Paul Murray & TRP -

[Becky Lindroos]

Has anyone here read Skippy Dies?  It’s really nothing like Gravity’s Rainbow but that’s where the author got his inspiration.  This snippet is from the Paris Review back in 2010.   Skippy Dies was long-listed for the Man Booker that year - got  a lot of other prizes as well.  It’s a long book - 671 pages.  If you listen to books the reading of this one is absolutely astounding with many voices doing different things.  It’s quite funny really,  but tragic, too in its own way.  

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PR:  And what got you writing in the first place?

Murray:   I read Gravity’s Rainbow in college, and that was a really big one for me. It’s so gorgeously written and so inventive and so imaginative that it sort of makes you want to hang up your pen because you think, how can anything approach this? But it was really inspiring for me when I was younger because it was a bridge between the world of literature and the world of pop culture. I really like pop culture: I watch TV and I listen to music and I look at the Internet. When I was in college I studied English literature, and it felt like there was a divide between those two worlds, because on the one hand you had Paradise Lost and so forth, and on the other you had Sebadoh and Pavement, and both of those world I loved very dearly. But Gravity’s Rainbow was the first book that captured the energy of popular culture. That was the first book that was like, wow, literature can do this, literature can—as well as being a higher art form that expresses grand notions about memory and loss and so forth—be something that my peers could conceivable enjoy. That was a breakthrough book for me. David Foster Wallace I came to a little bit later, but similar thing.

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Bekah 

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