Paris Review Interviews, IV by The Paris Review

Paris Review Interviews, IV Reviews

• 
  Antigone

  "The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."
  
  William Styron introduces the fourth and final volume of the interviews; an eminently satisfactory and solid selection to finish off the collection. Kerouac is here, and V.S. Naipaul, eccentric characters both. E.B. White, as grounding a literary presence as might be wished for, surprises all in admitting he's not much for reading. He prefers, by far, going outside to see what Nature is up to. There's a wonderful piece submitted by James Lipton; an extract of his interview with Stephen Sondheim. Haruki Murakami actually bristles on occasion, especially with regard to his placement in the pantheon of Japanese literature. But the author who had me sitting up to take note, and whom it's clear I must read at some point, is Paul Auster. The manner in which he expresses his experience of the mid-life conflict...so simply put, so purely felt...is well worth quoting here:
  
  "I'm well into my fifties now and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you - many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren't there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It's hard for a young person to understand this. It's not that a twenty year old doesn't know he's going to die, but it's the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person - you can't know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy."
  
  This four-part collection has its ups and downs in terms of focus and substance, but on the whole I found it fascinating as a record of artistic thought.
  
• 
  Maree

  I stayed up half the night finishing this book. What a GREAT book. Some of the greatest writers talking about their craft, how they began, what influenced them. The interviewers were sharp, witty and knew the writers they were talking to. I found myself wanting to run out and get the 3 volumes that preceded this one. I am sure this book will be of interest to anyone who loves to read, for writers who are learning their craft and for those who are both. I recommend this book to everyone!!!!!
• 
  Nancy

  Wow! Another Firstreads win! This is great!
  
  What a delight—to be exposed to such a variety of opinions about the craft of writing from authors of such varied backgrounds and ethnicities. I agree with Salmon Rushdie when he states in his introduction that the interviews sometimes reveal “more of the author than even the author knows.” Marianne Moore seems rather arrogant, Kerouac is cocky (but I do love what he has to say about haiku poetry), Philip Roth seems to have a chip on his shoulder, while Wodehouse and Murkami are warm and approachable.
  
  I was shocked about E. B. White not being a reader, saying “I would rather sail a boat than crack a book.” p.136. Conversely, Paul Auster can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn’t a voracious reader as an adolescent. Both Maya Angelou and Marilynne Robinson speak about their faith with Angelou saying she’s trying to be a Christian (how true, it’s the most any of us can do); she reads the Bible for its language. And Robinson states, “The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.” p.450.
  
  Orphan Pamuk plots a novel by knowing the whole story line in advance, dividing it into chapters and thinking up the details of what he’d like to happen in each. Most of the writers however, like William Styron, don’t do a lot of preplanning. Murakami says, “I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what is going to happen. I just wait.” p.341. And Robinson doesn’t plot her novels. She feels action is generated out of character. Grossman says when he gets stuck while writing, he sometimes writes a letter to his protagonist to get ‘unstuck.’ John Ashbury gives us insight into the abstract or ambiguous quality of his poetry, saying he likes giving the reader the raw material to create their own poem. I discovered why in Pamuk’s book “Snow,” his character Ka’s manuscript of poetry is lost so there is no poetry in the book. Pamuk admits in the interview that poetry is not his forté.
  
  All-in-all, the interviews are packed with information and stimulating insight. I want to re-read Wodehouse, search out Paul Auster, who I’ve never read, and dig out my old copies of John Ashbury so I can participate in his poetry.
  
• 
  Lee Kofman

  Yet another marvelous, marvelous The Paris Review collection of rich interviews with brilliant writers! Even if some of the interviews were on the topics I have little interest in (modernist poetry or musical writing, for example), in all of them the singular personalities of the interviewees came shining through. My highlights were Jack Kerouac (he sounds in life just the way he writes books and it was like reading a comedy/parody), Philip Roth and Paul Auster for writerly wisdom, and David Grossman for wisdom in general.
• 
  Leah W

  Until I just looked this up, I hadn't realized that I ranked this at five stars, while I gave all the other PR Interviews four stars. Perhaps it's because this book features several of my dear favorites (Wodehouse, John Ashbery, Sondheim, Auster, Murakami), but perhaps the series is just growing on me as it continues. This is the fourth volume in what was long-billed as a trilogy; perhaps we can march Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into another volume?
  
