Richard Morgan interview

[bekah]

  Never having heard of DeLillo before I picked Underworld up off the 
new-release shelf because I liked the cover art.  I proceeded to read 
the Prelude standing in the aisle of my local indie bookstore, 
mesmerized.   The sentences of Underworld are music to me.   I'd 
never been touched like that with words before.   I took it home (at 
full indie price)  and read it cover to cover in about a week.  I've 
read it 3 times since.  I've read everything DeLillo's written since 
Running Dog and I have the earlier books here as a part of my 
retirement plan.  (lol)

Saramago is excellent and  Orhan Pamuk is fabulous.   I truly love 
The Satanic Verses although I avoided it for so long because I 
thought it was just hype.   Nope.    Garcia  Marquez is incredible. 
The oeuvres of most of these really great authors are uneven in 
quality.  Not every book can be the great American (or Portuguese or 
Indian or Turkish or Mexican) novel.  

Is there a connecting similarity between the books?  I don't know. 
They can sit next to the Pynchon collection.   The big one to go next 
to Pynchon, imo,  is Ulysses but that's another era.

Bekah


At 10:35 PM -0400 4/29/07, Monte Davis wrote:
>DeLillo delivers for me on a lot of counts, but his humor is both sparser
>and bleaker. And Pynchon's humor, even (or especially) at its goofiest, is
>really important and central to his value to me, not ornament or comic
>relief or distraction.
>
>I'm glad to see you praise Jose Saramago, whom I think pulls off miracles
>(even though I'm reading in translation). He's definitely the most Tristram
>Shandean novelist alive -- and Pynchon has set that bar pretty high.