Need to Read More

If you love David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, as much as I love David Mitchell, you will appreciate this long-ass interview with him by the Paris Review. Dude seems like such a nice, unpretentious and down-to-earth guy while at the same time as competent, intelligent and well-read as anyone. Like, he really hits all the right notes in perfect balance. Don't you wish you were like that, and that all your friends were like that too? I'm ashamed that I still haven't read his latest because I was too cheap to pay 31 bucks at Kino (seriously though, come on. 31 bucks? for a paperback?). Sample:

"INTERVIEWER

In Number9Dream, you have a description of a gangster who has a voice “as thirsty as sandpaper.” He has “cavernous eye sockets, plump lips, mottled and flaky skin—the sort used on young actors playing old roles—and a wart on the corner of his eye bigger than an amorous nipple.”

MITCHELL

Good God!

INTERVIEWER

You don’t like it?

MITCHELL

I’m not sure. Am I guilty of Orwell’s criticism of Dickens’s fabulous gargoyles, that they make for rotten architecture? “His voice is as thirsty as sandpaper.” I think that’s from David Bowie’s description of Bob Dylan’s voice, a voice like sand and glue. Cavernous is the right word, at least. It has whiffs of cadaverous. Plump lips is OK too—the ps go pop: plump lips. The stuff about the makeup used on young actors playing old roles works. The makeup always looks wrong, doesn’t it? An amorous nipple is too pleased with itself. That’s writing, I suppose—dozens of decisions about what’s in, what’s out, what goes with what, what’s clever but not honest, what’s so honest that it’s a truism, what’s meretricious—and all just to produce one short sketch."

If you're on the Paris Review site they have a really awesome archive of all their "Art of " interviews over the years, scrolling through the last decades I already see a number I wanna read right now: Paul Auster, Joan Didion, Ian McEwan, Murakami, Ishiguro... etc. And there's 5 more decades worth. Goldmine!