:00:08. > :00:12.we do with him? Burn him? Tonight on Review, crisis, what
:00:12. > :00:19.crisis? The world of literature is trading high in a book review show
:00:19. > :00:26.special. Master of horror, Stephne King,
:00:26. > :00:31.turns back the clock to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, in 11/22/63.
:00:31. > :00:41.you afraid of ghosts, how can you be when the crime hasn't happened
:00:41. > :00:42.
:00:42. > :00:48.yet. Polymath academic in a conspiracy against the Jews in The
:00:48. > :00:55.skal Prague Cemetery. Blue Nights from Joan Didion. I didn't think
:00:55. > :00:57.people would see it as a love story. From literary exile to national
:00:57. > :01:00.hero, Apricot Jam And Other Stories published three years after the
:01:00. > :01:03.death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is something absolutely new.
:01:03. > :01:13.It is the language Russians have been speaking for thousands of
:01:13. > :01:20.years but none of our writers have used it. And a selection from the
:01:20. > :01:25.celebrity book shelf. Joining me here in Glasgow to praise or pan
:01:25. > :01:33.the year's literary offerings, are four critic whose literary credits
:01:34. > :01:36.are no way of need of a bailout, Greer grorgror, Susan Hitch and
:01:37. > :01:42.legendary English professor and beekeeper, John Carey. As ever you
:01:42. > :01:46.can make your own comments, or heart felt grittisms on Twitter.
:01:46. > :01:50.Our team are sharpening their tongues to respond as we speak.
:01:50. > :01:55.Stephne King is synonymous with horror fiction, the man who created
:01:55. > :02:00.Carrie and The Shining, and also Stand By Me and the Shawshank
:02:00. > :02:04.Redemption, in his new novel he looks to the past for inspiration
:02:04. > :02:09.and one of the defining moments of his teenage years. On the 22nd
:02:09. > :02:13.November, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F
:02:14. > :02:18.Kennedy, was barely a thousand days in office when he was assassinated
:02:18. > :02:23.by the by now legendary lone gunman. Stephne King was a teenager when
:02:23. > :02:27.Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shot. In 11/22/63, the supremo of the
:02:27. > :02:33.horror genre asks what would happen if we could change the critical
:02:33. > :02:40.moment in history. I was sitting on a bench looking at the Syntagma
:02:40. > :02:45.Sqare brick cube of the Texas book deposry. Come on in, the sixth
:02:45. > :02:50.floor whispered, take a look round, and take a look at the sixth floor.
:02:50. > :02:57.There is a museum here, and people come from all over, and people weep
:02:57. > :03:04.for the man who done what he done, but this is the 60s and Jake Epping
:03:04. > :03:08.doesn't exist, only George Ambush exists, a man of his time, so to
:03:08. > :03:13.speak. To come on up, are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be
:03:13. > :03:18.when the crime hasn't happened yet. Jake Epping is a 30-something
:03:18. > :03:24.English teacher from Maine. His friend who runs a local diner has a
:03:24. > :03:29.secret. A hidden store room by transports Jake back to 1958. Al
:03:29. > :03:35.enlists Jake on a mission to prevent the assassination of JFK.
:03:35. > :03:42.Jake's new life as George, plunders him into a world with iconography
:03:42. > :03:46.of the period. A series of entanglements ensues, romantic and
:03:46. > :03:50.more surprisingly with Oswald him we have. I went to the pantry and
:03:50. > :03:54.made small shuffling steps forward, pretend you are trying to find the
:03:54. > :03:59.stop of a staircase with your eyes shut. Close your eyes, it is easier
:03:59. > :04:05.that way. I did, two steps down I heard the pressure equalising pop
:04:05. > :04:12.deep in my ears. Warmth hit my skin, sunlight shone through my closed
:04:12. > :04:16.eye lits, I heart the weaving flats. It was September 1958, two minutes
:04:16. > :04:20.before noon. So how successful has King been in his reimagining of
:04:21. > :04:27.mid-20th century America, and has the king of horror brought his
:04:27. > :04:30.skills to bear on counter factual history.
