My novel about love, betrayal and chess in New Orleans: The Pride and the Sorrow

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Edith's War - author interview


Below is an interview I conducted with Andrew Smith about his novel EDITH'S WAR (recently released on March 26 2010).



"EDITH'S WAR is a story of hardship, love, passion, and motherhood during Liverpool's Blitz of World War II. In early summer of 1940 young Edith Maguire witnesses the internment of her Italian neighbours following Mussolini's declaration of war against Britain. Edith is swept up in the unthinkable event of her Italian friends' deportation to Canada on the Arandora Star and experiences first-hand the hardships and grief that ensue as a result of the ship's fateful voyage..."


Andrew Smith tells how he wrote the book, his inspiration and the connections between Britain, Canada and Italy below:

1

EDITH'S WAR tells a little-known story about Italian internment in Britain during WWII. How did you first encounter this information (new to me), and decide it would make a good novel?


I knew I wanted to write about how WWII changed British society, how the war was the mechanism that caused people to examine the way society worked and to call into question many of the conventions that had existed for centuries. I was researching this at the Imperial War Museum in London when I stumbled across the story of Italian internment in UK. The addition of Italians to the book, who are generally viewed as easy-going and uninhibited, especially compared to the British, fulfilled a welcome contrast to the depiction of an uptight British population. Also the accounts of their internment by harmless Italian men were classic examples of the stupidity of war and also of the way normal standards can change and deteriorate during wartime. This wartime shift in morality in relation to how the British Italians were treated, so different to how they might have been treated in peacetime, appalled and fascinated me.

2

I greatly enjoyed your evocation of place in the book - Liverpool, Venice (I am from Warrington, a town near Liverpool). Why/how did you choose these cities in particular to tell the story?

As you know, Liverpool was one of the hardest hit cities in Britain during bombing by the Germans. Liverpudlians suffered greatly during WWII. It was also the port from which many "aliens" were shipped to Canada or Australia, including hundreds of British Italian men. And the juxtaposition of the easy-going hedonistic and sensual city of Venice with the somewhat stiff and proper character that the younger brother had become, made him seem even more inhibited. And I made Venice the original home of the Italian couple who had lived in Liverpool during the war as a device to move the plot along. And finally you tend to write about what you know. I grew up on Merseyside, in Huyton, not far from Warrington, in the 40s and 50s. And I also know Venice well having spent a lot of time there during the last twenty years.

3

What was the greatest struggle you faced in writing the book?


There are good struggles and bad struggles. It's a huge struggle to write a novel like Edith's War because I had to do so much research and then the struggle that all author's face in developing characters, evolving a plot, etc. etc. But these are good struggles; I loved every minute of the research and writing stage. Then there is another huge struggle to get published. I tried long and hard to find an agent and a publisher and experienced many rejections along the way. This part of the process is excruciating and can be depressing if you start to take the rejections personally. One has to be strong, stick by the courage of your convictions, and realize that publishing is a business like any other.

4

Do you feel you are making a political point in writing this story? You decided to address the subject matter in the form of a novel. Why not non-fiction, or some other form?

If I'm making a political point it has to do with emphasizing the omnipresence and senselessness of war, and the fact that society seems unable to change in any significant way. I've written and published two non-fiction books, which I enjoyed writing, but I think it's difficult to impose passion and a distinct point of view into non-fiction. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think it's easier to do it more effectively in fiction. I wanted to state very clearly how humankind seems unable to avoid war (witness the presence of wars constantly throughout history), yet how senseless and unfair war always is. Even WWII, which might be seen as justified from the Allies' perspective, has hundreds if not thousands of examples of inhumanity and unnecessary suffering imposed by all sides. The novel form allowed me to portray actual events and have the reader make no mistake that I viewed them as senseless and unnecessary. I also wanted to imply how difficult it is for any of us to change, on a personal level but also on a larger scale, as a society. A non-fiction book usually only tells the story, whereas a novel can show the effects of a story and be so much more emotive in the telling.

5

How are you enjoying the publishing process, having your first book released? If there's one thing you could change about publishing a novel, what would it be?


It's very rewarding to hold the finished product of so much work in one's hands. But, to go back to my point about publishing being a business, I don't think many authors are prepared for the dog-eat-dog commercial side of publishing. I'm fortunate because I was somewhat prepared by my work in publishing, I'm a book designer, but even I wasn't ready for the alarming truths of how difficult it is to get one's book noticed and into the bookstores. If there's one thing I could change it would be that books are sold on their merit alone, and not because a publisher paid for a prominent position in a bookstore, or because the author has a TV show, or has won a literary prize, or one of the hundred other reasons a book gets noticed other than for the quality of writing or cleverness of plot, etc. But I'm sounding cynical. I'm really not, and I do still believe that if a book is good it'll get the readership it deserves.

6

A good amount of the novel is set in and about Italy. Do you feel personally connected to Italy?

Not particularly, other than I've spent a lot of time there since I was in my twenties and have quite a few Italian friends whom I love, and I like Italy better than almost anywhere else.

7

Do you remember when you first wanted to be a writer?


Yes I do, because I started writing late in life. It was 1988 and I was forty-years-old, when I took my first creative writing course. Just previous to that I had taken a bus trip over the Himalayas from Kashmir to Ladakh in Northern India and written a magazine article about it, the first piece of writing I'd ever published. The article won an award for travel writing, which inspired me to write more. So I took some courses and started writing short fiction, which I love writing. I don't know why it took me so long. I don't think being a writer was presented as an option at the school I went to in Liverpool so I never thought of it. So I went to art school and became a graphic designer. I've been lucky to have found writing, and to have another profession that allows me time to write but also keeps the wolf from the door. Because, as we know, books rarely provide much of an income.

