Browse content similar to 04/11/2011. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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we do with him? Burn him? Tonight on Review, crisis, what | :00:08. | :00:12. | |
crisis? The world of literature is trading high in a book review show | :00:12. | :00:19. | |
special. Master of horror, Stephne King, | :00:19. | :00:26. | |
turns back the clock to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, in 11/22/63. | :00:26. | :00:31. | |
you afraid of ghosts, how can you be when the crime hasn't happened | :00:31. | :00:41. | |
:00:41. | :00:42. | ||
yet. Polymath academic in a conspiracy against the Jews in The | :00:42. | :00:48. | |
skal Prague Cemetery. Blue Nights from Joan Didion. I didn't think | :00:48. | :00:55. | |
people would see it as a love story. From literary exile to national | :00:55. | :00:57. | |
hero, Apricot Jam And Other Stories published three years after the | :00:57. | :01:00. | |
death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is something absolutely new. | :01:00. | :01:03. | |
It is the language Russians have been speaking for thousands of | :01:03. | :01:13. | |
years but none of our writers have used it. And a selection from the | :01:13. | :01:20. | |
celebrity book shelf. Joining me here in Glasgow to praise or pan | :01:20. | :01:25. | |
the year's literary offerings, are four critic whose literary credits | :01:25. | :01:33. | |
are no way of need of a bailout, Greer grorgror, Susan Hitch and | :01:34. | :01:36. | |
legendary English professor and beekeeper, John Carey. As ever you | :01:37. | :01:42. | |
can make your own comments, or heart felt grittisms on Twitter. | :01:42. | :01:46. | |
Our team are sharpening their tongues to respond as we speak. | :01:46. | :01:50. | |
Stephne King is synonymous with horror fiction, the man who created | :01:50. | :01:55. | |
Carrie and The Shining, and also Stand By Me and the Shawshank | :01:55. | :02:00. | |
Redemption, in his new novel he looks to the past for inspiration | :02:00. | :02:04. | |
and one of the defining moments of his teenage years. On the 22nd | :02:04. | :02:09. | |
November, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F | :02:09. | :02:13. | |
Kennedy, was barely a thousand days in office when he was assassinated | :02:14. | :02:18. | |
by the by now legendary lone gunman. Stephne King was a teenager when | :02:18. | :02:23. | |
Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shot. In 11/22/63, the supremo of the | :02:23. | :02:27. | |
horror genre asks what would happen if we could change the critical | :02:27. | :02:33. | |
moment in history. I was sitting on a bench looking at the Syntagma | :02:33. | :02:40. | |
Sqare brick cube of the Texas book deposry. Come on in, the sixth | :02:40. | :02:45. | |
floor whispered, take a look round, and take a look at the sixth floor. | :02:45. | :02:50. | |
There is a museum here, and people come from all over, and people weep | :02:50. | :02:57. | |
for the man who done what he done, but this is the 60s and Jake Epping | :02:57. | :03:04. | |
doesn't exist, only George Ambush exists, a man of his time, so to | :03:04. | :03:08. | |
speak. To come on up, are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be | :03:08. | :03:13. | |
when the crime hasn't happened yet. Jake Epping is a 30-something | :03:13. | :03:18. | |
English teacher from Maine. His friend who runs a local diner has a | :03:18. | :03:24. | |
secret. A hidden store room by transports Jake back to 1958. Al | :03:24. | :03:29. | |
enlists Jake on a mission to prevent the assassination of JFK. | :03:29. | :03:35. | |
Jake's new life as George, plunders him into a world with iconography | :03:35. | :03:42. | |
of the period. A series of entanglements ensues, romantic and | :03:42. | :03:46. | |
more surprisingly with Oswald him we have. I went to the pantry and | :03:46. | :03:50. | |
made small shuffling steps forward, pretend you are trying to find the | :03:50. | :03:54. | |
stop of a staircase with your eyes shut. Close your eyes, it is easier | :03:54. | :03:59. | |
that way. I did, two steps down I heard the pressure equalising pop | :03:59. | :04:05. | |
deep in my ears. Warmth hit my skin, sunlight shone through my closed | :04:05. | :04:12. | |
eye lits, I heart the weaving flats. It was September 1958, two minutes | :04:12. | :04:16. | |
before noon. So how successful has King been in his reimagining of | :04:16. | :04:20. | |
mid-20th century America, and has the king of horror brought his | :04:21. | :04:27. | |
skills to bear on counter factual history. | :04:27. | :04:30. | |
Stephne King says he has been trying to write the book for 25 | :04:30. | :04:35. | |
years, but completing it has he set himself up as a completely | :04:35. | :04:37. | |
different writer? I don't know, he has always written a lot of | :04:37. | :04:43. | |
different types of books. I read this book with such joy, he's a | :04:43. | :04:49. | |
readers' writer but also a writers' writer, the sentence structure and | :04:49. | :04:53. | |
the rhythm, and dancing talk as well. What I was very interested in | :04:53. | :04:58. | |
with the "what if" story, what if Jake had been black or a woman, | :04:58. | :05:02. | |
that kind of twist to the story. I think at the end of the bok he does | :05:02. | :05:06. | |
acknowledge sometimes that he's a lot kinder to that period. I think | :05:06. | :05:11. | |
he came to it with a lot more nostalgia. There was a lot more of | :05:11. | :05:17. | |
his teenage baggage, it was a conventional hero? It was a | :05:17. | :05:20. | |
