And if that is true, then the conventional novel, a form hardly changed since Jane Austen and Balzac, is a rather old-fashioned way of exploring our rapidly changing modern world. When I sit down to write a novel I don’t have “experimental” in mind. The novel opens with a writer working in a prison, as I once did myself. Enjoyed also the challenge of making them cohere, both in meaning and language, with the lines I wrote myself. As far as I know, no one has ever written a book quite like this – a whole novel, a narrative novel, made mostly out of lines from other works.

Source: The Irish Times February 12, 2018 06:00 UTC