When I had my first dreamy thoughts about this novel, I thought of the soundtrack, if I could just call it that, as a metaphor of the way that large-scale global events or international crises, big events, penetrate our lives and interrupt them. "I've always been interested in the role that accidents plays in our lives. A biologist once said to me, 'If your parents had made love just two seconds later, you wouldn't be here.' (Brian Medina) Dreams of what could have been "I thought if we could follow and really live inside a character over an entire lifetime, then it would unpeel the whole business of character and their own sense of self - that sense of self that changes.īritish novelist Ian McEwan spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in front of a live audience at the 2022 Toronto International Festival of Authors. I thought if we could follow and really live inside a character over an entire lifetime, then it would unpeel the whole business of character and their own sense of self - that sense of self that changes. "It's an interesting process how we get from real people to symbols on a page that generate in your mind a sense of the reality of a person. I think we've inherited an extraordinary tradition from the 19th century of the delineation of character on the page - from Jane Austen right through to Gustave Flaubert, to George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Dickens and so on. "I've always been interested in character. McEwan spoke to Eleanor Wachtel onstage in September 2022 before a live audience at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. McEwan is one of Britain's foremost novelists, known for provocative, inventive fiction that engages with current realities and issues. His 17 novels include the Booker Prize winner Amsterdam and the hugely popular Atonement, which became an award-winning film starring Keira Knightly. Many of his other titles have also been adapted for the screen, including The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Enduring Love, On Chesil Beach and The Children Act.
That is, until a transformative event leads the teenage Roland down a very different path from McEwan himself. From a desert army camp in Libya, to post-war Britain, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and pandemic Brexit – McEwan follows his fictional alter-ego through a lifetime marked by historical upheavals.
In his latest novel, Lessons, Ian McEwan shares his own intimate background with his central character, Roland Baines. In 2022, Ian McEwan spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his latest novel Lessons.
0 kommentar(er)