8

How important are family relations in telling a good story?


I think human relations of any kind are crucial to a good story. We all need something we can relate to and human relations provide a great deal that is familiar to us all. I suppose family relations are often the most intense and usually the most influential on our lives so they hold a certain gravitas that no other relations hold, they're what forms us. So, while not necessary to a good story, family relations are certainly wonderful additions to a story.

9

What is your work schedule like when you're writing?

Once I've done research and am into the writing stage I tend to get up fairly early in the morning and write solidly for four to six hours. Once I actually sit down and put fingers to keyboard the time usually flies by. But I'm as bad as most writers about starting, I'll make a cup of tea I don't really need or thumb through a magazine I've already read. I don't know why many writers find it hard to actually start writing; maybe because it's so intense, it's hard work to write, and it's rather tiring. Often when I eventually stop I'm fairly drained. But once I start I rarely look up, except to check research, until I just run out of steam some half-a-dozen hours later.


10

What are you working on right now? A departure, or something related to historical fiction across different times and places like EDITH'S WAR?


Some months ago, at a stage when Edith's War was out of my hands with an editor, I wrote the first two chapters of a book set in contemporary London. Unlike Edith's War it'll be a straight single time period narrative. The story is about a paparazzi photographer who is down on his luck having lost his business and his wife. He's a recovering alcoholic, estranged from his family, and broke. But he has a cache of photos of celebrities that might be worth a great deal. But because of his alcoholism and past indiscretions nobody wants to know. There's a whole plot in my head about how an opportunity to get exclusive photos of a drugged-out music star falls in his lap. Actually it's a ploy by the recording company to get publicity, etc. etc. The idea comes from a fascination I have with the symbiotic relationship that celebrities often have with the press. Princess Di being a prime example. I'm also interested in the whole phenomenon of celebrity, especially in our society with the proliferation of shows like American Idol and with people like Paris Hilton who have no talent or skill (they don't even model) but who have become celebrities earning millions. I'm keen to get back to writing it, but first we have to get out there and sell Edith's War.


Thank you for your time, Andrew. You can read more about EDITH'S WAR at http://www.edithswar.com/ and on Facebook here.


I'll also be posting this interview on http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/ and a link from my website http://www.mattfullerty.com/.



Biography
Andrew Smith was born in Liverpool, England. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1974 since when he's worked in magazines and book publishing. Andrew Smith's writing has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, and has garnered a Western Magazine Award for Travel Writing. He has published two non-fiction books: Highlights, an illustrated history of cannabis (co-author) and Strangers in the Garden, the secret lives of our favorite flowers. He's enjoyed writing fiction since 1990, which, fortunately, is when he began.



Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time, Part 1


Mark Twain, Austen HaterOne man's Shakespeare is another man's trash fiction.


Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard's work:

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare....


But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not:


Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Robert Frost?

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.


John Steinbeck, surely?


I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.


Oh, dear.


But don't think these pleasantries were penned in a frolicsome hour by dilettante book critics with an unslaked thirst for a bit of author-bashing.

The Shakespearean take-down was George Bernard Shaw, the Austen shin-bone basher was Mark Twain, the anti-Frost poet was James Dickey, and the quick!-bring-me-the-bucket-it's-Steinbeck was James Gould Cozzens.

Yes, hell hath no fury like one author gleefully savaging another author's work.


And, lucky for us, there's plenty to be had where that came from.

Cast your eye on these, the 50 most memorable author vs. author put-downs (in no particular order; though if you've got a favorite, by all means, comment on it, below).


Hemingway: writer of bells, balls, and bulls

1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)


As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.


2. Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, according to Martin Amis (1986)


Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 -- the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

3. John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820)


Here are Johnny Keats's p@# a-bed poetry...There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.


4. Edgar Allan Poe, according to Henry James (1876)

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

5. John Updike, according to Gore Vidal (2008)


I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously...oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.


6. William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, according to Samuel Pepys (1662)


...we saw 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.


7. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)


Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age's humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher.


Charles Dickens writing something rotten, vulgar, and un-literar

8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898)


About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up 'The Old Curiosity Shop', and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot's. If a novelist can't write where is the beggar.


9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000)


How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.


10. Oscar Wilde, according to Noel Coward (1946)


Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.


11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov


Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.


12. John Milton's Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson


'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.


13. Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, according to Mark Twain (1897)

Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy of 'The Vicar of Wakefield', that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.


14. Ezra Pound, according to Conrad Aiken (1918)


For in point of style, or manner, or whatever, it is difficult to imagine anything much worse than the prose of Mr. Pound. It is ugliness and awkwardness incarnate. Did he always write so badly?


15. James Joyce's Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw (1921)


I have read several fragments of 'Ulysses' in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.


16. George Bernard Shaw, according to Roger Scruton (1990)


Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

Goethe, author of the worst book Samuel Butler ever read

17. Jane Austen, according to Charlotte Bronte (1848)


Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'...than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.


18. Goethe, according to Samuel Butler (1874)


I have been reading a translation of Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister.' Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea....Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.


19. John Steinbeck, according to James Gould Cozzens (1957)


I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn't read the proletariat crap that came out in the '30s.


20. Herman Melville, according to D.H. Lawrence (1923)


Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like 'Moby Dick'....One wearies of the grand serieux. There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!


21. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson (1791)


Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves...I doubt whether 'The Tale of a Tub' to be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.


22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927)


Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.


23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911)


His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.

24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)


I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.


25. Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner (1922)

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

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