Richard Morgan interview

[bekah]

Oh,  and William Vollmann's  Europe Central can sit on my shelf 
anywhere it wants to.

Bekah

At 8:37 PM -0700 4/29/07, bekah wrote:
>  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.