conventional hero, at the end he acknowledges, just in terms of | :05:20. | :05:25. | |
Dallas, he recalls an incident when LBJ's wife went, and she was spat | :05:25. | :05:31. | |
on by middle-class house wives, you don't get that sense of real | :05:31. | :05:36. | |
nastiness in America. What did you make of it I agree, he's an amazing | :05:36. | :05:40. | |
writer. I wish he could get a grown-up story to tell. The time | :05:40. | :05:45. | |
travel thing is irritating, for me. Because we know what happened. We | :05:45. | :05:49. | |
know how the story will have to end. But it is a kind of general thing | :05:49. | :05:54. | |
of fiction, in a sense, Robert Harris did it in a different way | :05:54. | :05:58. | |
with FatherLand, this working out of what if, and the thought process | :05:58. | :06:02. | |
and how things could be different? If we are really examining the | :06:02. | :06:08. | |
structure of the plot, it has to rely on a tremenduously tenuous | :06:08. | :06:11. | |
story about the bets he's having on the things he knows, which he | :06:11. | :06:14. | |
strangely knows, because they have already happened. Except you would | :06:14. | :06:17. | |
have to have an extraordinary recall to recall they had happened | :06:17. | :06:21. | |
at all. You go through all of that, you have the elaborate setting up | :06:21. | :06:28. | |
of why it is, and it doesn't work, and da-da-da. What gets me and | :06:28. | :06:33. | |
annoys me is this man could write n the most wonderful story about the | :06:33. | :06:39. | |
50s. I was there, I was a teenager a bit older than he at that time, | :06:39. | :06:44. | |
and the taste of things, the way they are, the way the wrappers are | :06:44. | :06:48. | |
on things, the way the music sounds, the way the streets are laid out, | :06:48. | :06:53. | |
the way the houses are organised, it is all so vivid, and he does it | :06:53. | :06:56. | |
in such a compressed way. His sentences are packed with | :06:57. | :07:04. | |
information, but you hardly notice. What about that, evokation, is it | :07:04. | :07:14. | |
:07:14. | :07:18. | ||
fetishising it slightly? We can't talk about the content too much | :07:18. | :07:21. | |
because there is a fantastic ending. He goes into the rabbit hole, and | :07:21. | :07:26. | |
what happens is you meet a man with a card, sometimes it is a yellow | :07:26. | :07:34. | |
card, sometimes green, this man is sort of a guardian of time. One of | :07:34. | :07:38. | |
them kills himself. The last time George goes through the man talks | :07:38. | :07:43. | |
to him about who they are. He says we are not supernatural, we are not | :07:43. | :07:46. | |
aliens, we are human beings, and we have to keep these streams of | :07:46. | :07:51. | |
realities in our minds. That is crazy. What kind of human beings | :07:51. | :07:55. | |
could they be to control reality. Is that craziness necessary, he did | :07:56. | :08:00. | |
a lot of crazy things in this book? I think the book is struggling | :08:00. | :08:06. | |
between two different kinds of explanation. There is the what if | :08:06. | :08:08. | |
strictly science fiction explanation, about going back into | :08:08. | :08:13. | |
the past. But there is also these time guardians part of, in some | :08:13. | :08:18. | |
ways, with The King's Speech king book, a more familiar - with a | :08:18. | :08:23. | |
Stephne King book, a more familiar horror genre, nasty things start | :08:23. | :08:28. | |
happening if you mess with the past. That works less successfully, | :08:28. | :08:32. | |
because this past is so substantial and so well imagined, that | :08:32. | :08:35. | |
interrupting it with strange bits of horror seems irrelevant. Do you | :08:35. | :08:39. | |
think that is because Stephne King has one foot in his horror genre, | :08:39. | :08:43. | |
thinking he has this hugely loyal fan base, can I get really out of | :08:43. | :08:48. | |
that? Or it is habit of mind. A habit of mind that is almost blown | :08:48. | :08:52. | |
aside by this wonderful story telling and the reality of his 50s. | :08:52. | :08:58. | |
He should have let it be blown and make it into the science fiction | :08:58. | :09:03. | |
story. There was the whole measure of story before the main eye | :09:03. | :09:05. | |
Adventurers of the Year. Did you think there was - event, there was | :09:05. | :09:10. | |
several pages and for me it was a bit like wading through treacle? | :09:10. | :09:13. | |
isness radio. One of the points about time travel is when you go | :09:13. | :09:17. | |
back into the past everything you changed is cancelled, it is always | :09:17. | :09:20. | |
the beginning. That is very important. And you have to have | :09:20. | :09:27. | |
that early stuff to get that into your mind. It is shattering, there | :09:27. | :09:31. | |
is a woman in the wheelchair, they will save her to be in the wheel | :09:31. | :09:36. | |
chai, she is in out, in out, multiple universes. And there must | :09:36. | :09:40. | |
be. There are multiple parallel universes. I felt I was getting | :09:40. | :09:43. | |
three stories for the price of one here. You have the first story | :09:43. | :09:46. | |
about the murder in family, the other story which is a love story, | :09:46. | :09:51. | |
and then you have the JFK story. And I loved it, because he's a | :09:51. | :09:55. | |
master story-teller. I'm not sure I liked the love story. I gagged a | :09:55. | :10:04. | |
bit on the love story. Sadie is beautiful. From one conspiracy | :10:04. | :10:14. | |
theory to no, unbelievably it is over 25 years since Roberto Echo | :10:14. | :10:22. | |
burst on to the scene with The Name Of The Rose, he bursts on to the | :10:22. | :10:28. | |
