By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  The Icelander Halldor Laxness’s Independent People, which I read last year on a trip to the country. Even in chapters where nothing happens, it happens brilliantly. I thought Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds was shot through with greatness, too. If “a truly great book” implies thickness and scope, then maybe it doesn’t qualify, but either way Powers has written a superlative novel.

  And the worst or most disappointing thing you’ve read recently?

  I’d rather not put the boot in publicly—it spoils my day when I’m on the receiving end.

  Where do you get your books, and where do you read them?

  If the book is still in print and from a mainstream publisher, I’ll use my local bookshop here in Clonakilty in West Cork; I’ll Amazon it if I’m after something more oddball from, say, the University of Hawaii Press; or use AbeBooks if it’s out of print or print-on-demand. I like to browse the bookshelves of charity shops in university towns, in case serendipity hands me something wonderful I had no idea I wanted. Up to ten proofs a week wriggle through my letterbox from editors and publishers (even though I’ve stopped blurbing), and occasionally there’s a well-chosen diamond.

  What’s it like to see Cloud Atlas turned into a movie? Any major changes in the transition that threw you off?

  First, there’s a primal wow to be had from seeing your characters walking and talking, larger than life, played by faces I’ve known for much of my life. Second, there’s a slower-burning pleasure in merely thinking of your story being out in the world, trickling into minds, wherever there are cinemas. Then, inevitably, the film gets lost in the hurly-burly of life, and I don’t think about it at all, at least until the next interview.

  None of the major changes the film made to my novel “threw me off” in the sense of sticking in my craw. I think that the changes are licensed by the spirit of the novel, and avoid traffic congestion in the film’s flow. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. In the German edition of my last novel, my translator Volker Oldenburg rendered a rhyming panoramic tableau by rescripting the items in order to make it rhyme in German too. He judged that rhythm mattered more than the exact items in the tableau, and it was the right call. Similarly, when the Wachowskis and Tykwer judged that in a translation (into film) of Cloud Atlas Zachry and Meronym’s future needs more certitude, then I trusted them to make the right call. They want to avoid melodrama and pap and cliché as much as I do, but a film’s payoff works differently to a novel’s payoff, and the unwritten contract between author and reader differs somewhat to the unwritten contract between filmmaker and viewer. Adaptations gloss over these differences at their peril.

  There is one brief scene where the directors continue a character’s story arc further than I imagined, in the case of Cavendish. This extension feels so right that I’ve incorporated it into the book I’m working on, making it “canonical” so to speak. Here’s hoping the Wachowskis won’t object.…

  You spent many years living in Japan. Were there Japanese writers you particularly admire you discovered while there?

  Haruki Murakami, probably the most famous living Japanese person, is hardly a “discovery,” but it was a pleasure to read him in his natural habitat. Shusaku Endo was perhaps the closest thing to a “national conscience” writer (in the Amos Oz mold, say) to emerge in Japan. His historical novel Silence is wonderful. I have a soft spot for Junichiro Tanizaki, too. His earlier, Poe-drenched work is good fun, but his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters, serves—Austen-like—as a sort of Lonely Planet guide to the matrix of social obligations which people in Japan still navigate. For a crash course in ultranationalism and the pathology of obsession, Yukio Mishima is the man, even if his humorlessness can wear you down. (The end of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is surely one of the best final scenes in the history of the novel.) To mention the war, Akira Yoshimura’s One Man’s Justice and Saiichi Maruya’s Grass for My Pillow both examine Japan’s bruised relationship with its recent history. Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife is an excellent historical novel on the status of women in Japan.

  What was it like teaching English while you were there? Did you enjoy it?

  Yes, I liked teaching very much, and I have many good memories. My students taught me more about Japan than its authors, really. By the end of my eight years there, however, I’d published two novels, had begun work on Cloud Atlas, and had come to see my future in fiction. I remember writing very short stories as comprehension exercises for my college students. I never kept any copies, and now I sometimes wonder if they were any good.

  In 2003, you were selected by Granta as one of the best young British novelists, alongside Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, among others. If you had to name the best young British novelists of today, who would be on your list?

