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eloquently, doesn't he? It takes us seamlessly to Meet The Author. | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
This week on Meet The Author Jim Naughtie talks to Rose Tremain | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
In the first sentence of Rose Tremain's novel, | :00:00. | :00:07. | |
The Gustav Sonata, we are told that Gustav loves his mother | :00:08. | :00:10. | |
He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerve | :00:11. | :00:16. | |
He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerver | :00:17. | :00:19. | |
His intense friendship with Anton, his own age, Jewish, | :00:20. | :00:23. | |
a brilliant music, is fulfilling and seems to offer his escape | :00:24. | :00:26. | |
and hope, but as the sonata enters its last movement, | :00:27. | :00:32. | |
when they are 60, we realise for Gustav, material success in life | :00:33. | :00:34. | |
can't necessarily bring him the contentment that he and Anton | :00:35. | :00:37. | |
have always looked for, but will always find a | :00:38. | :00:39. | |
This is a story about an intense relationship, which develops | :00:40. | :01:02. | |
into love, really, between Gustav and his friend Anton. | :01:03. | :01:04. | |
So it's a fantastically sad story, isn't it? | :01:05. | :01:16. | |
It is, it's a story built on hope, like so much of our lives are. | :01:17. | :01:20. | |
There is this old saying that happiness is impossible | :01:21. | :01:27. | |
because if you're living in the moment and you're | :01:28. | :01:33. | |
happy you are afraid it is going to disappear. | :01:34. | :01:35. | |
If it is in the past you can only recollect it, | :01:36. | :01:38. | |
and if it is in the future it might not happen. | :01:39. | :01:41. | |
So the story looks a that, and the condition of happiness | :01:42. | :01:43. | |
Getting through, and doing as much as you possibly can, | :01:44. | :01:54. | |
Despite a kind of unhappy childhood, despite a lot of things | :01:55. | :02:01. | |
working against him, this is a boy who becomes | :02:02. | :02:04. | |
a man in the story, who perseveres, he never gives up, | :02:05. | :02:06. | |
Well, we know him when he is a young boy, and we know him at the end | :02:07. | :02:15. | |
He never gives up, but he never reaches happiness, | :02:16. | :02:19. | |
what we would think of as happiness, does he? | :02:20. | :02:24. | |
Well, without doing a spoiler, JIm, there | :02:25. | :02:26. | |
There is a little lift, and it is up to the readers | :02:27. | :02:35. | |
to interpret to what extent this lift takes him right out | :02:36. | :02:37. | |
of his sort of former state into a different state. | :02:38. | :02:41. | |
The question for you is do you know whether it does or not? | :02:42. | :02:44. | |
I believe it does, when I write a novel, I never know - | :02:45. | :02:52. | |
in fact I deliberately don't know until somewhere quite near the end | :02:53. | :02:55. | |
exactly what ending this story has earned, because stories, | :02:56. | :02:58. | |
endings have to be earned, they can't be imposed. | :02:59. | :03:02. | |
That is interesting, because a lot of writers would say | :03:03. | :03:05. | |
"What happens in between, I don't know, but I know | :03:06. | :03:08. | |
the beginning, and I know the end", so you are unusual in that respect? | :03:09. | :03:15. | |
Yes, I'm not being prescriptive about it, I am not saying this | :03:16. | :03:17. | |
I am saying the process of writing for me is a discovery process. | :03:18. | :03:26. | |
I have to discover little by little as I go along, | :03:27. | :03:28. | |
and then find my route to the ending, which feels truthful. | :03:29. | :03:31. | |
It's true to say I toyed with one rather cataclysmic alternative | :03:32. | :03:34. | |
ending, and then I felt that actually, it was melodramatic, | :03:35. | :03:37. | |
it was not where I was leading these people. | :03:38. | :03:41. | |
Or where they - well, that is a huge question in writing, | :03:42. | :03:47. | |
This old thing that people say about characters taking over, | :03:48. | :03:53. | |
it isn't quite they take over, in my view, it is that once | :03:54. | :03:59. | |
you are a third of the way down the book, shall we say, | :04:00. | :04:04. | |
you understand that those characters, about who you knew very | :04:05. | :04:07. | |
little at the beginning, have their own kind of integrity. | :04:08. | :04:11. | |
The construction of the book, not surprisingly given its title, | :04:12. | :04:14. | |
