Great little story about an event at the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just finished in New York.
In a discussion between Paul Auster and Enrique Vila-Matas, the conversation focusses on readers being judged in the same way that authors are:
"Then it was time for questions, and a woman's voice piped up from the front: "Don't you think you were a little hard on the reader?" she said. "Isn't a reader smart just for opening a book?"
"That's what I said," Auster retorted.
"But don't they get what they get?" she said, and went on to say that readers shouldn't have to have any prejudices or expectations about what a book is; that reading should be like sex."
"I agree with you completely," he said, and went on again about the critics.
"You should relax; this is your wife interjecting!" she said, and a gasp went through he crowd. It seemed that, just as a character in one of Auster's books wanders into the life of the author, we had become caught in the middle of a minor domestic dispute! But Auster accepted her comments, as Vila-Mates looked on bemusedly."
The rest is here.
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
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