뉴욕타임즈 'By the Book' 칼럼에서

책을 좋아하다 보니 매주, 다른 사람들의 독서에 관한 얘기를 읽을

수 있는, 뉴욕타임즈 'By the Book' 칼럼 즐기기를 잘 안 빠뜨린다.

가끔은, 요전의 "By the Book: Yo-Yo Ma" 처럼, 칼럼에서 일부

내용을 여기에 소개/홍보 겸 나를 위한 메모로 올리기도 한다.

'By the Book'은 이 블로그 'Bookmarks'에 연결시켜져 있다.

 

(아래 <Jane Fonda>를 클릭하면, 칼럼 전체 내용 -- 모든 질문에

대한 그녀의 대답 -- 을 읽을 수 있다.)

  

 

< Jane Fonda >

 

 

Do you have any comfort reads?

Mary Oliver’s and Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

 

What moves you most in a work of literature?

When I come upon some idea or story that alters my personal trajectory and when an author has used unique words in a unique way to bring some moment or character alive.

 

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I’m not interested in romance or scary novels. I will occasionally read classics — Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust — or terrific contemporary novelists. But I mostly read nonfiction books focusing on whatever topic I am trying to learn about. Lately, I’m reading books about racism by Black authors like Baldwin, Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson and Ibram Kendi....

 

 

 

< Claire Messud >

 

(소설 "The Emperor's Children" 작가)

 

 

What’s the last great book you read?

... And this year, I’ve reread both “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace,” which rather complicates the question. Aside from those two, I’d say probably Vasily Grossman’s “Stalingrad,” which I read last winter; and before that, Walter Kempowski’s “All for Nothing.”

 

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

... If it’s badly written, it’s not a great book. What makes a book great, as Camus rightly says in “Create Dangerously,” is its truthfulness, its honesty about the human experience. To be truthful, you have to use language precisely, judiciously, with, as Nabokov would have it, the imagination of a scientist and the precision of a poet. If you fail at the level of language, if you write in clichés or secondhand phrases, your failure is metaphysical, and you’re doomed. Prose can be clunky, uneven, even ugly, and be true — but that’s not “bad prose”; it’s just unbeautiful prose, which isn’t the same thing.

 

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I’m interested in what it’s like to be alive on this earth. I’m interested in human truth. I’m not interested in escapism, and not particularly interested in entertainment for its own sake. Writers can explore life and truth in any genre — Penelope Fitzgerald and Hilary Mantel do this in historical fiction; Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin do it with science fiction; the scriptwriter Sally Wainwright does it in her TV crime series “Happy Valley.” So I wouldn’t rule something out by genre. That said, I gravitate toward the kind of fiction that is of no genre at all, and therefore gets called “literary fiction,” or used to; the kind that is more interested in people and in language than in plot.