:04:30. > :04:35.Stephne King says he has been trying to write the book for 25
:04:35. > :04:37.years, but completing it has he set himself up as a completely
:04:37. > :04:43.different writer? I don't know, he has always written a lot of
:04:43. > :04:49.different types of books. I read this book with such joy, he's a
:04:49. > :04:53.readers' writer but also a writers' writer, the sentence structure and
:04:53. > :04:58.the rhythm, and dancing talk as well. What I was very interested in
:04:58. > :05:02.with the "what if" story, what if Jake had been black or a woman,
:05:02. > :05:06.that kind of twist to the story. I think at the end of the bok he does
:05:06. > :05:11.acknowledge sometimes that he's a lot kinder to that period. I think
:05:11. > :05:17.he came to it with a lot more nostalgia. There was a lot more of
:05:17. > :05:20.his teenage baggage, it was a conventional hero? It was a
:05:20. > :05:25.conventional hero, at the end he acknowledges, just in terms of
:05:25. > :05:31.Dallas, he recalls an incident when LBJ's wife went, and she was spat
:05:31. > :05:36.on by middle-class house wives, you don't get that sense of real
:05:36. > :05:40.nastiness in America. What did you make of it I agree, he's an amazing
:05:40. > :05:45.writer. I wish he could get a grown-up story to tell. The time
:05:45. > :05:49.travel thing is irritating, for me. Because we know what happened. We
:05:49. > :05:54.know how the story will have to end. But it is a kind of general thing
:05:54. > :05:58.of fiction, in a sense, Robert Harris did it in a different way
:05:58. > :06:02.with FatherLand, this working out of what if, and the thought process
:06:02. > :06:08.and how things could be different? If we are really examining the
:06:08. > :06:11.structure of the plot, it has to rely on a tremenduously tenuous
:06:11. > :06:14.story about the bets he's having on the things he knows, which he
:06:14. > :06:17.strangely knows, because they have already happened. Except you would
:06:17. > :06:21.have to have an extraordinary recall to recall they had happened
:06:21. > :06:28.at all. You go through all of that, you have the elaborate setting up
:06:28. > :06:33.of why it is, and it doesn't work, and da-da-da. What gets me and
:06:33. > :06:39.annoys me is this man could write n the most wonderful story about the
:06:39. > :06:44.50s. I was there, I was a teenager a bit older than he at that time,
:06:44. > :06:48.and the taste of things, the way they are, the way the wrappers are
:06:48. > :06:53.on things, the way the music sounds, the way the streets are laid out,
:06:53. > :06:56.the way the houses are organised, it is all so vivid, and he does it
:06:57. > :07:04.in such a compressed way. His sentences are packed with
:07:04. > :07:14.information, but you hardly notice. What about that, evokation, is it
:07:14. > :07:18.
:07:18. > :07:21.fetishising it slightly? We can't talk about the content too much
:07:21. > :07:26.because there is a fantastic ending. He goes into the rabbit hole, and
:07:26. > :07:34.what happens is you meet a man with a card, sometimes it is a yellow
:07:34. > :07:38.card, sometimes green, this man is sort of a guardian of time. One of
:07:38. > :07:43.them kills himself. The last time George goes through the man talks
:07:43. > :07:46.to him about who they are. He says we are not supernatural, we are not
:07:46. > :07:51.aliens, we are human beings, and we have to keep these streams of
:07:51. > :07:55.realities in our minds. That is crazy. What kind of human beings
:07:56. > :08:00.could they be to control reality. Is that craziness necessary, he did
:08:00. > :08:06.a lot of crazy things in this book? I think the book is struggling
:08:06. > :08:08.between two different kinds of explanation. There is the what if
:08:08. > :08:13.strictly science fiction explanation, about going back into
:08:13. > :08:18.the past. But there is also these time guardians part of, in some
:08:18. > :08:23.ways, with The King's Speech king book, a more familiar - with a
:08:23. > :08:28.Stephne King book, a more familiar horror genre, nasty things start
:08:28. > :08:32.happening if you mess with the past. That works less successfully,
:08:32. > :08:35.because this past is so substantial and so well imagined, that
:08:35. > :08:39.interrupting it with strange bits of horror seems irrelevant. Do you
:08:39. > :08:43.think that is because Stephne King has one foot in his horror genre,
:08:43. > :08:48.thinking he has this hugely loyal fan base, can I get really out of
:08:48. > :08:52.that? Or it is habit of mind. A habit of mind that is almost blown
:08:52. > :08:58.aside by this wonderful story telling and the reality of his 50s.
:08:58. > :09:03.He should have let it be blown and make it into the science fiction
:09:03. > :09:05.story. There was the whole measure of story before the main eye
:09:05. > :09:10.Adventurers of the Year. Did you think there was - event, there was
:09:10. > :09:13.several pages and for me it was a bit like wading through treacle?
:09:13. > :09:17.isness radio. One of the points about time travel is when you go
:09:17. > :09:20.back into the past everything you changed is cancelled, it is always
:09:20. > :09:27.the beginning. That is very important. And you have to have
:09:27. > :09:31.that early stuff to get that into your mind. It is shattering, there
:09:31. > :09:36.is a woman in the wheelchair, they will save her to be in the wheel
:09:36. > :09:40.chai, she is in out, in out, multiple universes. And there must
:09:40. > :09:43.be. There are multiple parallel universes. I felt I was getting
:09:43. > :09:46.three stories for the price of one here. You have the first story
:09:46. > :09:51.about the murder in family, the other story which is a love story,
:09:51. > :09:55.and then you have the JFK story. And I loved it, because he's a
:09:55. > :10:04.master story-teller. I'm not sure I liked the love story. I gagged a
:10:04. > :10:14.bit on the love story. Sadie is beautiful. From one conspiracy
:10:14. > :10:22.theory to no, unbelievably it is over 25 years since Roberto Echo
:10:22. > :10:28.burst on to the scene with The Name Of The Rose, he bursts on to the
:10:29. > :10:36.scene again with The Prague Cemetery. Philosopher and all-round
:10:36. > :10:43.Greg carous multitasker, he is prolific, he's known for The Name
:10:43. > :10:47.Of The Rose, also a successful film starring Sean Connery and a young
:10:47. > :10:50.Christian Slater. His plam buoyant style and conspiracy theories
:10:50. > :10:54.continues with his - flamboyant style and conspiracy theories
:10:54. > :10:58.continues with The Prague Cemetery. It follows a secret agent, versed
:10:58. > :11:08.in forgery and bomb making, but who is also capable of even darker
:11:08. > :11:09.