  Notes:
  -Oh Jack Kerouac. What weren't you on during that interview? Speaking of which:
  -Interviewer: How about the Beats? Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a few years ago?
  Wodehouse: Jack Kerouac died! Did he?
  Interviewer: Yes.
  Wodehouse: Oh... Gosh, they do die off, don't they?
  
  
• 
  Jessica

  Mwahahaha... I love this book. I have never read any of the Paris Reviews before, and now I'm incredibly bummed to find that I was missing something amazing. Great writers talk about their books, their influences, their writing process, and just literature in general.
  
  The interviews are a great way to enter the mind of the writers behind the greatest novels (and poems) of the century. They're sleek and smart, insightful and witty. I love them. And I will be sure to work my way through the other volumes as well. A definite read for those who want to learn to write.
• 
  Colin

  A fascinating four-volume series. Essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process of some of the world's most highly regarded authors, playwrights, and poets.
  
  Highlights in this volume are the interviews with E. B. White and John Ashbury. I was almost tempted to skip the one with Kerouac. God, what an idiot.
  
  Anyway - read them. All of them.
• 
  Jill

  My 2009 motto? If Sarah Montambo likes it, Hells Yes!
• 
  Emily

  A big thanks to
  Frances and
  Camille for turning me on to the Paris Review interviews! I received the third and fourth volumes of the selected interviews for Christmas, and have been making my slow but delighted way through the fourth ever since. Number Four contains interviews with two of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami and Marilynne Robinson (which is why I started here), but it's chock full of thoughts from other luminaries of the last 75 years, including but not limited to William Styron, Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, P.G. Wodehouse, Maya Angelou, and Paul Auster.
  
  It's always hard to write about collections of things - poems, short stories, interviews, essays. How to encompass what made the reading experience special, when a collection is composed of many diverse parts rather than a unified whole? But here's what I'd like to say about reading these interviews: truly, I got so much more out of them than I anticipated. I was expecting to page through, perhaps even skim, the interviews with authors I hadn't read, pausing for a more in-depth read only on the relatively few with whose work I was familiar. This is not what happened. Not even close. Instead, I found myself feeling more as if I were reading character-driven short stories than mundane "interviews." The distinctive voice of each author came through so clearly: Styron's crotchety, expansive good-old-boy-ism; Moore's careful precision; Kerouac's self-involved exuberance; Wodehouse's sunny, bumbling optimism; Naipul's jumpy reticience, eventually overcome. Sometimes, as with Kerouac, these personas were the ones I expected to find. Other times, probably more often than not, they held surprises. Paul Auster, for example: given the hard-polished, seemingly soulless cleverness of his
  New York Trilogy, I was expecting a self-congratulatory cynic. Instead, he struck me as shockingly sincere. Listen to him gush, for example, about what the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
  
  

  
  But there's more to Hawthorne than just his stories and novels. I'm equally attached to his notebooks, which contain some of his strongest, most brilliant prose. The diary he kept about taking care of his five-year-old son for three weeks in 1851 is a self-contained work. It can stand on its own, and it's so charming, so funny in its deadpan way, that it gives an entirely new picture of Hawthorne. He wasn't the gloomy, tormented figure most people think he was. Or not only that. He was a loving father, and husband, a man who liked a good cigar and a glass or two of whiskey, and he was playful, generous, and warmhearted. Exceedingly shy, yes, but someone who enjoyed the simple pleasures of the world.

  
  
  I relate so strongly to Auster's joy here at finding a multi-facetedness to Hawthorne—a deadpan humor and a liking for good cigars, when all most people see is a "gloomy, tormented figure." The humanizing influence is so charming, both in what Auster has to say about Hawthorne, and in what the interview reveals about Auster himself. Reading his interview made me reevaluate my relationship to his work, which I had regarded as a kind of clever joke on the reader, but which I now tend to think about in a more serious light. On one hand, I think this makes The New York Trilogy slightly less successful, due to its lack of soul...but on the other hand, knowing there's more substance to the author than I had realized makes me more excited to read his other work. I'm now inclined to judge him more stringently, but with more respect.
  
  

  
  By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It's hard for a young person to understand this. It's not that a twenty year old doesn't know he's going to die, but it's the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can't know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

  
  
  I mean, what a gorgeous observation! And really, the whole volume is full of this kind of gem. One of my most exciting discoveries is the poet John Ashbery, whom I admit I had never heard of before reading his interview. I connected with it so strongly, though, that I sought out Ashbery's work and am now in the midst of his gorgeous yet enigmatic Notes from the Air. I related to his account of gradually coming to the realization that the people who produced nineteenth-century poetry had their own vital reality:
  
  

  
  I didn't really get a feeling for the poetry of the past until I had discovered modern poetry. Then I began to see how nineteenth-century poetry wasn't just something lifeless in an ancient museum but must have grown out of the lives of the people who wrote it.

