as a novelist I’m always much more centered on people and their emotions and the intimate experience of our daily lives. One kind of opens out into the other. In the case of Dissident Gardens, thinking about this kind of character, and what kinds of lives they’ve lived, forced me to look at their historical circumstances and their political lives because that was what defined them. I wanted to write about these characters who were really entrenched in their political lives. This huge distance between the daily lives we live and the sense of history in the background was really my subject, but it meant I had to get the history into the book. I had to know a certain amount of it myself, and I had to make the reader feel it all around them. It was a really demanding project on that level. I hope I got it right! You never want to load it too much up with research. You want it to seem like the characters are living, breathing, their emotions are the center of the story, but in this case I had to kind of make them live the kind of lives where they are always glancing at politics and culture and history. It’s sort of like the sea they’re swimming in...
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:56:35 +0000
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