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WHAT
BOOK? AUTHOR
SALLEY VICKERS SPEAKS TO The Daily Mail
At
present I am reading the Collected works of Bruno Schulz, the remarkable
Polish artist and writer. who was murdered by the Gestapo. Schulz's
last works, a series of fairy tale scenes painted for a member of
the SS for his son's nursery, are now the object of a fierce international
ownership controversy.
Assuming
I already have the King James Bible and Shakespeare (both favourite
reading matter) on any island I'm marooned on, it would be either
be Emma by Jane Austen or Homer's Odyssey. The first is a great
comic novel by an acknowledged mistress of irony and understatement.
It has a scintillating dark underlayer, and I love her grasp of
the power of the ordinary. The Odyssey is a rich story but also
a great moral tale. The return of the wandering Odysseus to his
faithful wife, Penelope, and the account of their matrimonial bed,
which is carved out of a living tree growing within their bed-chamber,
is one of the most erotic scenes I know - far more so than the explicit
sex scenes which modern fiction is full of.
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I
would give Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right' to George Bush. This
is a wonderful study of the perils of self-righteousness, which
I was very pleased to see is to be serialised next year by the BBC.
It's about a man who, needless to say, is quite wrong, but persists
in the belief of the rightness of his convictions.
I
am not going to say which contemporary books have left me cold as
I disagree with the modern habit of knocking other writers' work.
If I don't like a book I won't review it. It takes patience and
courage to write and publish, so I don't see it as my place to undermine.
However, a book which is supposed to be a classic which leaves me
cold is 'Paradise Lost' by Milton. It's too grandiose for me. I
much prefer Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' a marvellous modern
commentary on 'Paradise Lost' as well as a great contemporary trilogy
in its own right.
Salley
Vickers © 2002
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