  
  
  I remember going through this same process of realization about pre-contemporary literature (say, anything published before 1900) early in college. It was a visceral, un-cerebral epiphany; I reached a point at which I had amassed enough life experience myself to be able to empathize with and relate to people whose worldviews were very different from my own—to recognize what was essentially similar through the veil of differences. Before it happened, I experienced Shakespeare as a kind of alien being, whose characters, I had to accept, acted in ways not understandable in terms of my own existence. Which offered me very limited options for interacting with his texts. Sometime early in college something clicked for me, and I recognize the motivations that make Hamlet dither over killing his uncle, or Edgar put off revealing his identity to Gloucester. They suddenly seemed like real people to me, just living in different circumstances. (Obviously Ashbery has benefited from his long career in poetry; look how much more concise his version of this process is than mine!)
  
  So too, I shared Ashbery's thoughts on ambiguity in art:
  
  

  
  The idea of relief from pain has something to do with ambiguity. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself, whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. I guess that is why so much "depressing" modern art makes me feel cheerful.

  
  
  This idea seems very apropos to the recent Woolf in Winter discussions. Woolf is the poster girl of so-called "depressing" modern art, yet I find much of her work positively exhilarating, and I think a lot of it has to do with her ability to evoke and even celebrate ongoing ambiguity. Most of my favorite writers—Woolf, Ishiguro, Welty, Proust—are able to coexist peacefully with conflicting impulses and uncertainties, and resist tying anything up into a neat little package for the reader. Perhaps I wouldn't go so far as to say that their work makes me feel "cheerful," but it does match up with my lived experience, and so gives me the deeply-felt pleasure of discovering a kindred spirit. As Murakami says in his own interview, "I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions."
  
  There's no way I can share all the satisfying moments and fascinating tidbits in these interviews. I loved learning about the process by which Murakami's novels get translated into English (some smaller countries actually translate from the English rather than the original Japanese!); was engrossed by David Grossman's reflections on control of language in the Israeli press; was impressed by Hermione Lee's insightful questions in her interview with Philip Roth; was gobsmacked to learn that Stephen Sondheim grew up in a surrogate-son relationship to Oscar Hammerstein, and learned song-writing from him (and was also intrigued by Sondheim's reflections on how much less suited the English language is to writing rhyming poetry than the French and Italian). My ear for gossipy details loved picking up little facts of the writer's life—that Maya Angelou rents hotel rooms and writes on the unmade beds, for example.
  
  But what I loved most about reading these interviews was basking in the sense that what we all do, here in the book-blogging world—talking about literature; wrestling with how it works and why; pondering the mysteries of it—is work that's worthwhile, and even important, to do. I look forward to my slow but rewarding journey through the other three volumes and beyond.
• 
  Derek

  These books are absolute gold. Nothing better as far as craft and that writer life exists.
• 
  Niklas Pivic

  This fourth volume in the series surprised me in a good way. While V. S. Naipul gabs the title for being the most arrogant and - in a bad way - preposterous, this is very much mitigated and made up for by people such as
  Haruki Murakami,
  David Grossman,
  P. G. Wodehouse,
  Philip Roth and
  E. B. White.
  
  Most of the authors came across as hard-working and continually writing and re-writing, talking of the shitty first draft.
  Marilynne Robinson and Murakami don't seem to have this problem at all, instead writing as though the drafts were in their head. In Robinson's case, however, this might very well be because of her belief in god.
  
  Murakami came across as gentle and flowing in his descriptions, while
  Philip Roth brought aggressive earnest to the table. While
  Maya Angelou spoke of her childhood, muteness and the importance of having somebody to write for, Wodehouse was (at 91,5 years old at the time of his interview) happy-go-lucky and seemingly carefree, not worrying much.
  
  Grossman's words on Kafka were insightful, and
  John Ashbery was a real poet in real-time, as his interview, providing insight into his authorship as well on his former, drunken self, was really good.
  
  
  Orhan Pamuk was interviewed well, and gave quite a few insights both into his novel and about his authorship as a Turk.
  
  All in all, maybe the best volume in the series, spanning more half a decade in the making, containing both interviews with Americans and others, from the past to the present, with authors stylistic and those more stream-of-consciousness.
  
