Rereading William Faulkner

In a 1956 PARIS REVIEW interview, interviewer Jean Stein asked William Faulkner about the difficulty some readers experienced trying to read his work. Here is the excerpt — priceless!

INTERVIEWER: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER: Read it four times.

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Find Faulkner’s PARIS REVIEW interview here.

PHOTO: Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and friend Joy (Laura Ramsey) ponder William Faulkner‘s novel THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1929) in “The Jet Set” (Mad Men, Season 2, Episode 11).

Happy Birthday, Tom Robbins

Today is Tom Robbins 77th birthday! Hard to believe that the wild and wacky author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues has reached septuagenarian status. For me, reading Robbins’ 1971 novel Another Roadside Attraction was a revelation about what a novel could do and what it could be. Thank you, Tom, for opening up our minds and inspiring us with your imagination. 

“Often the things that pop out of my typewriter regale me, especially when I am trying to say something else and in a different way only to have a kind of metamorphosis take place during the act of typing and — ­whammo! — a concept I hadn’t counted on is strutting its vaudeville on the page.”  TOM ROBBINS, ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION

Photo: Tom Robbins at home in LaConner, Washington, by Alan Berner, The Seattle Times, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Value of Rereading, Quote by William Faulkner

In a 1956 PARIS REVIEW interview, interviewer Jean Stein asked William Faulkner about the difficulty some readers experienced trying to read his work. Here is the excerpt — priceless!

INTERVIEWER

Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER

Read it four times.

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Find Faulkner’s PARIS REVIEW interview here.

PHOTO: Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and friend Joy (Laura Ramsey) ponder William Faulkner‘s novel THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1929) in “The Jet Set” (Mad Men, Season 2, Episode 11).

Writing a Novel Is Like Having a Dream, Quote by Haruki Murakami

“For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.” HARUKI MURAKAMI, author of THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

FROM THE AMAZON.COM LISTING FOR THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE: Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami’s earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

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Editor’s Note: At 607 pages,  a long read, but never boring — and one of my all-time favorite novels.

Illustration: Portrait of Haruki Murakami by Bradley Wind

Happy Birthday, Haruki Murakami

January 12 marks the 64th birthday of Haruki Murakami, a novelist whose work I enjoy because it’s original, funny, surreal, and surprising.

Who else could write a detective story featuring an elderly (and rather simpleminded) private investigator that people pay a per diem to locate their lost cats? How does the detective get his clues? By interviewing cats! (That’s his special skill.)

Read an excerpt from the brilliant, charming, funny “Heigh Ho” at The Paris Review here.

To give you a feel for the story, here’s a passage from “Heigh Ho” by Haruki Murakami:

Being able to converse with cats was Nakata’s little secret. Only he and the cats knew about it. People would think he was crazy if he mentioned it, so he never did. Everybody knew he wasn’t very bright, but being dumb and being crazy were different matters altogether.

It wasn’t so unusual, after all, to see old folks talking to animals as if they were people. But if anyone did happen to comment on his abilities with cats and say something like, “Mr. Nakata, how are you able to know cats’ habits so well?” he’d just smile and let it pass. 

“Heigh Ho” by Haruki Murakami is also found in his novel Kafka on the Shore, available at Amazon.com.

Wishing you many more happy birthdays, Mr. Murakami! 

Harry Potter Epiphany, Quotes by J.K. Rowling

 

“There’s nothing better when something comes and hits you and you think ‘YES’!”  J.K. ROWLING

In 1990, while looking out the window during a train ride, J.K. Rowling got the idea for the entire series of Harry Potter books. Now that’s an epiphany! Here’s now Rowling describes the experience:

I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, and the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn’t have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write Philosopher’s Stone that very evening…”

Writing Non-Advice by Kurt Vonnegut

I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become.” KURT VONNEGUT, Welcome to the Monkey House

ILLUSTRATION: Kurt Vonnegut self-portrait

The Bostonians, Novel by Henry James

“As all the world knows, the opportunities in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had long been Miss Chancellor’s practice to cultivate the best.”

HENRY JAMES, The Bostonians