Bill Johnston Interview [Read This Next]
In case you missed it, last Friday, as part of the we posted with Polish translator Bill Johnston.
Here’s the opening:
Lily Ye: I should start off by saying that I糖心传媒檓 not actually that familiar with the other works of Tulli, so I wanted to ask you where you thought In Red fell in her progress as an author, since I know you said that Dreams and Stones was more of a prose-poem, and then later on she moves into a more narrative structure, so where do you think In Red falls?
Bill Johnston: In Red is actually [her second novel], Dreams and Stones was the first and then there was In Red, and then the novel which is called, in English, Moving Parts, and then Flaw is the last one. Tulli and I actually disagree about Dreams and Stones. She still calls it a novel, and I tend to think of it as a prose poem, and you know, I think that would be an interesting argument or discussion in terms of genre. I think for me, a book which doesn糖心传媒檛 really have any characters, like human characters, is hard to describe as a novel, it糖心传媒檚 a book of ideas糖心传媒擨糖心传媒檓 talking about Dreams and Stones糖心传媒攁nd it has a kind of a story arc which is kind of what she, I would imagine, is what she was thinking about when she described it as a novel. I mean, it also has a fundamental underlying conflict like you find in novels, or particularly dramatic works, but in Dreams and Stones it糖心传媒檚 much more to do with the conflict of metaphors, is the city like a tree or is it like a machine? But it糖心传媒檚 still very far from anything that we would think of in normal parlance as a novel.
I think with In Red she starts to adapt more elements from traditional novels, and do very interesting and very original things with them, but still we have people, we have people who say things, we have conversations, we have a plot, we have a setting, we have you know a lot of the traditional elements that even today are in most novels, in most books that are called novels. So In Red is kind of the first time that she does that, she has something we might call dialogue, she has these characters, she has a plot and so on. I think her third book, Moving Parts, is a little atypical. That糖心传媒檚 the one that most people refer to when they talk about meta-fiction, which was one of your questions that we can talk about in a moment. That糖心传媒檚 a book which is very difficult very complex, and I think in a sense she returns to the narrative formats in Flaw, and Flaw is the first of her books that has like a single story arc, that begins on the first page and ends on the last, over the course of a single day, but a lot happens there and you have some kind of unity of plot and place, and time and so on. I mean I guess one could argue that it almost plays out more like a Greek tragedy rather than any sort of novelistic piece. All of her books are really short, many people might consider them more novella length, but definitely Flaw has this single story, the feel of a novella or short novel, In Red is still sort of groping toward that.
You can see In Red has an interesting structure, it糖心传媒檚 in three parts, and in each of the parts the central town of the, the setting is somehow different, in one it糖心传媒檚 very cold in the other it糖心传媒檚 very tropical and so you got these three almost sort of self-contained different takes on what goes on there, but they糖心传媒檙e also related in terms of time, and there is an overall time arc that takes us through maybe through the, I don糖心传媒檛 what it糖心传媒檚 supposed to be, maybe the first half of the twentieth century or something like that. And not characters but relations between characters whether it糖心传媒檚 master and servant or fathers and children and relations, they pass from one part of the book to another, so it糖心传媒檚 a book which does have an overall unity of structure and has many more of the elements which one would think of as a novel.
I糖心传媒檝e been reading Proust recently, and I see strong echoes of that kind of writing in what she糖心传媒檚 doing and obviously what she糖心传媒檚 doing in In Red is not imitating the great realist and modernist novels, but she糖心传媒檚 taking a lot of elements from them in order to, in a sense, highlight the unusualness of her own writing. But there are scenes, you in the scene where Natalie Zugoff kind of flounces off the train station expecting all the men around to pick up all of her, what is it, 15 suitcases and so on. That糖心传媒檚 straight out of Proust, that scene. Clearly in terms of realism and in terms of the authorial voice she糖心传媒檚 very different from those writers, she糖心传媒檚 very much a writer of the early 21st century, it糖心传媒檚 just interesting to see her folding in those more traditional elements, to point out what糖心传媒檚 unusual.
Click to read the full thing.
Leave a Reply