scene again with The Prague Cemetery. Philosopher and all-round | :10:29. | :10:36. | |
Greg carous multitasker, he is prolific, he's known for The Name | :10:36. | :10:43. | |
Of The Rose, also a successful film starring Sean Connery and a young | :10:43. | :10:47. | |
Christian Slater. His plam buoyant style and conspiracy theories | :10:47. | :10:50. | |
continues with his - flamboyant style and conspiracy theories | :10:50. | :10:54. | |
continues with The Prague Cemetery. It follows a secret agent, versed | :10:54. | :10:58. | |
in forgery and bomb making, but who is also capable of even darker | :10:58. | :11:08. | |
:11:08. | :11:09. | ||
deeds. It transpires he's behind some of the many conspiracy | :11:09. | :11:16. | |
theories in 19th century history. Including offering the protocol of | :11:16. | :11:21. | |
the members of Zion and putting them into a Jewish cemetery. | :11:21. | :11:29. | |
interested in a reader that tries to understand not the game of the | :11:29. | :11:33. | |
mother - murder, but the game of the author, the way in which the | :11:33. | :11:41. | |
author pulls him or her, the reader to enter the story follow a certain | :11:42. | :11:49. | |
path. In a way, the real plot and crime, is the one organised by the | :11:49. | :11:55. | |
author. To trap, to frame the reader. The dark tone of the main | :11:55. | :12:00. | |
character is set from the start of the book, mainting him as an | :12:00. | :12:03. | |
unpleasant villain, who neither respects nor trusts anyone. When I | :12:04. | :12:08. | |
was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well | :12:08. | :12:16. | |
as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a | :12:16. | :12:24. | |
levintine, ungrateful as a Maltese, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous, | :12:24. | :12:29. | |
and as Scotland rouse as anyone, is adult trous through uncontrollable | :12:29. | :12:38. | |
lust, the result of an erect tile with a monstrous distortion between | :12:38. | :12:47. | |
the dwarf build and that. With such subject matter comparisons have | :12:47. | :12:52. | |
been made to Dan Browne, it has been described as the thinking | :12:52. | :13:00. | |
person's Da Vinci Code, but is The Prague Cemetery a worthy page- | :13:00. | :13:03. | |
Turner or just murder. It is all about the author Greer | :13:04. | :13:10. | |
gror Greer you are a stick letter for his - Germaine Greer, you are a | :13:10. | :13:16. | |
strikeler for historical - stickler for historical accuracy. Did it | :13:16. | :13:20. | |
arrest you? It puzzled me, it was meant to. That is kind of | :13:20. | :13:24. | |
irritating. There is one type face for the narrator, one type face for | :13:24. | :13:32. | |
the main character, who is theville lane of the piece, and his at - | :13:32. | :13:37. | |
villain, of the piece, and his alter ego, sometimes his alter ego | :13:37. | :13:43. | |
and sometimes something else. It is all trickry on the reader. It is | :13:43. | :13:50. | |
irritating because he chooses 1897, there was someone called that, and | :13:50. | :13:54. | |
the whole Paris he built full of Jews who occupied the highest | :13:54. | :13:59. | |
positions in society, and instead her grubbing around with this block, | :13:59. | :14:09. | |
:14:09. | :14:09. | ||
who lives in a junk shop and fakes documents. Part of it his own | :14:09. | :14:13. | |
fascination with documents. The fact that he's the scholar he is. | :14:13. | :14:16. | |
By faking documents you don't actually change anything. The whole | :14:16. | :14:21. | |
thing about the plotting and the conspiracy and the Stephne King | :14:21. | :14:31. | |
:14:31. | :14:33. | ||
which you loved, and then you have the Umberto Eco, - Stephen King | :14:33. | :14:39. | |
which you loved, and then you have Umberto Eco with the documents? | :14:39. | :14:44. | |
you go on Wikipedia, it says over the Middle East many despots | :14:44. | :14:48. | |
believe them, as did Hitler do, still believe them to be true, and | :14:48. | :14:52. | |
it is taught. You need a book simply exposing, very clearly, how | :14:52. | :14:55. | |
the documents were forged. Why doesn't he do that. Instead of | :14:56. | :15:02. | |
introducing all this fake history. There isn't a character in the book. | :15:02. | :15:06. | |
Can the narrative spine carry the weight of all this information and | :15:06. | :15:10. | |
history and the protocols and so forth? No, because it is a mess to | :15:10. | :15:16. | |
me. I felt like this main character was like somebody in the corner of | :15:16. | :15:20. | |
a pub, spouting a story going, and another thing, and another thing, | :15:20. | :15:23. | |
and people were like stay away from this character, complete low. I got | :15:23. | :15:28. | |
lost. This has such an exciting premise, this is a scam story, this | :15:28. | :15:32. | |
should be about conartists, I don't know how he could have made this | :15:32. | :15:36. | |
story as boring as he did. I felt as though I spent the | :15:36. | :15:40. | |
evening in bad company. This stuff is disgusting, we had just one | :15:40. | :15:45. | |
little paragraph of it there, he it goes on for pages and pages? What | :15:45. | :15:50. | |
about the whole ideas of having an unpleasant central character in a | :15:50. | :15:54. | |
book? They have to be unpleasant and interesting. This was not | :15:54. | :15:58. | |
interesting. Umberto Eco's own wife, apparently, said when she finally | :15:58. | :16:01. | |
read the book, no wonder you have been nasty all the couple of years | :16:01. | :16:06. | |
when you have been writing the book. I felt I had been nasty while I was | :16:06. | :16:13. | |
