Multi-angled

Ahead of her appearance at the Cork International Short Story Festival, and the Dublin vernissage for Things I Don’t Want to Know, we’re revisiting Darran Anderson’s interview with Deborah Levy.

I can’t understand why everyone isn’t attracted to modernism. How can we disagree with the idea that there is subjective as well as chronological time? One of the things that really fascinates me about the novels of Anita Brookner is that I regard her male and female characters as 18th century characters living in the 20th century. This is not a dig at a skilled writer — it genuinely interests me. How can anyone who is engaged with literature be arrogant and dumb enough to dismiss the writing of (in no particular order) Whitman, Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Pound, Stein, Eliot, Genet, Beckett, Woolf, and Mansfield as an irrelevant experiment? I was born into a world that was utterly changed by modernism. Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me. How can point of view not be multi-angled? Don’t they have to blinker horses with a leather blind to stop them from having a multi-angled point of view?

And Kevin Breathnach’s interview for Totally Dublin:

Thing I Don’t Want To Know is the title of my essay and it is a response to Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I Write. Orwell identified four headings to sum up his drive to hammer the typewriter. One of them is Political Purpose. So I use this heading to give contemporary feminism a bit of airing. I explore the idea that in the 21st Century there is a new set of patriarchal inflections that require Strong Modern Women to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled. That’s quite a call. Best not to answer the phone.

(And listening to Levy on the Granta podcast.)