The Globe and the Mail offers
an interview with Simon Schama, the writer and narrator of the outstanding
documentary A History of Britain.
Simon Schama is an
award-winning author whose books include Citizens: A Chronicle of the French
Revolution, Landscape and Memory and Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and
the American Revolution. His New Yorker columns earned him a National Magazine
Award for criticism, and he is a contributing editor at the Financial Times. He
is also a professor at Columbia University. Schama's latest book is Belonging:
The Story of the Jews 1492-1900.
What's the best advice you've
ever received?
"Be brave," the
last words of my father before he died.
Which fictional character do
you wish you'd created?
Chandler's Philip Marlowe
gumshoe as wise-cracker, supreme observer of the human condition. Nothing
passes him by: poor taste in interior decoration; a smudge of lipstick; a
certain something on someone's breath; the possibility of a decent cop; a
telling touch of tinny in a nervous chuckle. And yet, he's also a hopeless sap,
the hardest-boiled softest-centred romantic in fiction.
… Which books have you reread
most in your life?
War and Peace. Next time will
be my tenth reading. Sometimes I skip around in translations, but they have to
have kept the French passages untranslated. Pevear and Volokhonsky is by far
the most satisfying version. Nothing important in human life is missing from
Tolstoy's pages – the rage to power; the futile energy spent on schemes
political and erotic; the swell and collapse of friendship. But the important
things come at you sideways and often in sharp close-up like the fuzz on Lisa's
upper lip, which is a tipoff to Andrei's irritation.
… Is there a book you
consider a guilty pleasure?
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" –
the line sings to me as I pass the Waugh shelf in my library – just one more
hoot with Boot. Stupendously politically incorrect and generally outrageous, so
all the more delicious on yet another reading. But there isn't much Waugh I
don't love. Brideshead is a bit mushy, though has one of his great openings.
But it was his endings which were startlingly brilliant, the place where he was
most brilliant: the eye-poke ending of Vile Bodies; and the most terrifying of
all in A Handful of Dust; so terrifying, in fact, that Waugh's American
publisher demanded a different and less merciless conclusion, whereupon Waugh
produced something ostensibly kinder but in fact a conclusion of ashen
cynicism. Two endings, in bleakness competition – that's what I call a writer.
You can read the rest of the
interview via the below link:
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