By the Book (17 page)

The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he's gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I'm reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.

You've said your next book will be a collection of stories. Any recent short story collections you'd recommend?

How about a long story? Claire Keegan's “Foster.” It's told from the point of view of an Irish girl whose parents, lacking the money to care for her, send her to live with childless relatives, whom she ends up preferring. The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, every single word in the right place and pregnant with double meanings.

You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?

The King James Bible.
Anna Karenina
. And a how-to book on raft-building.

What do you plan to read next?

T. M. Luhrmann's
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
. I'm reading this despite my aversion to books with colons in their titles. Luhrmann's an anthropologist who teaches at Stanford. I heard an interview with her on the radio and was struck by how nonjudgmental she sounded. And it's a subject that interests me for a lot of reasons, historical, political, and artistic.

Jeffrey Eugenides
is the author of
The Virgin Suicides
,
Middlesex
, and
The Marriage Plot
.

J. K. Rowling

What's the best book you read this summer?

I loved
The Song of Achilles
, by Madeline Miller.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Team of Rivals
, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I lived in it the way that you do with truly great books; putting it down with glazed eyes and feeling disconcerted to find yourself in the twenty-first century. I met the author at a reception in the American Embassy in London last year, and I was so excited that I was bobbing up and down on the spot like a five-year-old.

Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?

“Can't be bothered with” isn't a phrase I'd use, because my reading tastes are pretty catholic. I don't read “chick lit,” fantasy, or science fiction, but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill. With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

What was the last book that made you cry?

The honest answer is
The Casual Vacancy
. I bawled while writing the ending, while rereading it, and when editing it.

The last book that made you laugh?

The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
. It's in my bathroom, and it's always good for a giggle.

The last book that made you furious?

As Margaret Thatcher might say, I don't wish to give it the oxygen of publicity.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The prime minister?

The president's already read
Team of Rivals
, and I can't think of anything better for him. I'd give our prime minister
Justice
, by Michael Sandel.

What were your favorite books as a child?

The Little White Horse
, by Elizabeth Goudge;
Little Women
, by Louisa May Alcott;
Manxmouse
, by Paul Gallico; everything by Noel Streatfeild; everything by E. Nesbit;
Black Beauty
, by Anna Sewell (indeed, anything with a horse in it).

Did you have a favorite character or hero as a child? Do you have a literary hero as an adult?

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

What's the best book your mother ever gave or read to you?

She gave me virtually all the books mentioned above. My most vivid memory of being read to is my father reading
The Wind in the Willows
when I was around four and suffering from the measles. In fact, that's all I remember about having the measles: Ratty, Mole, and Badger.

What books have your own children introduced you to recently? Or you to them?

My son introduced me to Cressida Cowell's dragon books, which are so good and funny. My younger daughter is pony mad, so we're halfway through a box set by Pippa Funnell. I recently started pressing Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on my elder daughter, who is a scientist.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I took this question so seriously I lost hours to it. I went through all of my favorite writers, discarding them for various reasons: P. G. Wodehouse, for instance, was so shy that it might be a very awkward meeting. Judging by his letters, his main interests were Pekingese dogs and writing methodology. As I don't own a Peke I've got a feeling we'd just discuss laptops rather than exploring the secrets of his genius.

I finally narrowed the field to two: Colette and Dickens. If Colette were prepared to talk freely, it would be the meeting of a lifetime because she led such an incredible life (her biography,
Secrets of the Flesh
, by Judith Thurman, is one of my all-time favorites). By the narrowest of margins, though, I think I'd meet Dickens. What would I want to know? Everything.

Do you remember the best fan letter you ever received? What made it special?

There have been so many extraordinary fan letters, but I'm going to have to say it was the first one I ever received, from a young girl called Francesca Gray. It meant the world to me.

So many children's books today try to compare themselves to Harry Potter. If your new book,
The Casual Vacancy
, were to be compared to another book, author, or series in your dream book review, what would it be?

The Casual Vacancy
consciously harked back to the nineteenth-century traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Gaskell; an analysis of a small, literally parochial society. Any review that made reference to any of those writers would delight me.

