“I cannot teach my 12-year-old daughter simple mathematics. I know nothing about mathematics. But I think a writer’s mind works with sympathy, not with understanding.”
Humdinger of an interview with Benjamin Labatut, author of When We Cease to Understand the World and The MANIAC, two of the best things I’ve read in the past 12 months. The first one was #83 (criminally low) on last Week’s NYT list of 100 best books since 2000.
The interview covers a lot of ground and Labatut comes of as a bit snobbish, but self deprecating too:
The very idea of capturing a voice inspires him to a crescendo of outraged yelps: “They’re not important to me! If you’re in London, you go out there, you listen to a bunch of voices around you. Just record them and imitate them! That’s not difficult! I don’t understand why there’s all this crazy, ‘Oh, we captured this.’ What is difficult is for any of those characters to say something interesting!
…but then…
“I’m just not that good of a writer – so I have to write about interesting things. If I was a wonderful prose writer, if I was a stylist, sure: I’d tell them who I had sex with and what I had for breakfast. But because I have never considered myself to be that good, I have to write about the most profound and confounding things out there.”
It’s a great piece, read it in full even if you haven’t read his books. After I finished it, Labatut is an even bigger enigma to me.
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