reading it. He ups the ante with it. He ups the stench of it? That is | :16:13. | :16:20. | |
part of the con, that he can disburden himself of all of this | :16:20. | :16:23. | |
zenophobic craziness, knowing he's press ago button out there, amongst | :16:23. | :16:28. | |
the great unwashed, who will actually respond to it. It is a | :16:28. | :16:34. | |
strange thing that it gives him a license to be so unpleasant. I | :16:34. | :16:44. | |
:16:44. | :16:44. | ||
recognise this Protestant tag nis son of perfume. He has a sinister | :16:45. | :16:49. | |
glrb protaganist son of fare fume, he has a sinister gift. If there | :16:49. | :16:56. | |
was a - perfume, he has a sinister gift. This is a profoundly | :16:56. | :17:01. | |
misleading book. It is interesting that Umberto Eco | :17:01. | :17:06. | |
compares himself, he almost says that he's the brainy Dan Browne? | :17:06. | :17:13. | |
The pride in his own braininess, which accounts for all the post | :17:13. | :17:18. | |
modern stuff, like the narrator is a separate person, and the narrator | :17:18. | :17:22. | |
himself says he doesn't know who the mysterious writer is. Come on, | :17:22. | :17:25. | |
we are not children. It is pathetic and it is trying to be clever, it | :17:25. | :17:30. | |
seems to me. I think he forgot about the reader and a writer who | :17:30. | :17:34. | |
forgets about a reader. He says that clearly himself, it is about | :17:34. | :17:39. | |
the author? Then write your book and read it yourself. It is a post | :17:39. | :17:43. | |
modern book.Yo Yo see that as post modern. It is meant to deconstruct | :17:43. | :17:48. | |
the idea of certainty when it comes to historical fact, it is | :17:49. | :17:53. | |
mischievous. It has its cake and eats it, you have a timeline at the | :17:53. | :17:58. | |
end of the book in case you get lost, you are wildly lost, the book | :17:58. | :18:01. | |
finshes and you have an appendix that explains what happens then. | :18:01. | :18:07. | |
The only nice thing about the book is the food. It is fair to say that | :18:07. | :18:12. | |
in recent years, life hasn't been kind to the celebrates writer, | :18:12. | :18:18. | |
Didion de. Eight years ago she lost her - Joan Didion, eight years ago | :18:18. | :18:23. | |
she lost her husband, the screen writer, John Gregory Dunne, she | :18:23. | :18:27. | |
wrote about her lost in her memoir A Year Of Magical Thinking, which | :18:27. | :18:31. | |
transferred to the stage with Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion. | :18:32. | :18:41. | |
The tragedy went on, her daughter, was in a coma a year after her | :18:41. | :18:51. | |
:18:51. | :18:53. | ||
husband died, Didion revisits the death. I visited her in New York. | :18:53. | :18:58. | |
Qintana Roo was a gift to you? thought of her as a gift. How did | :18:58. | :19:08. | |
:19:08. | :19:09. | ||
she come to you? She was adopted. Out of the blue I met a doctor, at | :19:09. | :19:13. | |
someone's house, at a Christmas party. He said I understand you | :19:13. | :19:21. | |
want a baby. I said, who doesn't. He said he had one coming the 1th | :19:21. | :19:26. | |
of March, come see me if he would - 1st of March, come see me if you | :19:26. | :19:31. | |
would like to talk about it. I did. So suddenly we were handed this | :19:31. | :19:37. | |
baby. Did you think you were ready for motherhood? In theory, I | :19:37. | :19:43. | |
thought I was ready for motherhood. Because I had not the slightest | :19:43. | :19:49. | |
idea what was involved. I didn't even think, it didn't occur to me | :19:49. | :19:54. | |
that it involved anything other than clothes. I thought it involved | :19:54. | :20:00. | |
little dresses. But obviously I had no real clue. But it was the nature | :20:00. | :20:05. | |
of your work, that you just took Qintana Roo with you everywhere? | :20:05. | :20:14. | |
She was always with us. We simply, I can't think of any place we | :20:14. | :20:21. | |
didn't expect to put her in the back seat and go. So she saw a lot | :20:21. | :20:25. | |
and travelled a lot? Yeah, we were going to Vietnam at the time she | :20:25. | :20:29. | |
was born, it didn't occur to me at first that it wasn't going to be a | :20:29. | :20:35. | |
smart idea to take her to Vietnam. But we did. We didn't. You didn't | :20:35. | :20:39. | |
take her but you could have? Definitely. You talked about the | :20:39. | :20:42. | |
fact that she was worried and wanted to hear the narrative again | :20:42. | :20:48. | |
and again, tell me what happened, the phone went and you went to get | :20:48. | :20:52. | |
me, and what would happen if you weren't in, did that attend her | :20:52. | :20:56. | |
throughout her life? I don't think I gave it enough thought. Because | :20:56. | :21:03. | |
it did not, I saw no reason why she should be insecure about being | :21:03. | :21:10. | |
loved, being wanted. So it did not cross my mind that she could still | :21:10. | :21:15. | |
be and I think she was. But your narrative also was that you worried | :21:15. | :21:22. | |
that she some how would be taken from you? Yes. Why? Why did you | :21:22. | :21:28. | |
worry that? Because I, obviously I didn't think that I, I presume I | :21:28. | :21:35. | |
worried that because I didn't think I deserved her. You never think you | :21:35. | :21:39. | |
deserve the perfect baby to be handed to you. But she was. But she | :21:39. | :21:43. | |
was. I think first of her sitting on the | :21:43. | :21:49. | |
bare hardwood floors on the house in Franklin Avenue, and the wax | :21:49. | :21:53. | |