:11:09. > :11:16.deeds. It transpires he's behind some of the many conspiracy
:11:16. > :11:21.theories in 19th century history. Including offering the protocol of
:11:21. > :11:29.the members of Zion and putting them into a Jewish cemetery.
:11:29. > :11:33.interested in a reader that tries to understand not the game of the
:11:33. > :11:41.mother - murder, but the game of the author, the way in which the
:11:42. > :11:49.author pulls him or her, the reader to enter the story follow a certain
:11:49. > :11:55.path. In a way, the real plot and crime, is the one organised by the
:11:55. > :12:00.author. To trap, to frame the reader. The dark tone of the main
:12:00. > :12:03.character is set from the start of the book, mainting him as an
:12:04. > :12:08.unpleasant villain, who neither respects nor trusts anyone. When I
:12:08. > :12:16.was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well
:12:16. > :12:24.as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a
:12:24. > :12:29.levintine, ungrateful as a Maltese, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous,
:12:29. > :12:38.and as Scotland rouse as anyone, is adult trous through uncontrollable
:12:38. > :12:47.lust, the result of an erect tile with a monstrous distortion between
:12:47. > :12:52.the dwarf build and that. With such subject matter comparisons have
:12:52. > :13:00.been made to Dan Browne, it has been described as the thinking
:13:00. > :13:03.person's Da Vinci Code, but is The Prague Cemetery a worthy page-
:13:04. > :13:10.Turner or just murder. It is all about the author Greer
:13:10. > :13:16.gror Greer you are a stick letter for his - Germaine Greer, you are a
:13:16. > :13:20.strikeler for historical - stickler for historical accuracy. Did it
:13:20. > :13:24.arrest you? It puzzled me, it was meant to. That is kind of
:13:24. > :13:32.irritating. There is one type face for the narrator, one type face for
:13:32. > :13:37.the main character, who is theville lane of the piece, and his at -
:13:37. > :13:43.villain, of the piece, and his alter ego, sometimes his alter ego
:13:43. > :13:50.and sometimes something else. It is all trickry on the reader. It is
:13:50. > :13:54.irritating because he chooses 1897, there was someone called that, and
:13:54. > :13:59.the whole Paris he built full of Jews who occupied the highest
:13:59. > :14:09.positions in society, and instead her grubbing around with this block,
:14:09. > :14:09.
:14:09. > :14:13.who lives in a junk shop and fakes documents. Part of it his own
:14:13. > :14:16.fascination with documents. The fact that he's the scholar he is.
:14:16. > :14:21.By faking documents you don't actually change anything. The whole
:14:21. > :14:31.thing about the plotting and the conspiracy and the Stephne King
:14:31. > :14:33.
:14:33. > :14:39.which you loved, and then you have the Umberto Eco, - Stephen King
:14:39. > :14:44.which you loved, and then you have Umberto Eco with the documents?
:14:44. > :14:48.you go on Wikipedia, it says over the Middle East many despots
:14:48. > :14:52.believe them, as did Hitler do, still believe them to be true, and
:14:52. > :14:55.it is taught. You need a book simply exposing, very clearly, how
:14:56. > :15:02.the documents were forged. Why doesn't he do that. Instead of
:15:02. > :15:06.introducing all this fake history. There isn't a character in the book.
:15:06. > :15:10.Can the narrative spine carry the weight of all this information and
:15:10. > :15:16.history and the protocols and so forth? No, because it is a mess to
:15:16. > :15:20.me. I felt like this main character was like somebody in the corner of
:15:20. > :15:23.a pub, spouting a story going, and another thing, and another thing,
:15:23. > :15:28.and people were like stay away from this character, complete low. I got
:15:28. > :15:32.lost. This has such an exciting premise, this is a scam story, this
:15:32. > :15:36.should be about conartists, I don't know how he could have made this
:15:36. > :15:40.story as boring as he did. I felt as though I spent the
:15:40. > :15:45.evening in bad company. This stuff is disgusting, we had just one
:15:45. > :15:50.little paragraph of it there, he it goes on for pages and pages? What
:15:50. > :15:54.about the whole ideas of having an unpleasant central character in a
:15:54. > :15:58.book? They have to be unpleasant and interesting. This was not
:15:58. > :16:01.interesting. Umberto Eco's own wife, apparently, said when she finally
:16:01. > :16:06.read the book, no wonder you have been nasty all the couple of years
:16:06. > :16:13.when you have been writing the book. I felt I had been nasty while I was
:16:13. > :16:20.reading it. He ups the ante with it. He ups the stench of it? That is
:16:20. > :16:23.part of the con, that he can disburden himself of all of this
:16:23. > :16:28.zenophobic craziness, knowing he's press ago button out there, amongst
:16:28. > :16:34.the great unwashed, who will actually respond to it. It is a
:16:34. > :16:44.strange thing that it gives him a license to be so unpleasant. I
:16:44. > :16:44.