  How middle-aged does this question make me feel?! It’s tricky to answer, because I’m not very plugged in to the current scene here in the west of Ireland, and I tend to read the dead more than I do the living. But since you insist, three possible candidates for the Granta UK class of 2013 are Ned Beauman, Joe Dunthorne, and Simon Lelic. Lelic’s three novels are breakneck, intelligent “social thrillers” that even invade my dream-life.

  You’ve mentioned reading Ursula Le Guin and Susan Cooper as a child. What drew you to fantasy, and do you still read it?

  Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you’re ten, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. I don’t mean that kids can’t distinguish fantasy from reality—the playground bully will clarify the matter gratis—but fantasy offers a logic to which kids are receptive, and escapism for which kids are hungry. As an adult, I read less fantasy (aside from bedtime-story duties), but perhaps nomenclature plays a role here, too: both fantasy and SF have made inroads into literary fiction and influence even those novels whose imprint logo is reassuringly conservative. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle isn’t regarded as a fantasy novel, but the plot is propelled by occult magic. Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly Never Let Me Go is old-money dystopian SF, as is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Philip K. Dick would recognize both Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Philip Roth’s Plot Against America as alternate-history SF in the grandest, proudest tradition. We imbibe more SF and fantasy than we notice. On my last visit to New York, by the by, I had a dinner with a group of literary writers, and the whole main course was spent in earnest and learned discussion of A Game of Thrones.

  Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?

  Edmund from the Narnia books is an interesting one. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he commits an act of exquisite treachery by refusing to corroborate Lucy’s experiences in Narnia, before selling his siblings for a box of crack-laced Turkish delight. Way to go, Ed. Yet by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund has evolved the strength of character to tell Eustace calmly, “You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.” Stumbling heroes linger longer.

  Have you discovered any good new books for young people through your own two children?

  Lots, yes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we’re now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best-known among a good number of equals. Michael Morpurgo is a great evoker of place and emotion, and a cool stylist. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and The Graveya
rd Book are both gorgeous pieces of work which will outlive most of us, I expect.

  You have written that you see your stammering as “an informant about language.” In what ways has it informed your approach to reading, and to writing?

  Reading, maybe not a lot, other than to nudge me toward books and away from people, which maybe is a lot, after all. As a future writer, however, my stammer was an effective if merciless boot-camp instructor. It (or “He” as I imagined it) trained me to amass a vocabulary flexible and muscular enough to avoid words beginning with stammer-consonants, and do so on the hoof, before the other person caught on. My stammer also taught me about register—it was no good substituting “autodidact” for “I taught myself” because in a bog-standard state school in 1980s Britain using a word like “autodidact” got you convicted of talking posh, an offense punishable by being hung from iron railings by your underpants. What I didn’t know at the time was how linguistic register helps a novelist flesh out character and lends authenticity to dialogue or narrated thought. So while I wouldn’t say that stammering drove me to become a writer—this impulse comes from elsewhere—it did influence the type of writer I have become. What feels like a curse when you’re younger can prove to be a long-term ally.

  If you could match three writers, dead or alive, with three topics of your choice, who would you have write about what?

  I’ve puzzled for days over this, but drawn a blank. In order to concoct a pleasing combo—Mark Twain on the Tea Party, for example—you must already imagine what the author would write—an all-you-can-eat of gourmet ridicule—so there’s no element of surprise. There’s also a “changing the eye of the beholder” problem: sending an age-of-sail novelist into space, for example, would involve so much technical bringing-up-to-speed that I’m not sure whether Conrad, say, would still be writing like Conrad by the time he was climbing into his spacesuit. My only other idea is more vengeful than illuminating: to gather up a party of the most vociferous climate change deniers and send them one hundred years into the future so they have to share the fates of their own great-grandchildren. But even then, I suspect, they would find reasons why it was someone else’s fault.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

  Chekhov. I don’t want to know anything in particular—I’d just like to carve up a pheasant with him, served with new potatoes and green beans from the garden. Then we could polish off some dodgy Crimean wine and play a few rounds of Anglo-Russian Scrabble and lose track of time and the score. If Isaac Bashevis Singer could be there, too, I think they’d get on well. And if Dorothy Parker could drop by at some point, and maybe Katherine Mansfield, and Sylvia Townsend-Warner … And suddenly it’s a party.

  And if you were forced to name your one favorite author?

