Interviewed by
A.V. Club,
Jonathan Franzen discusses the relationship between a writer and a reader.
[JF:]It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else.
AVC: Has technology changed that? Hasn’t that always been the essential mission of the novelist?
JF: I think it was always implicit, and in the best fiction, it was always there. I think when people were responding to Crime And Punishment, when they were responding to Jane Eyre, they really felt un-alone. But there were so many other kinds of writing, and so many other kinds of reading going on, and the novel served so many other functions back then, that the really elemental function of literature was not as obvious. And you didn’t have to attend to it so much. (Gregg LaGambina)
'Back then' they also had to write under pseudonyms, as the
Independent (Ireland) recalls:
Meanwhile, throughout history, authors such as Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen and the Brontës were forced to write anonymously for more austere reasons than simply fuelling speculation. (Deirdre Reynolds)
And now for one of those not-so-rare allusions to the Brontës in accounts of all things horses. The
Telegraph has an article on Mary King, 'horsewoman extraordinaire' according to them and later described as follows,
There was a bit of a female Heathcliff about King as she set off up the hill into the mist, fog, and towards the trees, a lady on a passionate mission. (Will Greenwood)
Associated Content has a couple of new article on
Wuthering Heights:
'Analysis of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights' and
'Important Quotations in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Their Meanings'. The
British Journal of Psychology reviews
Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope. And
Nope Sport explains how
the Full Brontë urban races to take place in Thornton and Haworth on 9-10 October were born.
As for blogs,
Licnis oldala (in Hungarian) and
Bazgradełko (in Polish) both post briefly about
Wuthering Heights.
Shelf Love comments on
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and
De todo un poco... pero casi nada posts in Spanish about the Brontë sisters, with a short review of
Jane Eyre, and
A vontade de regresso writes in Portuguese about Charlotte Brontë.
Copper Penny wonders if
Villette is an 'unfilmable book' and suggests a way of approaching the novel on-screen.
Also, via
Copper Penny, we have seen that the latest issue of
Stylist (see pages 50 and 51) has an article on the Brontës:
The Brontës: Back in Vogue by Megan Conner, with special attention to the forthcoming adaptations of
Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights.
The
WW Ladies Book Club Blurbs recommends
Jane Slayre. And finally,
Memoirs of a Vintage Magpie writes about a recent trip to Haworth (with pictures) and Flickr user
Walruscharmer has uploaded several pictures taken on the way to Top Withins.
Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wuthering Heights
0 comments:
Post a Comment