terracotta tiles of the house in Malibu. Listening to the birds on | :21:53. | :22:01. | |
eight track. The birds in the Mommas ska the papas, Do You Want | :22:01. | :22:07. | |
To Dance, she would croon that she did. I still hear her crooning back | :22:07. | :22:14. | |
to the eight track "I want to dance", the same way I still see | :22:14. | :22:18. | |
the tatoo through her veil. Something else I still see from | :22:18. | :22:28. | |
:22:28. | :22:28. | ||
that wedding day, the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing | :22:28. | :22:33. | |
Christian Laboutan shoes, with red soles, you saw the red soles when | :22:33. | :22:37. | |
she kneeled at the alter. Did you get the sense always that she was | :22:37. | :22:46. | |
fragile? No. I didn't. Or it didn't occur to me that she was as fragile | :22:46. | :22:51. | |
as she was. Do you think that fragility came from genetics, when | :22:51. | :22:57. | |
Sheehy vently found her own family? - when she eventually found her own | :22:57. | :23:00. | |
family? There was a genetic component, but none of us have any | :23:00. | :23:06. | |
way of knowing it. In the book you talk about depth and shall dough | :23:07. | :23:11. | |
and changes? That is the most accurate - shallow and changes? | :23:11. | :23:15. | |
That is the most accurate way to describe her. The particular | :23:15. | :23:21. | |
personality she has she was always somewhere, there was light on her | :23:21. | :23:26. | |
that you didn't expect to see, or the light changed. She was a | :23:26. | :23:31. | |
different person. You expected her to be doing one thing and she was | :23:31. | :23:39. | |
doing actually another. It is hard to get a handle on her? That is | :23:39. | :23:43. | |
what I meant by it. It was very hard to get a handle on her. | :23:43. | :23:53. | |
:23:53. | :23:57. | ||
you feel you knew her? No. I mean I think I didn't know the totality of | :23:57. | :24:01. | |
her. Did you feel also that you wanted to set things down for the | :24:02. | :24:11. | |
:24:12. | :24:16. | ||
record? Yes I did. I wanted, it was coming to my attention that I had | :24:16. | :24:26. | |
:24:26. | :24:30. | ||
treated her as a baby all of her life, you know, that I had been not | :24:30. | :24:36. | |
as aware as I should have been of how sensitive and smart she was. I | :24:36. | :24:44. | |
had thought, I wanted to, and so I wanted to say I'm sorry. | :24:44. | :24:50. | |
You know. This book is about saying you are sorry to your daughter? | :24:50. | :24:54. | |
But aren't you just being a little hard on yourself? I don't know | :24:54. | :25:00. | |
anybody who has lost a child who isn't hard on themselves. If there | :25:00. | :25:04. | |
is anything that causes you to have reason to be hard on yourself, | :25:04. | :25:08. | |
there it is. But in the end, it was an illness that couldn't have been | :25:09. | :25:18. | |
prevented correction it? No. could it? No. "I no longer value | :25:18. | :25:22. | |
this kind of memento, I no longer want reminders of what was, what | :25:22. | :25:26. | |
got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long | :25:26. | :25:30. | |
period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I | :25:30. | :25:35. | |
thought I did. A period during which I believe that I could keep | :25:35. | :25:38. | |
people fully present, keep them with me by preserving their | :25:38. | :25:45. | |
mementos, their things, their totems. This misplaced belief now | :25:45. | :25:50. | |
fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no | :25:50. | :25:53. | |
drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want on | :25:53. | :25:58. | |
reflection to see. There is no closet I can open with room left | :25:58. | :26:02. | |
for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that | :26:02. | :26:07. | |
might otherwise be put to such use, I see instead, three old Burberry | :26:07. | :26:12. | |
rain coats of John's, a swayed jacket given to Qintana Roo by the | :26:12. | :26:21. | |
mother of her first boyfriend. A cape given by mother to my father | :26:21. | :26:25. | |
not long after world war II in other closet I find in a chest of | :26:25. | :26:31. | |
drawers a perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open a box | :26:31. | :26:36. | |
and find fo photographs taken by my grandfather as a mining engineer in | :26:36. | :26:41. | |
Nevada. In another box I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that | :26:41. | :26:47. | |
my mother had salvaged from her own mother's box of mementos ". | :26:47. | :26:55. | |
have so much around you, wold wonderful pictures of yourself, | :26:55. | :27:00. | |
your husband and your daughter, things there. Do you look at them | :27:00. | :27:05. | |
any more? I look at them because they are right there in wond of me, | :27:05. | :27:09. | |
but I don't expect to - in front of me, but I don't expect to find an | :27:09. | :27:15. | |
answer in them any more. comfort? I used to, I used to | :27:15. | :27:21. | |
imagine that keeping those little family memories around me would | :27:21. | :27:31. | |
continue to be a solace, but they don't actually. If you look back at | :27:31. | :27:36. | |
your role as a wife, mother and writer? Oddly enough I think I was | :27:36. | :27:41. | |
a better wife and mother, I used to think I was a better writer, and I | :27:41. | :27:47. | |
used to think that I was totally focused on writing. Then I, at some | :27:47. | :27:53. | |
point I stopped, and I started focusing on when I was no longer a | :27:53. | :28:03. | |
:28:03. | :28:04. | ||
wife and mother, I started focusing on that, to a much stronger degree. | :28:04. | :28:07. | |