:16:45. > :16:49.recognise this Protestant tag nis son of perfume. He has a sinister
:16:49. > :16:56.glrb protaganist son of fare fume, he has a sinister gift. If there
:16:56. > :17:01.was a - perfume, he has a sinister gift. This is a profoundly
:17:01. > :17:06.misleading book. It is interesting that Umberto Eco
:17:06. > :17:13.compares himself, he almost says that he's the brainy Dan Browne?
:17:13. > :17:18.The pride in his own braininess, which accounts for all the post
:17:18. > :17:22.modern stuff, like the narrator is a separate person, and the narrator
:17:22. > :17:25.himself says he doesn't know who the mysterious writer is. Come on,
:17:25. > :17:30.we are not children. It is pathetic and it is trying to be clever, it
:17:30. > :17:34.seems to me. I think he forgot about the reader and a writer who
:17:34. > :17:39.forgets about a reader. He says that clearly himself, it is about
:17:39. > :17:43.the author? Then write your book and read it yourself. It is a post
:17:43. > :17:48.modern book.Yo Yo see that as post modern. It is meant to deconstruct
:17:49. > :17:53.the idea of certainty when it comes to historical fact, it is
:17:53. > :17:58.mischievous. It has its cake and eats it, you have a timeline at the
:17:58. > :18:01.end of the book in case you get lost, you are wildly lost, the book
:18:01. > :18:07.finshes and you have an appendix that explains what happens then.
:18:07. > :18:12.The only nice thing about the book is the food. It is fair to say that
:18:12. > :18:18.in recent years, life hasn't been kind to the celebrates writer,
:18:18. > :18:23.Didion de. Eight years ago she lost her - Joan Didion, eight years ago
:18:23. > :18:27.she lost her husband, the screen writer, John Gregory Dunne, she
:18:27. > :18:31.wrote about her lost in her memoir A Year Of Magical Thinking, which
:18:32. > :18:41.transferred to the stage with Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion.
:18:41. > :18:51.The tragedy went on, her daughter, was in a coma a year after her
:18:51. > :18:53.
:18:53. > :18:58.husband died, Didion revisits the death. I visited her in New York.
:18:58. > :19:08.Qintana Roo was a gift to you? thought of her as a gift. How did
:19:08. > :19:09.
:19:09. > :19:13.she come to you? She was adopted. Out of the blue I met a doctor, at
:19:13. > :19:21.someone's house, at a Christmas party. He said I understand you
:19:21. > :19:26.want a baby. I said, who doesn't. He said he had one coming the 1th
:19:26. > :19:31.of March, come see me if he would - 1st of March, come see me if you
:19:31. > :19:37.would like to talk about it. I did. So suddenly we were handed this
:19:37. > :19:43.baby. Did you think you were ready for motherhood? In theory, I
:19:43. > :19:49.thought I was ready for motherhood. Because I had not the slightest
:19:49. > :19:54.idea what was involved. I didn't even think, it didn't occur to me
:19:54. > :20:00.that it involved anything other than clothes. I thought it involved
:20:00. > :20:05.little dresses. But obviously I had no real clue. But it was the nature
:20:05. > :20:14.of your work, that you just took Qintana Roo with you everywhere?
:20:14. > :20:21.She was always with us. We simply, I can't think of any place we
:20:21. > :20:25.didn't expect to put her in the back seat and go. So she saw a lot
:20:25. > :20:29.and travelled a lot? Yeah, we were going to Vietnam at the time she
:20:29. > :20:35.was born, it didn't occur to me at first that it wasn't going to be a
:20:35. > :20:39.smart idea to take her to Vietnam. But we did. We didn't. You didn't
:20:39. > :20:42.take her but you could have? Definitely. You talked about the
:20:42. > :20:48.fact that she was worried and wanted to hear the narrative again
:20:48. > :20:52.and again, tell me what happened, the phone went and you went to get
:20:52. > :20:56.me, and what would happen if you weren't in, did that attend her
:20:56. > :21:03.throughout her life? I don't think I gave it enough thought. Because
:21:03. > :21:10.it did not, I saw no reason why she should be insecure about being
:21:10. > :21:15.loved, being wanted. So it did not cross my mind that she could still
:21:15. > :21:22.be and I think she was. But your narrative also was that you worried
:21:22. > :21:28.that she some how would be taken from you? Yes. Why? Why did you
:21:28. > :21:35.worry that? Because I, obviously I didn't think that I, I presume I
:21:35. > :21:39.worried that because I didn't think I deserved her. You never think you
:21:39. > :21:43.deserve the perfect baby to be handed to you. But she was. But she
:21:43. > :21:49.was. I think first of her sitting on the
:21:49. > :21:53.bare hardwood floors on the house in Franklin Avenue, and the wax
:21:53. > :22:01.terracotta tiles of the house in Malibu. Listening to the birds on
:22:01. > :22:07.eight track. The birds in the Mommas ska the papas, Do You Want
:22:07. > :22:14.To Dance, she would croon that she did. I still hear her crooning back
:22:14. > :22:18.to the eight track "I want to dance", the same way I still see
:22:18. > :22:28.the tatoo through her veil. Something else I still see from
:22:28. > :22:28.
