Exactly what its title suggests, a collection of writers talking to other writers. Each conversation is one on one, with one writer having selected the other as their partner/subject, meaning that it's generally an up-and-comer (if you consider the likes of Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Jonathan Lethem to be up-and-comers) interviewing a more established writer who they particularly admire (and, in many cases, seemingly have been strongly influenced by); it being writers talking to writers, the topic of conversation is, more often than not, writing, and often - and these are the ones that I enjoyed the most - at quite a general level, asking Big Questions along the lines of "what is the role of the writer in society today?", "how should we write?", and so on.
I've been carrying this book around for months now (I've been stalled halfway through the last one, with Tobias Wolff - that name brings back the memories! - for weeks, having been distracted by other things), and the details of most of the conversations aren't fresh in my mind any more, but naturally I was drawn to the pieces involving writers with whose work I'm familiar to greater or lesser extents - those involving Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Tom Stoppard in particular. Ben Ehrenreich's conversation with John Banville is a bit of a highlight; and Zadie's engaging ramblings in company with Ian McEwan are also well worth the reading. Apart from those, the one which left the largest impression is Thisbe Nissen's talk with Siri Hustvedt, in which everything that the latter said made me think that I couldn't possibly not like her novels (none of which I've read before).
Anyway, as I said, the details have largely fled my conscious memory by now, but I'm sure that the insights and inspirations with which these conversations are liberally scattered have lodged somewhere in my mind, where they'll operate to my benefit and edification. It really is fascinating to read what these brilliant writers have to say about their craft, and how they arrived at and continued to approach their current points as writers, and not a little reassuring into the bargain.
* * *
My own writing continues, slowly. I think that the best way to write a novel would probably be to forge ahead as quickly as possible, just putting the words on the page at the time and only later returning to hone and craft them to whatever contingent perfection might be possible, but I don't seem capable of that wilful initial neglect - instead, I find myself painstakingly working and reworking individual paragraphs, sentences, phrases, as I go. (In particular, the attempt to stick as closely as possible to a phenomenological account is giving me serious grief.)
I've been thinking about the novels which have been, whether or not I've been aware of it, serving as touchstones for me throughout this whole writing process, and have come up with The Secret History, The Great Gatsby, To The Lighthouse, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; each of those is a touchstone for me as a reader and as a person, but there's something about them which also moves and inspires me in my writing, and I find myself recurring to them over and over and over again.
* * *
Incidentally, I noticed that the review of The Secret River written by the person who sat in on our Contemporary Historical Fictions seminar last year has come out in the latest Meanjin and was vaguely happy to notice a footnoted acknowledgement of Clara Tuite and her honours seminar for sharing ideas at an early stage.
* * *
This may also be a good place to set down another reading list for the next few months / indefinite future, based on recentish recommendations and general 'ought to read for one reason or anothers', more or less in order:
* Ali Smith - The Accidental [because it seems like absolutely everyone is talking about this one - and see here]
* William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury [because I've been mucking around with what I've been thinking of as 'floating dialogue' lately, and Wei tells me that Faulkner does something similar, plus he's been recommended to me in the past]
* Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved [see above]
* Sarah Waters - Night Watch [because Waters is fab and this one seems to be making waves - inter alia, shortlisted for the Orange prize, I noticed]
* Joyce Carol Oates - Them
* Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
* George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch
* Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
* And, of course, Swann's Way - but then no one, least of all myself, really expects me to actually read the thing any time soon.