On reflection. On reflection. were a better wife and mother than | :28:07. | :28:11. | |
you thought you were? Yes. Isn't that a good thing? That's a good | :28:11. | :28:13. | |
thing. Joan Didion, thank you very much. | :28:13. | :28:20. | |
Thank you. I felt from that she was incredibly | :28:20. | :28:25. | |
conflicted, but the main thing was she wanted to apologise to Qintana | :28:25. | :28:28. | |
Roo? It came over very strongly. It is a very, very strange book. This | :28:28. | :28:38. | |
:28:38. | :28:45. | ||
is a woman in acute grief, grief makes us solaceistic, she wrote a | :28:45. | :28:50. | |
book about her husband dying in the year her daughter died. The self- | :28:50. | :28:55. | |
concern becomes a real account of her own world, which she enters | :28:55. | :29:01. | |
into, which has its own logic, not the logic of rationality. It is a | :29:01. | :29:05. | |
different move from this book, it moves from the death of Quintana to | :29:05. | :29:09. | |
her life, to account of her adoption, to the tumult that brings | :29:09. | :29:13. | |
into Didion's mind, all the way through to the tumult growing of | :29:13. | :29:18. | |
her ageing. But it seems in the end to be uncomfortably about her. | :29:18. | :29:24. | |
There is something very like that about the work, and very | :29:24. | :29:27. | |
unenlightning for all its honesty. Do you think there is a lot more | :29:28. | :29:31. | |
pain than on the page, you had to read between the lines a lot of the | :29:32. | :29:37. | |
time? Your interview is better than the book, without a doubt, to hear | :29:37. | :29:40. | |
her talk. The book seems terribly precious to me. The way in which | :29:40. | :29:45. | |
the culture is shown off, to Quintana as a bed time read, when | :29:45. | :29:54. | |
she's tiny, she reads TS Eliot's New Hampshire, come on, their | :29:55. | :29:58. | |
search for some quotation about the tropics, saying they are not exotic, | :29:58. | :30:04. | |
they are only out of date. Well, come on, what does it mean? All | :30:04. | :30:08. | |
these dropings of glamour rouse friends, Tony Richardson, who | :30:08. | :30:13. | |
filled the house with light and parrots and whippets, oh how | :30:13. | :30:20. | |
glamorous. Then the dreadful death. The death of the daughter. But all | :30:20. | :30:24. | |
that precious talk is eliminated when she talks face-to-face. Do you | :30:24. | :30:30. | |
think we know her better than she knows herself? Everybody will talk | :30:30. | :30:34. | |
nonsense about the honesty of this book. And Didion knows perfectly | :30:34. | :30:40. | |
well that writers sell everybody out. What they are making is a text. | :30:40. | :30:49. | |
It is wonderfully light, shimering, complicated, he will dwant, style, | :30:49. | :30:53. | |
stylistic effort, but you do know that you are not being told things. | :30:53. | :30:59. | |
She feels guilty about Quintana's death, why? Why? Because Quintana | :30:59. | :31:06. | |
was diagnosed as obsessive compulsive, border line personality | :31:06. | :31:15. | |
disorder, who was doing all this to her? She appears like a design - | :31:15. | :31:20. | |
designer accesssory, they want the child to fit into their life in a | :31:20. | :31:26. | |
particular way, she's not allowed to be exist. There is a bit where | :31:26. | :31:36. | |
:31:36. | :31:37. | ||
she says she brought her home in a cashmere fur-lined wrap. One of the | :31:37. | :31:42. | |
things I appreciated when she spoke about her daughter, it wasn't | :31:42. | :31:46. | |
filtered through her mental health issues. She wouldn't admit they | :31:46. | :31:50. | |
were there. She did in the book. The thing is, particularly as I | :31:50. | :31:55. | |
have recently been through very traumatic experiences myself, and | :31:55. | :32:00. | |
people in my family, we all deal with grief in a very different way. | :32:00. | :32:03. | |
We can say we might be saying she might not be honest, maybe this is | :32:03. | :32:07. | |
her way of dealing with grief? thought she did explore it, we did | :32:07. | :32:11. | |
get a sense of what Quintana was like as a little girl, she was | :32:11. | :32:15. | |
clearly clever and funny. It goes to a hotel with her mother and | :32:15. | :32:20. | |
father and talks to the screen writer about deals. Kids pick up | :32:20. | :32:24. | |
the stuff at home. She picks up all that. There are some other absences | :32:24. | :32:28. | |
from the book. One of those is the other people looking after Quintana | :32:28. | :32:34. | |
from day-to-day. There is one walk- on part for one Spanish-speaking | :32:34. | :32:38. | |
partner, who yells snake and grabs the child away, and Didion says, | :32:38. | :32:42. | |
there is no snake. It is the only walk-on part for the many domestic | :32:42. | :32:47. | |
staff, clearly all around, who was obviously a substantial part of | :32:47. | :32:53. | |
Quintana's life. Do you think the book can convey loss, I'm thinking | :32:53. | :33:00. | |
about Blake Morrison's book about his father, so you will lumating | :33:00. | :33:06. | |
about his - illuminating about his relationship. Quintana does say | :33:06. | :33:10. | |
some sad things, saying she wants to be in the ground and sleep, at | :33:10. | :33:16. | |
what age and when it happens you don't hear it. You don't know | :33:16. | :33:20. | |
Quintana when she was a child. of the things Didion wants to | :33:20. | :33:24. | |
believe about her, is she showed signs of disturbance from an early | :33:24. | :33:28. | |
age. She's saying it wasn't her fault, we couldn't do anything | :33:28. | :33:33. | |