which is a clue to people, that The Gustav Sonata | :04:15. | :04:17. | |
is in the form of three movements, really. | :04:18. | :04:20. | |
But there is a sense in this Swiss setting of a kind of, | :04:21. | :04:28. | |
not exactly timelessness, but a slow pace, a gradual feeling, | :04:29. | :04:33. | |
and after all we cover nearly 60 years in the course of the book, | :04:34. | :04:37. | |
It clearly interests you, this sort of, the gentleness with | :04:38. | :04:46. | |
What I risked to do in this book, there are a lot of elipses of time, | :04:47. | :04:56. | |
it is not continuuous, even in the first section which more | :04:57. | :05:01. | |
or less narrates the childhood, the continuous childhood of Gustav. | :05:02. | :05:05. | |
There are elipses of time, because I believe that | :05:06. | :05:10. | |
readers are really clever, they like to work with the book, | :05:11. | :05:13. | |
they don't like to be told everything, they are perfectly | :05:14. | :05:18. | |
If they see there is a year that has passed where you haven't been told | :05:19. | :05:24. | |
anything about it, they are perfectly capable of filling that | :05:25. | :05:26. | |
It also helps to engage them, if they have | :05:27. | :05:30. | |
What I'm establishing in the first section, | :05:31. | :05:34. | |
what we could call in musical terms the exposition, is the circumstances | :05:35. | :05:37. | |
in which this little boy grows up, and in particular, the unkindnesses | :05:38. | :05:40. | |
I feel that by the end of that section, what the reader is saying | :05:41. | :05:46. | |
is why is this person not kind to her son? | :05:47. | :05:48. | |
At that point I felt I had to go back to this very difficult time, | :05:49. | :05:57. | |
that Switzerland had before and during the war, | :05:58. | :06:00. | |
which people assume, I think, or we - I had assumed, | :06:01. | :06:04. | |
because Switzerland managed to retain their neutrality, | :06:05. | :06:09. | |
that they were kind of, there was a kind of serenity | :06:10. | :06:12. | |
When of course it was desperate for them. | :06:13. | :06:17. | |
They didn't know at any minute the Germans might not invade them. | :06:18. | :06:22. | |
So it needed to go back and look at the very difficult time | :06:23. | :06:25. | |
And the agony for Anton's family a Jewish family, | :06:26. | :06:28. | |
in this period of European history is, of course, intense. | :06:29. | :06:30. | |
Yes, and that was the sort of second element that came into the story, | :06:31. | :06:34. | |
It took, it is interesting to relate, again, in terms of things | :06:35. | :06:39. | |
that happen in novels, that you hadn't perfectly foreseen, | :06:40. | :06:44. | |
the question of Anton's family and the Jewish question. | :06:45. | :06:49. | |
It had a much greater centralty in the book than I first | :06:50. | :06:52. | |
Yeah, it's a book that really looked at moral rightness. | :06:53. | :07:00. | |
I mean, the sacrifice that Gustav's father makes in order to save Jewish | :07:01. | :07:04. | |
It's actually, he is actually punished. | :07:05. | :07:10. | |
There's a lack of justice in the story in that | :07:11. | :07:14. | |
Yes, there is, and that is, it seems to me, again we are back | :07:15. | :07:20. | |
to this old question of truth, it seems to me to be real that this | :07:21. | :07:23. | |
He might have got away with it and been feted | :07:24. | :07:27. | |
You do acts of extraordinary sort of magnanimity and moral rightness, | :07:28. | :07:35. | |
You talk about the way that the story developed | :07:36. | :07:46. | |
in your hands, the way the characters, if not | :07:47. | :07:50. | |
exactly leading you on, at least demanded certain things, | :07:51. | :07:52. | |
That throws light on, not just your method | :07:53. | :07:56. | |
but on the state of mind that you are in when you writing a books, | :07:57. | :07:59. | |
it must involve not just a lot of discipline, | :08:00. | :08:02. | |
I think it completely involves that, and I think... | :08:03. | :08:13. | |
I used to say when I was teaching creative writing, I used to say | :08:14. | :08:16. | |
to students in a bossy way, I used to say, if you can't be | :08:17. | :08:20. | |
alone, if you can't bear being alone, if you can't bear | :08:21. | :08:22. | |
Because the only way that books get written is you shut | :08:23. | :08:26. | |
yourself in your room and you're there for hours. | :08:27. | :08:28. | |
So, I have never found the solitude of writing difficult. | :08:29. | :08:34. | |
In fact, as I get older, it's more and what I crave. | :08:35. | :08:39. |