  I’d have to say, “I’m sorry, but books just don’t work like that, and neither does music, Amen,” and take the consequences.

  David Mitchell is the author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten.

  * * *

  What the President Should Read (Continued)

  It seems to me that Barack Obama is sufficiently well read. The president might consider E. M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy or even Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which would have helped him surround himself with people who don’t think they know everything about everything: being poor, being wealthy, getting sick, getting old, fighting a war. If it matters to anybody, I voted for Mr. Obama.

  —James Patterson

  Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius—Stoicism and the limitations of power. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”

  —Sting

  Physics for Future Presidents, by Richard A. Muller (2009) is, of course, already conceived for this purpose. The president’s science adviser has traditionally been a physicist. Parting the layered curtains of science reveals that there’s no understanding of biology without chemistry, and there is no understanding of chemistry without physics. Informed people in government have known this from the beginning. And all of engineering derives from the laws of physics themselves. So the physics literacy of a president is a good thing, especially since innovations in science and technology will drive the engines of twenty-first-century economies. Failure to understand or invest wisely here will doom a nation to economic irrelevance.

  —Neil deGrasse Tyson

  The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, by Larry Siems, head of PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Program. But since the president probably already knows what’s in it, I’d suggest he read The Complete Stories of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov helps you imagine what it’s like to be someone else, a useful skill for a political leader.

  —Francine Prose

  End This Depression Now, by Paul Krugman.

  —Dan Savage

  Definitely Don’t Bump the Glump!, by Shel Silverstein. It’s about how a great many creatures you encounter will try to eat you, even if you start out acting all bipartisan.

  —Gary Shteyngart

  Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s Moby-Dick. This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry. And to balance this all-male adventure, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  I would want him to read Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, Susan Sheehan’s great nonfiction book about a young schizophrenic woman. It really conveys the grinding wheel of mental illness.

  —David Sedaris

  It would be my late father, Kenneth Lamott’s, nonfiction work, Anti-California: Report from Our First Parafascist State, on the years when Ronald Reagan was governor. I love the image of Barack Obama holding and reading my father’s amazing book. It would mean my father was alive again—because books are living organisms, outside of the time-space continuum.

  —Anne Lamott

  * * *

  John Grisham

  What book is on your night stand now?

  There are a dozen. I’m halfway through All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. I haven’t read it since college.

  When and where do you like to read?

  I usually read at night, in the bed, before falling asleep. In the summertime, I love to read on the porch in a rocker under a ceiling fan.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  The word “great” gets tossed around too easily. The last book that kept me completely engrossed while delivering a powerful story was Life After Death, by Damien Echols. He spent eighteen years on death row in Arkansas for crimes he didn’t commit, and was released last year. Though he’s innocent, the state refuses to exonerate him.

  Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre: Any guilty pleasures? Do you like to read other legal thrillers?

  I read much more nonfiction, usually while researching the next novel. Books and studies on unlawful convictions, unfair trials, overcrowded prisons, prosecutorial misconduct, etc. I read most of the other legal thrillers on the bestseller lists to keep up with the competition.

  Who are your favorites among the competition?

  When Presumed Innocent was published in 1987, I was struggling to finish my first novel. Scott Turow re-energized the legal suspense genre with that book, and it inspired me to keep plugging along. Scott is still the best lawyer-novelist.

  What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

  The Grapes of Wr
ath, by John Steinbeck. I read it when I was a senior in high school and was struck by its clarity and power. I’m not sure if it inspired me to write, but I do recall thinking, “I wish I could write as clearly as John Steinbeck.”

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

  Fifty Shades of Grey. Why should he miss all the fun? Plus, it might loosen him up a bit.

  What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes?

  My wife gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I am having great fun with it. I’m not sure I am reading more, but I am certainly ordering more. But there is always a stack of hardbacks on the night stand waiting to be read. I’ll start three a week and try to finish one. I’m too lazy to take notes.

  Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  I love humor and for this reason I’ve always enjoyed Mark Twain. He was without a doubt the funniest writer who ever picked up a pen. I’m not sure I ever cried while reading a book.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

  As a small child I loved Dr. Seuss. Later, the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton. Then I discovered Mark Twain with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Tom Sawyer is still my all-time favorite literary hero.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  I tried a couple of times to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but never finished it.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?