----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 04:37:12 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: BBC radio adaptation of Vladimir Nabokovs novel Laughter in the Dark.
...
To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com

------------------ [1]
http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2005/2005may/050527-hill.html[2]
Inspired by school
Mail & Guardian Online - Johannesburg,South Africa
... _ AUTHOR\'S NOTES: Craig Higginson's new novel The Hill_ is a
sensitive and well-told tale that is set at a young boys school, he
tells ZA@PLAY[3] more about the book. ...

May 27 2005

Inspired by school

AUTHOR\'S NOTES: Craig Higginson's new novel _The Hill_ is a
sensitive and well-told tale that is set at a young boys school, he
tells ZA@PLAY more about the book.

Craig Higginson was born in Zimbabwe, but grew up and was educated
in South Africa. He studied at Wits and worked as Barney Simon’s
assistant at the Market Theatre before moving to London, where he
worked as a journalist and in the theatre, including a stint at the
Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004 he returned to South Africa.
Higginson now works as literary manager at the Market Theatre and as
an editor. He has just won the Gold Sony Award for his BBC radio
adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark_.

Like his previous novel, _Embodied Laughter_ (1998), his new book,
_The Hill_ (Jacana) is set among boys at school. In _The Hill_,
however, they are younger and the focus is on one particular lad, his
family relationships and the ambiguous interaction that develops
between him and a teacher. It is a sensitive, well-told tale.

DESCRIBE YOURSELF IN A SENTENCE.
Human beings are the only animals who invent pictures of what they
want to be and then try to become them: like all of us, my pictures
change every day; they have ranged from James Bond (generally when I
was little, although I still have my moments) to an old man sitting
contentedly in the sun.

DESCRIBE YOUR BOOK IN A SENTENCE.
The novel, which is set in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, follows a very
tricky year in the life of a simple but endlessly resourceful boy
called Andrew Hughes.

DESCRIBE YOUR IDEAL READER.
Someone who is open to whatever the book has to offer.

WHAT WAS THE ORIGINATING IDEA?
Books derive their existence from many sources. I started writing
this one when I was living in England and missing home. I think I
felt a certain nostalgia for a time of my life, and for a landscape,
that I seemed to have moved away from forever — and I wanted to
return there for a while. But I realised, once I had entered into
that imagined land, that I was actually rewriting a story I had
written when I was about 12 — before I had even known what a novel
was. So perhaps I wanted to write the story I hadn’t had the tools or
experience to do justice to back then. But books are mysterious
creatures, and when I look at this one now I am not quite sure how it
came about.

DESCRIBE THE PROCESS OF WRITING AND PUBLISHING THE BOOK.
The first draft of _The Hill_ was written over an intensive period of
four months in England several years ago. I came back to it now and
again and reworked it over the years. I sent it to an agent in
England, who told me no one was interested in reading a book about a
boy who goes to boarding school. This was just before Harry Potter
mania consumed the planet. Last year I dusted off the manuscript and
sent it to a few publishers. I got positive responses from all those
who actually read it and I chose Jacana. One element of the research
is worth mentioning. When I wrote the first draft, I developed a kind
of personal mythology for Andrew in which certain animals in that
landscape, for example, represented certain things. When I later went
to the British Library and dug up 19th-century oral testimonies from
the last surviving Drakensberg San, I found that what I had written
resonated in all sorts of unexpected ways with their mythology. A
coincidence? Perhaps. But it led me to think that there might not be
such a difference, after all, between those long-departed people and
ourselves. Our affinities as human beings across time and space run
deep, but only when we are alive to them.

NAME SOME WRITERS WHO HAVE INSPIRED YOU AND TELL US WHY OR HOW.
Many writers have inspired me but two of the stronger influences
behind _The Hill_, in terms of novels, are _Lord of the Flies_ and
_Death in Venice_ -- as anyone who reads it would perhaps pick up.
The two writers I was conscious of being indebted to during the
writing were Bruce Chatwin (I wanted to write a slim, poetic book in
which not a word was wasted) and Graham Greene (I wanted to present
the scenes dramatically, sticking to dialogue and description and
reducing the narrator’s voice, so that the reader could be given
space to form his or her own opinions).

WHAT ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT?
_Celestial Navigation_ by Anne Tyler.

DO YOU WRITE BY HAND, OR USE A TYPEWRITER OR COMPUTER?
I use a computer — strange at first, but when you’re on a roll you
feel like a concert pianist!

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF FICTION?
It can be whatever you need it to be: entertainment, stimulant,
antidepressant — or depressant! — companion, lover, antagonist ...
Through books, people speak to us and we are taken to places we never
knew existed. The possibilites of fiction are at once limited and
infinite. I can’t define its purpose, I can only assert its
importance.

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WISH TO ADD?
I think it is criminal that books cost what they do here. How can we
expect people to read when books cost four times more than a movie
ticket? In England, paperback novels and films cost about the same.
That is as it should be. My publisher has made my novel considerably
less expensive than some, but we have a long way to go, and it is not
only down to the publishers: the government also needs to help.

_Jay Parini is the author of The Art of Subtraction (George
Braziller)_

Links:
------
[1] http://www.mg.co.za/
[2] http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2005/2005may/050527-hill.html
[3] http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2005/2005may/050527-hill.html

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