:22:28. > :22:33.that wedding day, the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing
:22:33. > :22:37.Christian Laboutan shoes, with red soles, you saw the red soles when
:22:37. > :22:46.she kneeled at the alter. Did you get the sense always that she was
:22:46. > :22:51.fragile? No. I didn't. Or it didn't occur to me that she was as fragile
:22:51. > :22:57.as she was. Do you think that fragility came from genetics, when
:22:57. > :23:00.Sheehy vently found her own family? - when she eventually found her own
:23:00. > :23:06.family? There was a genetic component, but none of us have any
:23:07. > :23:11.way of knowing it. In the book you talk about depth and shall dough
:23:11. > :23:15.and changes? That is the most accurate - shallow and changes?
:23:15. > :23:21.That is the most accurate way to describe her. The particular
:23:21. > :23:26.personality she has she was always somewhere, there was light on her
:23:26. > :23:31.that you didn't expect to see, or the light changed. She was a
:23:31. > :23:39.different person. You expected her to be doing one thing and she was
:23:39. > :23:43.doing actually another. It is hard to get a handle on her? That is
:23:43. > :23:53.what I meant by it. It was very hard to get a handle on her.
:23:53. > :23:57.
:23:57. > :24:01.you feel you knew her? No. I mean I think I didn't know the totality of
:24:02. > :24:11.her. Did you feel also that you wanted to set things down for the
:24:12. > :24:16.
:24:16. > :24:26.record? Yes I did. I wanted, it was coming to my attention that I had
:24:26. > :24:30.
:24:30. > :24:36.treated her as a baby all of her life, you know, that I had been not
:24:36. > :24:44.as aware as I should have been of how sensitive and smart she was. I
:24:44. > :24:50.had thought, I wanted to, and so I wanted to say I'm sorry.
:24:50. > :24:54.You know. This book is about saying you are sorry to your daughter?
:24:54. > :25:00.But aren't you just being a little hard on yourself? I don't know
:25:00. > :25:04.anybody who has lost a child who isn't hard on themselves. If there
:25:04. > :25:08.is anything that causes you to have reason to be hard on yourself,
:25:09. > :25:18.there it is. But in the end, it was an illness that couldn't have been
:25:18. > :25:22.prevented correction it? No. could it? No. "I no longer value
:25:22. > :25:26.this kind of memento, I no longer want reminders of what was, what
:25:26. > :25:30.got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long
:25:30. > :25:35.period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I
:25:35. > :25:38.thought I did. A period during which I believe that I could keep
:25:38. > :25:45.people fully present, keep them with me by preserving their
:25:45. > :25:50.mementos, their things, their totems. This misplaced belief now
:25:50. > :25:53.fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no
:25:53. > :25:58.drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want on
:25:58. > :26:02.reflection to see. There is no closet I can open with room left
:26:02. > :26:07.for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that
:26:07. > :26:12.might otherwise be put to such use, I see instead, three old Burberry
:26:12. > :26:21.rain coats of John's, a swayed jacket given to Qintana Roo by the
:26:21. > :26:25.mother of her first boyfriend. A cape given by mother to my father
:26:25. > :26:31.not long after world war II in other closet I find in a chest of
:26:31. > :26:36.drawers a perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open a box
:26:36. > :26:41.and find fo photographs taken by my grandfather as a mining engineer in
:26:41. > :26:47.Nevada. In another box I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that
:26:47. > :26:55.my mother had salvaged from her own mother's box of mementos ".
:26:55. > :27:00.have so much around you, wold wonderful pictures of yourself,
:27:00. > :27:05.your husband and your daughter, things there. Do you look at them
:27:05. > :27:09.any more? I look at them because they are right there in wond of me,
:27:09. > :27:15.but I don't expect to - in front of me, but I don't expect to find an
:27:15. > :27:21.answer in them any more. comfort? I used to, I used to
:27:21. > :27:31.imagine that keeping those little family memories around me would
:27:31. > :27:36.continue to be a solace, but they don't actually. If you look back at
:27:36. > :27:41.your role as a wife, mother and writer? Oddly enough I think I was
:27:41. > :27:47.a better wife and mother, I used to think I was a better writer, and I
:27:47. > :27:53.used to think that I was totally focused on writing. Then I, at some
:27:53. > :28:03.point I stopped, and I started focusing on when I was no longer a
:28:03. > :28:04.
:28:04. > :28:07.wife and mother, I started focusing on that, to a much stronger degree.
:28:07. > :28:11.On reflection. On reflection. were a better wife and mother than
:28:11. > :28:13.you thought you were? Yes. Isn't that a good thing? That's a good
:28:13. > :28:20.thing. Joan Didion, thank you very much.
