent. My brother oh yes yes yes. No I saw him for lunch the other day he's still saying the same thing. He's only 70 and then which nowadays no no no aged or so he'll be dreaming for a long time. But there is there is a softening I think. An increasing tenderness in one's life and one's. Attitude toward oneself one forgives oneself more wounded when that hero. So you know her for that. It must be a young person somewhere in the room

you know be reassured. Getting older has its. It's come Prince of consolation. Well you see I was quite surprised when people began to read the book telling me how funny it was because I took out all my books it's quite funny. I mean I don't you know I don't get it done enough from them but I think they are. I think the novel form essentially is a comic form. Even the most tragic novels are still coming for. You. I suppose because of a certain. Fundamental level. Novels are about delusions about her so into delusion as a whole what comic. And I'm not quite sure of that. That's something I'm still. Thinking about. But. You know I think yes I suppose this is. More. For the Haiti but I suppose a more lighthearted book is more playful.

I'd like the notion of the gods playing with us and of us playing with the gods. I mean for those of you who haven't read it the book is is. It's fallen in love with. Adam Garvey's daughter in law or go to my sexy creations and I said Agent ss. Agent is this I'm in love with her and I think I'm OK. And he comes to us to spend a night of passion my time. Bringing Hermes and Hermes is the main narrator in the book. And then turns up so the guards are there throughout the book. I. Love this conceit and I love the notion of the gods being here because I. This is what I have to be very careful I mean I'm not mystical I'm not religious but I do feel. Confident in the presence of the gods and I've always felt this when I was. Young I remember taking my dog for a walk. We're talking about my dog only my dog died in 1989 I still dream about him he was one of the

guards I think and he's in this book and this book as a as the dog Rex. And I remember taking my dog for a walk and. I was walking through a kind of what you'd call it in America gully between. Trees on both sides and the wind. Suddenly. Went through. And I could see exactly where the guards by the Greeks invented gods. This was a guy out of his way so much. And. I love the notion of it when the Greeks did this extraordinary thing. And I. Trained for 5000 years ago they invented a system. That would explain not explain but that would account for and accommodate all our human preoccupations our fears our hopes our joys in the guards the guards. There is a God for everything. There's. An account among the gods and among them it's full of everything that we feel as human

beings. And this has never been cheap to get and. Then we got monotheism and as we know certainly in our time. Perfectly the notion monotheism. There is one vengeful God watching over us and making us do things. So really the infinite is darkness for bring that paganism. Bring back bring back the gods. I mean I you know I can only be frivolous about this but yet at a certain level I believe it is in my bones. So I feel. Again it's very hard to talk about if I say I feel the presence of the gods it makes it seem. Either sentimental or silly or sentimental and GEOS and I don't mean to be any of those things but I do feel it. I better not say what I feel. I had. Always danger to safe when I was standing at podium like this and start to say what I feel. The voice inside me says John shut up.

Shut up now. My mention of diagnosis and as you one is a simple answer to it I about four five six years ago I began to rejoice in you know whom I'd not read before. Not many great books which I don't like i've never actually succeeded in finishing one of them. But what he called his one man doing his his hard work his heart no. Such as dirty snow as you moan banishes topic. All of which have been reissued by New York Review Books that publishing wing of the New York Review of Books and I recommend them highly to. Extraordinary books that Republican about a dozen extraordinary books I think some of the best. High art in the 20th century was written by seamen under the guise of cheap little nuggets. And I was greatly taken by this. And I thought that I would try to do something like myself. I haven't got. To know it was.

An earthly grasp of. Economy and brevity I mean he can set a scene and. A line in one of his books which opens with. Which I could quote it directly but you know the commuter crowd was coming out of the station and she was the only one walking in. And immediately went there to see it. I haven't got that gift I couldn't do it. But I thought that I would try to do something like that and I would write a simpler kind of fiction that more and. That would be fluent and fluid and. That I would write with a certain amount of ease and spontaneity rather than that. The hideously. Slow and tortured way in which I write these books. When I say Of course I You see I hate saying that because people think oh well tortured. Evokes a Nazi on torture and the slowness of the torture has to do with trying to get them to look

light. And. Playful. As they can be. That's what art is is aimed at is making things simple. So that's why I became that black at the time I thought that it was a kind of. You should disappear and I thought that I was just. You know going off on a frolic of my own but looking back I think that I. I think Dan Brown needed some kind of radical. Shake up or some kind of change. And I think you know it's an experiment. It's ongoing I don't know whether you know I may be making a total fool of myself maybe falling slowly flat on my face and it doesn't feel that way then to like books I'm quite proud of their. Craft. And I hope well crafted Because most. Crime fiction you are fiction is written with a plant and a burnt stick you know and I try to write. As well as I can when I said long answer

to a short question but I think you know when I started to like I made a pact with myself that I would not write in teachers. Which is probably the reason the books haven't been a successful as they should be. Because of what you know there is a point that I think I like the process of braining I do it myself and I think the interest for certain intervals in the book you know and I don't like being at rest in the middle of pain as my brain doesn't have to keep churning away. When you meet John Banda look you have to read every line of it. You don't get the point. And I try and like to write a book that you could write books that you could. Read relative ease. But unfortunately when I gave the first minute to my publisher. He shook his head and said. You know this is not crime fiction. And I said when you said this is this is an art book. Christ you.