Of the books you've written, which is your favorite?

My heart is divided three ways:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
, and
The Casual Vacancy
.

There's a whole publishing subindustry of books about Harry Potter. Have you read any of them, or any of the scholarly articles devoted to the books?

No, except for two pages of a book claiming to reveal the Christian subtext. It convinced me that I ought not to read any others.

What's the one book you wish someone else would write?

The Playboy of the Western World
, the second volume of Nigel Hamilton's biography of JFK and sequel to
Reckless Youth
.

If you could bring only three books to a desert island, which would you pack?

Collected works of Shakespeare (not cheating—I've got a single volume of them); collected works of P. G. Wodehouse (two volumes, but I'm sure I could find one); collected works of Colette.

If you could be any character from literature, who would it be?

Elizabeth Bennet, naturally.

What was the last book you just couldn't finish?

Armadale
, by Wilkie Collins. Having loved
The Woman in White
and
The Moonstone
, I took it on tour with me to the United States in 2007 anticipating a real treat. The implausibility of the plot was so exasperating that I abandoned it midread, something I hardly ever do.

What do you plan to read next?

There are three books that I need to read for research sitting on my desk, but for pleasure, because I love a good whodunit and she's a master, I'm going to read
The Vanishing Point
, by Val McDermid.

J. K. Rowling
is the author of the Harry Potter series and the novels
The Casual Vacancy
,
The Cuckoo's Calling
, and
The Silkworm
, the last two under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

David Mitchell

What book is on your night stand now?

Postwar
, by the historian Tony Judt; David Finkel's account of US forces in Iraq,
The Good Soldiers
; and a proof of Nadeem Aslam's new book,
The Blind Man's Garden
, which I haven't started yet. Plus my notebook, in case a decent idea ambushes me after turning out the light.

What was the last truly great book you read?

The Icelander Halldor Laxness's
Independent People
, which I read last year on a trip to the country. Even in chapters where nothing happens, it happens brilliantly. I thought Kevin Powers's
The Yellow Birds
was shot through with greatness, too. If “a truly great book” implies thickness and scope, then maybe it doesn't qualify, but either way Powers has written a superlative novel.

And the worst or most disappointing thing you've read recently?

I'd rather not put the boot in publicly—it spoils my day when I'm on the receiving end.

Where do you get your books, and where do you read them?

If the book is still in print and from a mainstream publisher, I'll use my local bookshop here in Clonakilty in West Cork; I'll Amazon it if I'm after something more oddball from, say, the University of Hawaii Press; or use AbeBooks if it's out of print or print-on-demand. I like to browse the bookshelves of charity shops in university towns, in case serendipity hands me something wonderful I had no idea I wanted. Up to ten proofs a week wriggle through my letterbox from editors and publishers (even though I've stopped blurbing), and occasionally there's a well-chosen diamond.

What's it like to see
Cloud Atlas
turned into a movie? Any major changes in the transition that threw you off?

First, there's a primal wow to be had from seeing your characters walking and talking, larger than life, played by faces I've known for much of my life. Second, there's a slower-burning pleasure in merely thinking of your story being out in the world, trickling into minds, wherever there are cinemas. Then, inevitably, the film gets lost in the hurly-burly of life, and I don't think about it at all, at least until the next interview.

None of the major changes the film made to my novel “threw me off” in the sense of sticking in my craw. I think that the changes are licensed by the spirit of the novel, and avoid traffic congestion in the film's flow. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. In the German edition of my last novel, my translator Volker Oldenburg rendered a rhyming panoramic tableau by rescripting the items in order to make it rhyme in German too. He judged that rhythm mattered more than the exact items in the tableau, and it was the right call. Similarly, when the Wachowskis and Tykwer judged that in a translation (into film) of
Cloud Atlas
Zachry and Meronym's future needs more certitude, then I trusted them to make the right call. They want to avoid melodrama and pap and cliché as much as I do, but a film's payoff works differently to a novel's payoff, and the unwritten contract between author and reader differs somewhat to the unwritten contract between filmmaker and viewer. Adaptations gloss over these differences at their peril.