:28:20. > :28:25.Thank you. I felt from that she was incredibly
:28:25. > :28:28.conflicted, but the main thing was she wanted to apologise to Qintana
:28:28. > :28:38.Roo? It came over very strongly. It is a very, very strange book. This
:28:38. > :28:45.
:28:45. > :28:50.is a woman in acute grief, grief makes us solaceistic, she wrote a
:28:50. > :28:55.book about her husband dying in the year her daughter died. The self-
:28:55. > :29:01.concern becomes a real account of her own world, which she enters
:29:01. > :29:05.into, which has its own logic, not the logic of rationality. It is a
:29:05. > :29:09.different move from this book, it moves from the death of Quintana to
:29:09. > :29:13.her life, to account of her adoption, to the tumult that brings
:29:13. > :29:18.into Didion's mind, all the way through to the tumult growing of
:29:18. > :29:24.her ageing. But it seems in the end to be uncomfortably about her.
:29:24. > :29:27.There is something very like that about the work, and very
:29:28. > :29:31.unenlightning for all its honesty. Do you think there is a lot more
:29:32. > :29:37.pain than on the page, you had to read between the lines a lot of the
:29:37. > :29:40.time? Your interview is better than the book, without a doubt, to hear
:29:40. > :29:45.her talk. The book seems terribly precious to me. The way in which
:29:45. > :29:54.the culture is shown off, to Quintana as a bed time read, when
:29:55. > :29:58.she's tiny, she reads TS Eliot's New Hampshire, come on, their
:29:58. > :30:04.search for some quotation about the tropics, saying they are not exotic,
:30:04. > :30:08.they are only out of date. Well, come on, what does it mean? All
:30:08. > :30:13.these dropings of glamour rouse friends, Tony Richardson, who
:30:13. > :30:20.filled the house with light and parrots and whippets, oh how
:30:20. > :30:24.glamorous. Then the dreadful death. The death of the daughter. But all
:30:24. > :30:30.that precious talk is eliminated when she talks face-to-face. Do you
:30:30. > :30:34.think we know her better than she knows herself? Everybody will talk
:30:34. > :30:40.nonsense about the honesty of this book. And Didion knows perfectly
:30:40. > :30:49.well that writers sell everybody out. What they are making is a text.
:30:49. > :30:53.It is wonderfully light, shimering, complicated, he will dwant, style,
:30:53. > :30:59.stylistic effort, but you do know that you are not being told things.
:30:59. > :31:06.She feels guilty about Quintana's death, why? Why? Because Quintana
:31:06. > :31:15.was diagnosed as obsessive compulsive, border line personality
:31:15. > :31:20.disorder, who was doing all this to her? She appears like a design -
:31:20. > :31:26.designer accesssory, they want the child to fit into their life in a
:31:26. > :31:36.particular way, she's not allowed to be exist. There is a bit where
:31:36. > :31:37.
:31:37. > :31:42.she says she brought her home in a cashmere fur-lined wrap. One of the
:31:42. > :31:46.things I appreciated when she spoke about her daughter, it wasn't
:31:46. > :31:50.filtered through her mental health issues. She wouldn't admit they
:31:50. > :31:55.were there. She did in the book. The thing is, particularly as I
:31:55. > :32:00.have recently been through very traumatic experiences myself, and
:32:00. > :32:03.people in my family, we all deal with grief in a very different way.
:32:03. > :32:07.We can say we might be saying she might not be honest, maybe this is
:32:07. > :32:11.her way of dealing with grief? thought she did explore it, we did
:32:11. > :32:15.get a sense of what Quintana was like as a little girl, she was
:32:15. > :32:20.clearly clever and funny. It goes to a hotel with her mother and
:32:20. > :32:24.father and talks to the screen writer about deals. Kids pick up
:32:24. > :32:28.the stuff at home. She picks up all that. There are some other absences
:32:28. > :32:34.from the book. One of those is the other people looking after Quintana
:32:34. > :32:38.from day-to-day. There is one walk- on part for one Spanish-speaking
:32:38. > :32:42.partner, who yells snake and grabs the child away, and Didion says,
:32:42. > :32:47.there is no snake. It is the only walk-on part for the many domestic
:32:47. > :32:53.staff, clearly all around, who was obviously a substantial part of
:32:53. > :33:00.Quintana's life. Do you think the book can convey loss, I'm thinking
:33:00. > :33:06.about Blake Morrison's book about his father, so you will lumating
:33:06. > :33:10.about his - illuminating about his relationship. Quintana does say
:33:10. > :33:16.some sad things, saying she wants to be in the ground and sleep, at
:33:16. > :33:20.what age and when it happens you don't hear it. You don't know
:33:20. > :33:24.Quintana when she was a child. of the things Didion wants to
:33:24. > :33:28.believe about her, is she showed signs of disturbance from an early
:33:28. > :33:33.age. She's saying it wasn't her fault, we couldn't do anything
:33:33. > :33:36.about it, we will never know, and also she died of hospital
:33:36. > :33:40.infections. Because she had so much medical treatment. So she's not
:33:40. > :33:48.going to discuss that, because five will get you ten, there is a
:33:48. > :33:55.billion dollar court case in the offing. We don't know that, do we?
