Sarah Perry Meet the Author


Sarah Perry

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Now it's time for Meet The Author.

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Faith and reason, and the Gothic imagination, the ingredients

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of Sarah Perry's bestselling novel, The Essex Serpent.

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We're in the 1890s and Cora Seaborne, newly widowed,

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leaves London for the country, where she encounters a community

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terrified by the apparent return of a fabled monster.

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Her interest in nature leads her to believe that it's real.

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The local vicar believes it's the product of a pagan imagination.

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They argue a good deal.

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They also, more or less, fall in love.

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It's a rich tale of obsession, mystery and belief.

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Welcome.

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I suppose it's a story, really, about fear, isn't it?

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It is.

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And it's a story about the way that fear affects from people

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in different ways, according to their age, their gender,

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their preconceived ideas about the world.

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And how an imagined, or unimagined, monster can be very different

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to different sets of people.

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There's a sense in which it's a period which reflects some

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of the obsessions of our own?

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Very much so.

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One of the things I wanted to do was, in perhaps

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a slightly mischievous way, wrong-foot the reader,

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who might feel that they're reading a Victorian novel,

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set in the world of crinolines and fainting wives, pea-soupers,

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and instead find themselves reading about the Trades Union Congress,

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the London Underground, the birth of feminism,

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scientific developments.

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So I wanted to invite the reader to interrogate how far we've come

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since the end of the 19th century and whether the end of the 19th

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century was actually more modern than we ever allow

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ourselves to think.

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And at the heart of the story is the argument, really,

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between two people who also then have a romantic attachment.

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The vicar, who is married, and the newly widowed woman

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who arrives in the country.

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Of course, they have a very different response to this apparent

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appearance of a serpent, a monster in the midst

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of the community.

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She thinks it's a natural event, because she wants

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it to be a dinosaur.

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He says it's all got to do with a breakdown in faith.

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Yeah.

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A very interesting collision.

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It is.

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I think that's another reason why the end of the 19th century

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are so interesting for me.

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I think debates around science and reason, the extent

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to which faith and science are antagonists, and whether or not

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they can support each other.

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Or if they are?

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Or if they are, precisely.

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It's something that is very much part of the dialogue now

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and is a debate that's been going on for a very long time.

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What I wanted to do was disrupt the idea that a man of faith

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like Will would be a man of superstition and fear.

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Actually, he's presented as being a man of reason.

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And that a man of science, like Cora, or a woman of science,

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like Cora, would be the reasonable and rational one.

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Actually, she is rather given to emotional display and not

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getting things quite right.

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Well, indeed.

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And the distinction is not as clear as we might first think?

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Exactly.

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The intriguing thing about your story is that there

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is the excitement of how to interpret this phenomenon that

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apparently has turned up in the community.

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But alongside it is, if you'll forgive me

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putting it like this, in this phrase,

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an old-fashioned love story?

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I wanted to present a relationship that seemed to be somewhere

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on a slightly indefinable spectrum, between an intellectual curiosity

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and an argument that comes between intellectual opposites.

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Emotional intimacy and romance, at what point does it switch

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from one thing to another?

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I think it's important to say to people that

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haven't read the book yet, perhaps, that although you have

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these ideas running through your head and you wanted to communicate

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the nature of this argument to the reader,

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in the end, it's a story.

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I mean, it's a story about a community that is gripped

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by fear and excitement.

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That is what draws the reader in?

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I hope so.

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More than anything else, I'm a storyteller.

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I'm a great spinner of yarns.

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I'm given to boring on at great length about anecdotes

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around family and friends, things that have happened to myself.

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That's what a good novel does.

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Ideally, however high the ideas, however much you want to interest

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or educate, really it should be about a cracking story that can pass

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the time on a wet weekend.

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But it's also true that what you display in this book,

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which is a wonderful read, enthralling read, is an affection

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for the Gothic imagination.

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I mean, it's a kind of Gothic novel, isn't it?

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Very much so.

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I'm very, very interested in what he Gothic actually is.

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Interestingly, you could lock three or four academics in a room,

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with no bread or water for ten hours, and not let them out

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until they have agreed on a definition of the Gothic.

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They'll starve, because it's something that people

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are constantly debating.

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The Gothic is a feeling.

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It's a sensation, is not a genre.

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It's the feeling that there is something that we

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don't quite understand.

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"Am I mad, or did I just see that thing?

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If I am mad, is that worse than a monster?"

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We all have fears that we, to some degree, enjoy.

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I mean, we enjoy treading on the edge of an abyss, in a way,

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in our minds, don't we?

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That's what we all do.

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We do.

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I think what a really good Gothic novel does,

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what I wanted to try to emulate, his arouse in the reader

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similar sensations to those felt by the characters.

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So, a successful Gothic novel will leave the reader feeling

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as unnerved and as uneasy as the characters who are

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encountering these fears themselves.

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So, a reader of a Gothic text like Dracula would be invited

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to think, what is it that I desire that I ought not to desire?

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So, you're drawn into the book like one of the characters.

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What kind of cracking stories did you grow upon?

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I sense that you've a love for the Victorian novel, just

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by the way you attack this period.

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I mean, attack in a sense of being a writer

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who immerses himself in it?

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Yes.

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I had a very interesting background.

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My parents were members of a strict Baptist chapel and I was brought up

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with very little access to popular culture.

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So, actually, I was raised on the King James Bible,

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which is one succession after the other of cracking yarns.

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Well, if you want to write good English...

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Exactly, in terms of exposure to cracking ideas,

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extraordinary prose, but also one story after another

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of heroism, and betrayal, and mystery, and strangeness,

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and magic, all incorporated in this one book.

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Because we didn't have a television and I didn't go

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to the cinema, and all the rest of it, I immersed myself instead

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in what was available in the house, which tended to be 19th century

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literature, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Bunyan, and what all of these have

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in common is storytelling.

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Yes.

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And so did you always know you were going to be,

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in some form, a storyteller?

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I did, very much so.

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In a way that I find very difficult to convey how

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intense this feeling is.

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The analogy I always use is that most women I know have always known

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that they would one day be a mother.

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I have always known, in that sort of visceral,

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"There's no point in my existing if I don't do it" kind of way, that

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I will tell stories in some way.

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Whatever period I would have been born into, I would have been

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a storyteller of one kind or another.

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What you've done in this book, of course, is to play with,

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but also to respect, a tradition.

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I mean, you enjoy writing a story, telling a story of the kind that

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you grew up reading.

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You're not interested in experiment.

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I mean, you want to obviously do something original

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with your characters, and have them stepping outside

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stereotypes, of course, but you are also paying homage

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to a storytelling tradition that you love?

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That's right.

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What I wanted to do simultaneously pay homage to and interrogate it.

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For example, one of the things I did was shy away from the kind

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of language we associate with 19th-century novels.

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So, nobody rides in a carriage.

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They call a cab.

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People do not speak to Mama and Papa, they speak to Mum and Dad.

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They go to a pub, rather than to an inn.

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In that sense, I was very much enjoying the tropes of 19th-century

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fiction and Gothic fiction, whilst also disrupting the reader

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and saying, you know, this is not a dusty period.

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This is not a dusty novel.

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It's modern, its contemporary.

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Well, I think anybody reading this book would come to the conclusion

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that you might have been quite happy at that time.

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Do you think you would have been?

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Yes, I was born 100 years too late, I suspect.

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Sarah Perry, author of the Essex Serpent,

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thank you very much.

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Thank you.

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