Are wasting my time here you know I want to make money and be cheap. Neither of which but certainly having succeeded in making money whether I've succeeded being cheap enough to start me to say. A small star about the state of management in general. So it Lawrence terrorism and. I don't know what you mean. Oh somebody didn't put something on the web about. Some young guys saying he didn't I. I mean there's always some young turk coming and snapping at the heels of. So I don't people like me. It's quite right they should. Yeah he did actually the Guardian wrote me about it. Oh yeah I remember now he this was a young guy who was in Berlin. He's the son of. Irish people living in England so he's a son of the diaspora essentially and

he said that he didn't read you know people like me. He didn't name the book. It's quite obvious why most people like me and can't be so. Sad old farts that should really give up. But that's what that's what the young should be doing. I was doing it myself and I was his age. But he had some points to Nick unfortunately did it in. A crude and scatological language which is unfortunate. The children of the diaspora think that if they use four letter words and. Crudely. Stuff to do with our digestive systems that somehow they will seem. Authentically Irish. Course the Irish don't speak like this at all. Unfortunately it's. Anyone. No point going brother. But he did have a point when he was saying that that I don't write about the current state of Ireland and I think that's true. My answer to the

Guardian newspaper on the road by those who say that. The problem or the glory of Irish fiction is that you know Irish novelist tend to be poetic rather than prosaic. The Arsenal was always trying to aspire to the condition of poetry so it was in most part not interested in you know there's no there's no war and peace is Doctor Zhivago rabbit trilogy and we don't seem to be interested in doing that which I find strange. I mean I would think that in the present generation there would be somebody angry enough driven enough to try to write that the great novel that hasn't been attempted. I can't do it. People I've come to are. Still writing the sort of the pastoral novel of the

1950s. Did you really want to know I was into this. Boring beyond belief. We do our best. We write what we can. We we make the best books that we can. That's all we can do. It's after that it's for you to decide whether we're. Worth reading or not. When I talk about the great Irish novel I'm putting in quotation marks something ironic communiqué notion of it would be. You know John Dos Passos USA or. Even Saul Bellow's. Adventures of organ marriage eventually fall in March in many ways is writing my name as if I think it is the great American novel. Time for good or bad. You know. We don't do that kind of book you know. We don't write that kind of big. All encompassing novel which is still a literary work but is still concerned with. Social political and moral issues in the day we don't do that.

We try to write a kind of. Poetry. In prose John McGahern always uses so. There's various there's pros and then there's poetry. Point You can happen either. And since John was a novelist he said it happened more often in prose than I did in poetry in Ireland that's true. So we but you see I can't regret. The absence of the great novel because. I don't. See the point of literature. Throwing in something with political social moral concerns I think that. The task of literature is too. And here we get into very murky water and dating the task of detention is to produce beautiful objects. Beauty has become one of those. Words that makes us. Blush and stammer. Nowadays it's you know it.

It's like what we think of the word sex or the Victorians in viruses. But I think that still is the duty of the artist is to make beautiful things not to comment on. 9/11 or the book or you know over the great issues of the day. That's not the that's not the task of the art is that task the journalist. The task the historian and artists. You know who my voice is getting. Lower and lower because I realize that. Practically none of you is agreeing with me. And you know they actually are talking to myself. But this is you know this is what I believe in this is what I think that artists should do it is is that the program for artists is to make. Beautiful things beautiful things that are very strong. It is. Built into as Emerson has a wonderful passage which I wish I could. Code for a day to raise saying that you know we we profess to despise

poetry and art and all that stuff you know we regard ourselves as people of action. So he says. I rag on the end of a stick. You know for some. Guy. That. Boundary way off a trackless desert. Will drive us to tears. You know he's talking about a flag he says without knowing it. We are all committed to poetry and beauty. And I think this is absolutely true this is and this seems to mean that. If the artist has any duty to anything other than making art. Then it's that has to make beauty and to assert. The sensuality and beauty you know. You know and beauty is not there with lawyers and Jews and dogs and all that stuff. Beauty is a hard thing. It's it's. It's at the basis of of our times. So I am beginning to feel like a lay preacher buying my snake oil.