:33:55. > :33:57.I said five will get you ten, it is a bit.
:33:57. > :34:00.Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was the
:34:00. > :34:03.most seering indictment of the Soviet gulag ever written. Two
:34:03. > :34:06.years after his death we have another publication from the
:34:06. > :34:09.greatest Russian author of the 20th century. Apricot Jam And Other
:34:09. > :34:14.Stories was written in the years between Solzhenitsyn's return to
:34:14. > :34:18.Russia in 1994, are and his death, 14 years later.
:34:18. > :34:22.Now a firm fixture in the Russian School Curriculum, it was just
:34:22. > :34:27.decades ago when it would have been unthinkable to mention
:34:28. > :34:33.Solzhenitsyn's name in the Soviet Union. Despite winning the Nobel
:34:33. > :34:38.Prize for Literature in 1970, he was exiled from Russia four years
:34:38. > :34:41.later, for depicting his experiences in the Siberian work
:34:42. > :34:47.camps. Fleeing to the west, his reception from the world's press
:34:47. > :34:53.was a marked difference from his treatment in mother Russia. Going
:34:53. > :34:58.on a walk is difficult for Solzhenitsyn getting away from his
:34:58. > :35:04.exile. Going for a ride in a tram has no respite. It was many years
:35:04. > :35:06.before he went back to Russia, after Gorbachev allowed his books
:35:06. > :35:09.to be published. Apricot Jam And Other Stories was one of the books
:35:09. > :35:14.he produced on his return, they have been translated into English
:35:14. > :35:23.three after his death. His first son, Stefan, translated one of the
:35:23. > :35:28.short stories for the book. short stories are binary in two
:35:28. > :35:37.halfs, they are connected by theme, by character, by plot line, in one
:35:37. > :35:42.case by the names of the protagonist. They form a body of
:35:42. > :35:47.work, that he could not have writ without his return to Russia. He
:35:47. > :35:54.didn't sense - could not have written without his return to
:35:54. > :35:58.Russia. He couldn't have written them in America, he had to feel the
:35:58. > :36:02.native air. "I didn't know Russia, I didn't have a feeling for what
:36:02. > :36:08.mode of expression in a sentence. What sent me on the right path?
:36:08. > :36:11.Studying legal documents from the 17th century or earlier. When an
:36:11. > :36:16.accused was being questioned and tortured, the describes would
:36:16. > :36:21.record precisely and concisely what he said. When someone was being
:36:21. > :36:25.flogged, stretch on the rack, or burned with a hot iron, the most
:36:25. > :36:29.unadorned speech coming from his very bowels would burst forth from
:36:29. > :36:34.him. And this is something absolutely new. It is the language
:36:34. > :36:42.Russians have been speaking for thousands of years, but none of our
:36:42. > :36:46.writers have used it". He welcomed readers everywhere, he welcomed
:36:46. > :36:49.critics, he welcomed readers. Any time a reader opens a book is a
:36:49. > :36:55.magical moment and one that he always took very seriously and
:36:55. > :37:00.admired, no matter the country. We were talking about Eco being
:37:00. > :37:04.almost synthetic, this is about as real as it gets? This is a great
:37:04. > :37:08.book. He's not Tolstoy, but I nearly is. There were two stories
:37:08. > :37:12.in the book, I can't read Russian, and I fancy the language is
:37:12. > :37:18.different, he seems like Tolstoy. The two battle stories,
:37:18. > :37:24.Solzhenitsyn was in the breakout after Stalin grad, and one story
:37:24. > :37:29.about an artillery unit that gets cut off from the infantry and gets
:37:29. > :37:34.wiped out, and one about an acoustic unit that picks up the
:37:34. > :37:39.sound of enemy artillery and the targets, and everybody shouting at
:37:39. > :37:44.you. Like Tolstoy, but the loving attention to deDail was terrific.
:37:44. > :37:49.At the same time, and it is important - detail was terrific, at
:37:49. > :37:55.the same time, and it is important is the depression of the book. In
:37:56. > :37:59.the putting down of the peasant rebellion in 1920, he says the
:37:59. > :38:05.thirst for revenge was so powerful on each side that both sides put
:38:05. > :38:11.out the eyes of their captives before killing them. You think why
:38:11. > :38:17.is he on about the pureness of the Russian Seoul soul like Tolstoy
:38:17. > :38:22.when they street - Russian soul like Tolstoy, when they treat each
:38:22. > :38:26.other like dogs. He son said he couldn't write this book only in
:38:26. > :38:30.Russia. The banality that expresses itself in the sets of two stories
:38:30. > :38:35.is about two lives of Russia, and two lives of Solzhenitsyn in Russia.
:38:35. > :38:39.He has one life in the Soviet Union and another in Russia it's not back
:38:39. > :38:43.in Russia, it was the Soviet Union before. A lot of it is about
:38:43. > :38:47.negotiating what is tragically, horribly, still the same. It is
:38:47. > :38:53.still the same peasants. You can write like Tolstoy, because it is
:38:53. > :39:00.the same peasants, having the same horrible time in the same wars.
