The novelist, who won the 2005 Booker prize for this novel, recalls the childhood holidays that caused him
At what instant can the constitution of a romance be said to have begun? Nabokov claimed he felt the first tickling caress of Lolitawhen he read a newspaper report of a captive ape that after much coaxing used to produce a depict of- what else?- the bars of its enclosure. Joyce’s firstly time with Nora Barnacle sterilized Ulyssesin Dublin on 16 June 1904 in perpetuity. And there was a real-life model for the Tadzio of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, discerned by the author one evening in the summer of 1911 in the dining room of the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido and lovingly, adoringly, retained, for ever. Or so they say.
For my part, any tale that I am working on seems to have had no beginning, but to have been always somehow under way; perhaps there is only one tale, of which every so often I write a segment. Yet in the case ofThe SeaI do seem to recall an initiating instant. I say “seem”, because it’s possible I imagined it; in artwork, origination stories are common, and enduring.
Read more: theguardian.com
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