about it, we will never know, and also she died of hospital | :33:33. | :33:36. | |
infections. Because she had so much medical treatment. So she's not | :33:36. | :33:40. | |
going to discuss that, because five will get you ten, there is a | :33:40. | :33:48. | |
billion dollar court case in the offing. We don't know that, do we? | :33:48. | :33:55. | |
I said five will get you ten, it is a bit. | :33:55. | :33:57. | |
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was the | :33:57. | :34:00. | |
most seering indictment of the Soviet gulag ever written. Two | :34:00. | :34:03. | |
years after his death we have another publication from the | :34:03. | :34:06. | |
greatest Russian author of the 20th century. Apricot Jam And Other | :34:06. | :34:09. | |
Stories was written in the years between Solzhenitsyn's return to | :34:09. | :34:14. | |
Russia in 1994, are and his death, 14 years later. | :34:14. | :34:18. | |
Now a firm fixture in the Russian School Curriculum, it was just | :34:18. | :34:22. | |
decades ago when it would have been unthinkable to mention | :34:22. | :34:27. | |
Solzhenitsyn's name in the Soviet Union. Despite winning the Nobel | :34:28. | :34:33. | |
Prize for Literature in 1970, he was exiled from Russia four years | :34:33. | :34:38. | |
later, for depicting his experiences in the Siberian work | :34:38. | :34:41. | |
camps. Fleeing to the west, his reception from the world's press | :34:42. | :34:47. | |
was a marked difference from his treatment in mother Russia. Going | :34:47. | :34:53. | |
on a walk is difficult for Solzhenitsyn getting away from his | :34:53. | :34:58. | |
exile. Going for a ride in a tram has no respite. It was many years | :34:58. | :35:04. | |
before he went back to Russia, after Gorbachev allowed his books | :35:04. | :35:06. | |
to be published. Apricot Jam And Other Stories was one of the books | :35:06. | :35:09. | |
he produced on his return, they have been translated into English | :35:09. | :35:14. | |
three after his death. His first son, Stefan, translated one of the | :35:14. | :35:23. | |
short stories for the book. short stories are binary in two | :35:23. | :35:28. | |
halfs, they are connected by theme, by character, by plot line, in one | :35:28. | :35:37. | |
case by the names of the protagonist. They form a body of | :35:37. | :35:42. | |
work, that he could not have writ without his return to Russia. He | :35:42. | :35:47. | |
didn't sense - could not have written without his return to | :35:47. | :35:54. | |
Russia. He couldn't have written them in America, he had to feel the | :35:54. | :35:58. | |
native air. "I didn't know Russia, I didn't have a feeling for what | :35:58. | :36:02. | |
mode of expression in a sentence. What sent me on the right path? | :36:02. | :36:08. | |
Studying legal documents from the 17th century or earlier. When an | :36:08. | :36:11. | |
accused was being questioned and tortured, the describes would | :36:11. | :36:16. | |
record precisely and concisely what he said. When someone was being | :36:16. | :36:21. | |
flogged, stretch on the rack, or burned with a hot iron, the most | :36:21. | :36:25. | |
unadorned speech coming from his very bowels would burst forth from | :36:25. | :36:29. | |
him. And this is something absolutely new. It is the language | :36:29. | :36:34. | |
Russians have been speaking for thousands of years, but none of our | :36:34. | :36:42. | |
writers have used it". He welcomed readers everywhere, he welcomed | :36:42. | :36:46. | |
critics, he welcomed readers. Any time a reader opens a book is a | :36:46. | :36:49. | |
magical moment and one that he always took very seriously and | :36:49. | :36:55. | |
admired, no matter the country. We were talking about Eco being | :36:55. | :37:00. | |
almost synthetic, this is about as real as it gets? This is a great | :37:00. | :37:04. | |
book. He's not Tolstoy, but I nearly is. There were two stories | :37:04. | :37:08. | |
in the book, I can't read Russian, and I fancy the language is | :37:08. | :37:12. | |
different, he seems like Tolstoy. The two battle stories, | :37:12. | :37:18. | |
Solzhenitsyn was in the breakout after Stalin grad, and one story | :37:18. | :37:24. | |
about an artillery unit that gets cut off from the infantry and gets | :37:24. | :37:29. | |
wiped out, and one about an acoustic unit that picks up the | :37:29. | :37:34. | |
sound of enemy artillery and the targets, and everybody shouting at | :37:34. | :37:39. | |
you. Like Tolstoy, but the loving attention to deDail was terrific. | :37:39. | :37:44. | |
At the same time, and it is important - detail was terrific, at | :37:44. | :37:49. | |
the same time, and it is important is the depression of the book. In | :37:49. | :37:55. | |
the putting down of the peasant rebellion in 1920, he says the | :37:56. | :37:59. | |
thirst for revenge was so powerful on each side that both sides put | :37:59. | :38:05. | |
out the eyes of their captives before killing them. You think why | :38:05. | :38:11. | |
is he on about the pureness of the Russian Seoul soul like Tolstoy | :38:11. | :38:17. | |
when they street - Russian soul like Tolstoy, when they treat each | :38:17. | :38:22. | |
other like dogs. He son said he couldn't write this book only in | :38:22. | :38:26. | |
Russia. The banality that expresses itself in the sets of two stories | :38:26. | :38:30. | |
is about two lives of Russia, and two lives of Solzhenitsyn in Russia. | :38:30. | :38:35. | |
He has one life in the Soviet Union and another in Russia it's not back | :38:35. | :38:39. | |
in Russia, it was the Soviet Union before. A lot of it is about | :38:39. | :38:43. | |
negotiating what is tragically, horribly, still the same. It is | :38:43. | :38:47. | |