:39:00. > :39:02.I think it's Anne credibly ambitious attempt. - it is an
:39:03. > :39:07.incredibly ambitious attempt. The eight stories that fall into two
:39:07. > :39:11.halves. The two halves are meant to illuminate each other, you start
:39:11. > :39:15.with the most difficult one, which is Apricot Jam And Other Stories,
:39:15. > :39:20.because it is about language, and about the relationship of language
:39:20. > :39:24.to reality. The writer in the datcha, is Solzhenitsyn, that is
:39:24. > :39:29.where he ended up, it is his view of himself, as a stoodge, not only
:39:29. > :39:36.of the Soviets, not only of social realisim itself, but also of the
:39:36. > :39:42.noble prize committee. He's the cosseted writer who actually feels
:39:42. > :39:47.that he understands nothing. But then you have the other problem,
:39:47. > :39:55.which is the peasant uses the funny language. One of the problems with
:39:55. > :39:59.this collection is it is not translated by the writer, it is
:39:59. > :40:06.like reading bricks. What I had find interesting about
:40:06. > :40:10.Solzhenitsyn's work and this collection, I find writers who
:40:10. > :40:14.write about totalitarian regimes and have suffered the brutality,
:40:14. > :40:19.what it is is they just talk about the evil of the regimes, they don't
:40:19. > :40:22.talk about why so many people followed the regimes. I think
:40:22. > :40:25.Russia still has a very ambiguous relationship with communism. I
:40:25. > :40:29.think Solzhenitsyn does well what he does well, which is talk about
:40:29. > :40:32.the evil of those. What is interesting now is we are in
:40:32. > :40:37.situation where, he is on the curriculum in schools, and reading
:40:37. > :40:41.a lot of this material, you think, how is that actually taught, what
:40:41. > :40:45.is said. Because so much is unresolved, so much is so recent?
:40:45. > :40:49.Absolutely, and never can in a sense be resolved. He says at one
:40:49. > :40:54.point that you can't change human nature even under socialism. And
:40:54. > :40:59.the interesting thing is that the story about Zukov, the great
:40:59. > :41:06.Russian marshall, he takes part in the putting down of this peasant
:41:06. > :41:11.rebellion with another character in the story Ego, but the details are
:41:11. > :41:20.telling, in Apricot Jam And Other Stories, the kulak boy, he becomes
:41:20. > :41:24.a street kith kid, they run through the diner won't eat it and they can
:41:24. > :41:27.wolf it up. That brings home the hunger. We were talking about human
:41:27. > :41:31.nature, that human nature does follow a regime. I would like
:41:31. > :41:36.someone to explore that a bit more. He does also talk about, there is a
:41:36. > :41:39.sense in which you have already said how being an acoustic
:41:39. > :41:42.artillery officer, that is like Solzhenitsyn himself, Solzhenitsyn
:41:42. > :41:45.is negotiating what it would have been to take the other choice, to
:41:45. > :41:50.go on believing in communism, and then be disillusioned, what would I
:41:50. > :41:54.have done, these are not bad people doing these awful things. He's
:41:54. > :41:58.exploring that idea and exploring constantly the division between
:41:58. > :42:04.good and evil. It is even more complicated than that. In that
:42:04. > :42:09.story, about the village, that was their finest hour, which seemed to
:42:09. > :42:16.him, as a red army officer, with a load of built on his shoulders.
:42:16. > :42:22.will have to come out. After all that, heavy emotional lifting. It
:42:22. > :42:30.is time to send you into the weekend in a lighter note. This is
:42:30. > :42:35.a selection of our comedian with his favourite books. I think Robert
:42:35. > :42:41.E Howard who wrote Conan, a mad bloke from Texas who committed
:42:41. > :42:47.suicide at the age of 30, but in the age he was writing wrote more
:42:47. > :42:52.stuff than anyone could in a lifetime. He said someone stood at
:42:52. > :42:56.his shoulders dictating to him. This one is Wales rb writer of
:42:56. > :43:00.history and horror from the late 19th century. Most of the stuff is
:43:00. > :43:05.out of brint for years. This is about a guy who goes - print for
:43:05. > :43:11.years. This is about a guy who goes on holiday to Wales, and has a
:43:11. > :43:15.weird experience, and goes back to weird London and feeling he's
:43:15. > :43:20.perpetually stalked by a small dwarf. I have to pass through that
:43:20. > :43:29.bit of London every day on the bus, it is more exciting having read the
:43:29. > :43:38.book. This is Laughing Torso, by Nina, an artist and writer from
:43:38. > :43:42.fits rovia, all the writers Fitzrovia were on pints of bitter
:43:42. > :43:46.and cannabis, everybody in Bloomsbury was on champagne and
:43:46. > :43:56.cocaine. This is the catalogue of the lives of lots of fantastically
:43:56. > :43:57.
:43:57. > :44:02.interesting drunks in the 20s and 30s.
:44:02. > :44:08.His show is playing London and touring the UK. Thanks to my guests