What a wonderful article, fascinating and finely written. It touches upon so many things, each with significance and impact: loss, living and dying, our changing attitudes towards mortality, the way in which experience can be transformed into art, cultural resonances; to list but a few.
I’m thinking i’ll buy this book, and i don’t read much fiction these days. Having read this article, it won’t feel like fiction.
Well said. Authors are often advised to provide a “hook” in the first page or two of their novel, to persuade the reader the book has something worthwhile to say and to read on. More often than not, in my experience, the hook is melodramatic and overwrought. This article is, however, a most engaging hook. How, I wonder, does writing about people in Henry VIII’s reign (so Wikipedia tells me) allow the author to explore and resolve her grief?
Indeed. The quality of the article makes me want to read The Book of Days, but also to read The Inheritors. I have had a quick look at the reviews on the Big River (you know which) website and will now see if our local bookshop has copies of each. Thanks for the article.
AH
AC Harper
2 months ago
Care must be taken not to trespass clumsily on territories of gender, racial identity, or sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between unacceptable cultural appropriation and creative imagination.
Quite so, otherwise we would have no Science Fiction and have to learn (properly) a foreign language before we read a book written in it rather than a translation.
A comment as drôle as it is fair. I used to wonder why people seemed unable to accept fiction as, well, fiction. Finally, it occurred to me that, for so many, their lives as lived pretty much are an internet-curated fiction. No wonder written fiction seems so post modern to them, so intrusive. What a sad pass we have come to.
Report this comment
This site is registered on wpml.org as a development site. Switch to a production site key to remove this banner.
What a wonderful article, fascinating and finely written. It touches upon so many things, each with significance and impact: loss, living and dying, our changing attitudes towards mortality, the way in which experience can be transformed into art, cultural resonances; to list but a few.
I’m thinking i’ll buy this book, and i don’t read much fiction these days. Having read this article, it won’t feel like fiction.
Well said. Authors are often advised to provide a “hook” in the first page or two of their novel, to persuade the reader the book has something worthwhile to say and to read on. More often than not, in my experience, the hook is melodramatic and overwrought. This article is, however, a most engaging hook. How, I wonder, does writing about people in Henry VIII’s reign (so Wikipedia tells me) allow the author to explore and resolve her grief?
Indeed. The quality of the article makes me want to read The Book of Days, but also to read The Inheritors. I have had a quick look at the reviews on the Big River (you know which) website and will now see if our local bookshop has copies of each. Thanks for the article.
Quite so, otherwise we would have no Science Fiction and have to learn (properly) a foreign language before we read a book written in it rather than a translation.
A comment as drôle as it is fair. I used to wonder why people seemed unable to accept fiction as, well, fiction. Finally, it occurred to me that, for so many, their lives as lived pretty much are an internet-curated fiction. No wonder written fiction seems so post modern to them, so intrusive. What a sad pass we have come to.