Word: novels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...know of Audrey Niffenegger is her achingly romantic novel The Time Traveler's Wife, then you're in for a surprise with her latest. Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger's follow-up to her time-hopping best seller, is a Victorian ghost story set in the present that's more in tune with her creepy "visual novels" The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters. Starring a pair of waifish twins who inherit their mysterious (and dead, but maybe not-so-dead) aunt's London flat, the book is set in and around the city's famous Highgate Cemetery. Niffenegger talked...
There are many parallels between your last book, a graphic novel called The Three Incestuous Sisters, and Her Fearful Symmetry. Is there something in the way that sisters interact, in your mind, that makes those relationships fertile ground for stories to grow out of? Yes, though I should hasten to add that my relationship with my own sisters is idyllic and lovely. However, there's so much potential for rivalry and competition. But then there are all the upsides of companionship and that "Who knows you better than your sister?" feeling...
...things that digital books could do more effectively. I can imagine, for example, that with textbooks and telephone books and all of those resources, it would be lovely for them to be searchable the way we're used to searching the Internet. But to read a novel, I would really much rather have a physical book. I realize that e-books are in their infancy and that the machines will improve, but at the moment, [for art books] the image-rendering qualities are just laughable...
...tempest broke on Thursday, after video clips of a television debate broadcast three days earlier were posted on the Internet. In the clips, far-right politician Marine Le Pen reads truncated extracts from Mitterrand's novel, including passages in which Mitterrand describes visits to Thai clubs and brothels to procure sex from prostitutes he at times calls "boys" and "young boys." "The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide," Mitterrand writes. (See pictures of the French crackdown on migrants...
...detractors point out that sleeping with minors is indeed a crime - and that if, as Mitterrand's book suggests, that is what he did, he should step down. But Mitterrand has always maintained his novel was intended as a kind of full disclosure of things he'd seen and experienced. While the portion of the book dealing with prostitution might worry some readers - "I got into the habit of paying for boys," he writes - Mitterrand argues that his use of the word boy referred to younger men rather than minors. Many older gay men use the expression in that...