Anyway that's that's for what it's worth. That's my pathetic of the duty of the artist. It's not going to win the Nobel Prize I'm never going to be. A. Mover and shaker I'm not going to go there never be things and back in like boxing you know addresses the great questions of the day. And. Because I don't think that's what art is for. You know I think that you know the greatest novel about let's say the Boer War which in its time was as important as 9/11 or the war in Iraq and using it was written about the Boer War and all of us who said How delighted that boy. Would be deservedly forgotten. The boat was a terrible terrible thing. Cruel War. But not just wasn't doing anything about that it wasn't any hadn't any of her knowledge about the Boer. And I don't believe that about his writing about current great events. That Into annoyances either they just simply amusing us.

Again for those of you who haven't read it the the book Tenet is. Originally I was going to base the book quite. Closely on the front lines of great. Drama. Unfortunately one of the highest is not known in the newspaper world except for a small number of people which is a great tragedy. Good it has completely eclipsed him. Kleist was certainly intention as it is his masterpiece a masterpiece of European adventure of world. It's a strange dark. Comedy Keiser mission was to blend. The great drama which are Shakespearean by the mask. And in one picture and he succeeds Absolutely. The Guard uses the Roman names gunship to reforms in line with our community. The.

Wife vantage team in general. He comes and spends the night with her. In the guise of her husband. Next morning is wonderful. And he is not talk is as old as in the modern era has done and various other people have but in the morning pitchin comes home unexpectedly from war. And he says to putting you back so soon. He says what you mean I have been away for nine months and she says but what about last night. He says what about us no. And she says no to block the piece band together. So then begins so the hideous. Comedy of Errors that. Go zones for an extraordinarily intricate plot. Beautiful plant you know. And it's tragic in the sense that Twitter loses everything and his wife loses his identity. So I was going to base this novel quite closely on it and then of course fiction has its own

demands and interests in a way but inside the book there is going to. Be this play by kind. And hatred. I do think it is. For those of you who don't know and that you all do here. Harvard upo scholars for all I know. They've been talking to I had. But for those of me who don't know him I really do recommend There are three or four quite good translations of them to market. As I said dark comic deeply disturbing. And. Christ wrote in talking to David Reiser and it applies in his essay on the 9th theatre which is only by cheerful case he wrote one of the great. Modernist print muchness documents text

that says more about. The naive and sentimental. Approach to art done Schiller did and much longer text. Anyway you didn't ask me to say something about class and I said it there was if your phone is late can I wake up I have stopped talking to my playlist. The question then is what I'm writing a novel about an overdue ice dartboard liking the characters do I end up liking them. It's a good question an interesting question because curiously in this book I stuck to my intense surprise. This may simply be. I can to do with age I found out at the end of the book that I. That I kind of missed them when they were when they were gone I never felt that before. I realize. They praise myself for a moment I'm almost enough to admit that all the characters are me.

They have to beat me I'm the only material that I have to work with I cannot be you or my wife or my children I can only be me. So I have to generate myself in the way that we generate the creatures of our dreams. And as we know the creatures and I dreams can be extraordinarily persuasive but strange and strange to us unfamiliar. But in this some kind of calmness grow in me for these characters and I quite like them. And I felt. That I was. I felt a kind of. Nostalgia for a kind of sadness for them. There's a character called Petra. She is 19 years old trees and. She cuts herself you know she's a self harmer who's. She's in a lot of trouble and there's a terrible sentence in which I I didn't

really want to write but. Hermes the god said you know she will soon be with us because we love her. So she's obviously not going to be on the end of the book. It felt quite sad about that. Which is a new. New Sensation to me because they say it may simply be that I've become a follower and I haven't got the stuff to the end of the year. You know just a silly old prosper. Always going to be different I mean put down the scratches away as a page for. The whole day you might have a couple of hundred words and he's knocking. Most of which he will change next day. Blackens. Positively. Known Horia you know he just. Writes away like blazes and I structure like as a craftsman he writes. What I hope is a good clean. Solid prose. Crafted

prose. And you know you know what I mean. There's more need for craftsman than there is for artists in the world. So I've been to black out. I've invented craftsman. My quite like and I quite like Benjamin Black Books. I hate Duncan's books. I mean you do I mean people always think. That I am striking a pose but I'm not and we don't build books there or standing in front of me than I was here is a. Terrible sins behind me or tombstone or something because they're all wrong. There's a wonderful and finish on this. There's a wonderful cartoon by Guy Larson which is in two parts. It's great news great genius he should be given the Nobel Prize. And that it's both things so far a bit talking to you is far better than the flowers will be wonderful.

They have human faces or smiling beautiful. And says you know how we see flowers and flowers or snaggletooth crosses. It's how flowers see themselves. And that's when my books are to meet you minutes in this beautiful and I hope you do. I see those horribly botched. Much. Of the so to say one last thing I should and the course I think my books are better than everybody else is. Just not good enough for me.