still the same peasants. You can write like Tolstoy, because it is | :38:47. | :38:53. | |
the same peasants, having the same horrible time in the same wars. | :38:53. | :39:00. | |
I think it's Anne credibly ambitious attempt. - it is an | :39:00. | :39:02. | |
incredibly ambitious attempt. The eight stories that fall into two | :39:03. | :39:07. | |
halves. The two halves are meant to illuminate each other, you start | :39:07. | :39:11. | |
with the most difficult one, which is Apricot Jam And Other Stories, | :39:11. | :39:15. | |
because it is about language, and about the relationship of language | :39:15. | :39:20. | |
to reality. The writer in the datcha, is Solzhenitsyn, that is | :39:20. | :39:24. | |
where he ended up, it is his view of himself, as a stoodge, not only | :39:24. | :39:29. | |
of the Soviets, not only of social realisim itself, but also of the | :39:29. | :39:36. | |
noble prize committee. He's the cosseted writer who actually feels | :39:36. | :39:42. | |
that he understands nothing. But then you have the other problem, | :39:42. | :39:47. | |
which is the peasant uses the funny language. One of the problems with | :39:47. | :39:55. | |
this collection is it is not translated by the writer, it is | :39:55. | :39:59. | |
like reading bricks. What I had find interesting about | :39:59. | :40:06. | |
Solzhenitsyn's work and this collection, I find writers who | :40:06. | :40:10. | |
write about totalitarian regimes and have suffered the brutality, | :40:10. | :40:14. | |
what it is is they just talk about the evil of the regimes, they don't | :40:14. | :40:19. | |
talk about why so many people followed the regimes. I think | :40:19. | :40:22. | |
Russia still has a very ambiguous relationship with communism. I | :40:22. | :40:25. | |
think Solzhenitsyn does well what he does well, which is talk about | :40:25. | :40:29. | |
the evil of those. What is interesting now is we are in | :40:29. | :40:32. | |
situation where, he is on the curriculum in schools, and reading | :40:32. | :40:37. | |
a lot of this material, you think, how is that actually taught, what | :40:37. | :40:41. | |
is said. Because so much is unresolved, so much is so recent? | :40:41. | :40:45. | |
Absolutely, and never can in a sense be resolved. He says at one | :40:45. | :40:49. | |
point that you can't change human nature even under socialism. And | :40:49. | :40:54. | |
the interesting thing is that the story about Zukov, the great | :40:54. | :40:59. | |
Russian marshall, he takes part in the putting down of this peasant | :40:59. | :41:06. | |
rebellion with another character in the story Ego, but the details are | :41:06. | :41:11. | |
telling, in Apricot Jam And Other Stories, the kulak boy, he becomes | :41:11. | :41:20. | |
a street kith kid, they run through the diner won't eat it and they can | :41:20. | :41:24. | |
wolf it up. That brings home the hunger. We were talking about human | :41:24. | :41:27. | |
nature, that human nature does follow a regime. I would like | :41:27. | :41:31. | |
someone to explore that a bit more. He does also talk about, there is a | :41:31. | :41:36. | |
sense in which you have already said how being an acoustic | :41:36. | :41:39. | |
artillery officer, that is like Solzhenitsyn himself, Solzhenitsyn | :41:39. | :41:42. | |
is negotiating what it would have been to take the other choice, to | :41:42. | :41:45. | |
go on believing in communism, and then be disillusioned, what would I | :41:45. | :41:50. | |
have done, these are not bad people doing these awful things. He's | :41:50. | :41:54. | |
exploring that idea and exploring constantly the division between | :41:54. | :41:58. | |
good and evil. It is even more complicated than that. In that | :41:58. | :42:04. | |
story, about the village, that was their finest hour, which seemed to | :42:04. | :42:09. | |
him, as a red army officer, with a load of built on his shoulders. | :42:09. | :42:16. | |
will have to come out. After all that, heavy emotional lifting. It | :42:16. | :42:22. | |
is time to send you into the weekend in a lighter note. This is | :42:22. | :42:30. | |
a selection of our comedian with his favourite books. I think Robert | :42:30. | :42:35. | |
E Howard who wrote Conan, a mad bloke from Texas who committed | :42:35. | :42:41. | |
suicide at the age of 30, but in the age he was writing wrote more | :42:41. | :42:47. | |
stuff than anyone could in a lifetime. He said someone stood at | :42:47. | :42:52. | |
his shoulders dictating to him. This one is Wales rb writer of | :42:52. | :42:56. | |
history and horror from the late 19th century. Most of the stuff is | :42:56. | :43:00. | |
out of brint for years. This is about a guy who goes - print for | :43:00. | :43:05. | |
years. This is about a guy who goes on holiday to Wales, and has a | :43:05. | :43:11. | |
weird experience, and goes back to weird London and feeling he's | :43:11. | :43:15. | |
perpetually stalked by a small dwarf. I have to pass through that | :43:15. | :43:20. | |
bit of London every day on the bus, it is more exciting having read the | :43:20. | :43:29. | |
book. This is Laughing Torso, by Nina, an artist and writer from | :43:29. | :43:38. | |
fits rovia, all the writers Fitzrovia were on pints of bitter | :43:38. | :43:42. | |
and cannabis, everybody in Bloomsbury was on champagne and | :43:42. | :43:46. | |
cocaine. This is the catalogue of the lives of lots of fantastically | :43:46. | :43:56. | |
:43:56. | :43:57. | ||
interesting drunks in the 20s and 30s. | :43:57. | :44:02. | |
His show is playing London and touring the UK. Thanks to my guests | :44:02. | :44:08. |