  Brilliant way to end it (not entirely, I hope).
• 
  Bill

  I was in Binghamton the other day with time for lunch, and nothing to read. It turns out that there is a pretty good little bookstore about three blocks from the courthouse, and after a bit of browsing I settled on this.
  
  The Paris Review Interview series were originally issued in more-or-less chronological order, and I read the first four volumes in the series that way. They are long out-of-print, and this reissue series blends newer interviews with older ones in a pattern I haven't been able to discern. This one, for example, has Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, which I'd read years ago, and also P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Sondheim, and Haruki Murakami.
  
  I'd forgotten how oblique the Pound interview (conducted by Donald Hall) was. I think I thought I understood it back then, but I don't any more. Interestingly they ask Wodehouse about his wartime, uh, indiscretion, but Hall doesn't go near it with Pound.
  
  I've been meaning to start reading fiction again, and mostly this was a book I picked up to push me in that direction. I suspect that what will happen instead is that I will go back and read more of these sets of interviews.
• 
  Amy Dixon

  I won The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV, in a Good Reads contest. It was no accident that I entered this drawing. I've read and loved the previous three volumes. Volume IV is as terrific as the preceding books.
  
  Volume IV contain author interviews, culled from the pages of the Paris Review, that includes Marianne Moore, P.G. Wodehouse, Haruki Murakami, and many more. The earliest interview is with William Styron in 1954; the latest is with Marilynne Robinson in 2008. The interviews not only capture the authors, but also a bit of the times in which they were conducted.
  
  The Paris Review Interviews are insightful, interesting, and often witty, funny and quotable. Reading the collection is not merely entertaining; it sharpens the readers own sensibilities about good writing and good literature.
  
  Highly recommended for people who love books.
• 
  Jim

  This is a it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin kind of a book. All you need to do is look at the list and you will either love it or loathe it:
  
  

  America: William Styron, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, E. B. White, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim, Marilynne Robinson
  United Kingdom: P. G. Wodehouse
  Trinidad: V. S. Naipaul
  Japan: Haruki Murakami
  Turkey: Orhan Pamuk
  Israel: David Grossman

  
  The interviews are of the standard we’ve come to expect. The only issue really is if the authors interest you.
  
  You can read a full review on my blog
  here
  
• 
  j_ay

  William Styron *****
  Marianne Moore ****o
  Ezra Pound ***oo
  Jack Kerouac ****o
  E. B. White ***oo
  P. G. Wodehouse ***oo
  John Ashbery ***oo
  Philip Roth ***oo
  Maya Angelou ***oo
  Stephen Sondheim ****o
  V. S. Naipaul ***oo
  Paul Auster ***oo
  Haruki Murakami ****o
  Orhan Pamuk ****o
  David Grossman ***00
  Marilynne Robinson ***oo
  
• 
  Printable Tire

  I'm a big fan of this series- I'm glad it's making a comeback.
• 
  Pamela

  Wonderful as always.
• 
  Kenny

  Maya angelou keeps the bible on her bed. she was quiet for a decade before coming out with caged bird. tidbits like that
• 
  Joe

  The Murakami one was pretty good in here. At least, that's the one I remember the most.
• 
  Derek

  This is one fourth of a powerful collection of interviews with an international cast of first-rate poets, novelists, and musicians. I learned a hell of a lot about the variety of creative experiences. Surprisingly, Kerouac’s wacky interview impressed me most. Maya Angelou reminded me of her deep reservoir of equanimity. Grossman made me want to run out and one one or more of his novels. Roth had the most to say. Pamuk was fascinating on the position Turkey identity in terms of the East/West dichotomy. Robinson got me interested in her nonfiction. Auster made me order something of his online already. Naipaul confirmed my impression that he was a man of unlimited self-confidence. And so on.
• 
  James

  Not my favourite in this series. Very few women. Mostly American men. Murakami, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Wodehouse all bring their A-Game. But the dominant impression...Jack Kerouac was a very weird bloke.
• 
  Andresa Bastos

  Brillint. Sharing of personal challenges, in such a human and intelligent texts.
• 
  Not Mike

  Interviews.
• 
  Peter Gooch

  Bought it for the V.S.Naipaul interview, but there's also Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, and Marianne Moore. Could be a text for a seminar on writing.
• 
  Claremontreader

  what fun! I'll read this one slowly, interview-by-interview. Maya Angelou's was amazing.