Michael Schmidt and Robert McCrum
Michael Schmidt and Robert McCrum
The Novel: A Biography
The Commonwealth in Fiction: Tendai Huchu, Chiew-Siah Tei, Kei Miller
Mark Danielewski and Ben Marcus: What The Novel Did Next
Lesley McDowell
Suitably perhaps, the novel and novelists dominated the last day of Aye Write, beginning with a stimulating conversation between Robert McCrum, former literary editor of The Observer and compiler of the 100 Greatest English language novels, and academic and author of The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt, who amiably disagreed on whether the best novels come from a dark place in a writer's soul. Prison is good for a writer, McCrum observed, who also felt that "the job of the novelist is to entertain". Schmidt countered that "you have the right to expect something of the reader", and this relationship between writers and readers was also a focus for the three Commonwealth writers, brought under an umbrella, Kei Miller drily said, "that is really just lumping all brown people together.".
What being a "Commonwealth writer" really meant was, it seems, very little, and when the question of readership came up, Miller said that for his latest collection of essays about Kingston, he had in mind a Caribbean readership, not a British one, which made him write better. Zimbabwean author Tendai Huchu questioned the idea of the reader at all: "I grew up liking nineteenth-century Russian novelists, but I don't think they had a reader like me in mind."
Both Ben Marcus and Mark Danielewski are known for the difficulty of their work, but Danielewski perhaps surprisingly cited ghost stories and mysteries as motivating forces. What is too familiar to us in language becomes invisible, a ghost; he wanted "to find the rooms where the spirits you don't know, live".
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