Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and a century of lived life, Will Self sets out to understand the nature of the modern world.
The book, according to the author
Q: James Joyce’s quote “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella” adorns the cover of your new novel Umbrella. The novel could be characterised as modernist, and you clearly owe Joyce a greater debt than just that line.
A: It’s not modernist enough, I’m afraid. The modernist aspects of it include the refusal to accept the arbitrary divisions of chapters and line breaks. I wrote it like that because life doesn’t resolve itself into chapters, nor is it punctuated by line breaks. Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness – which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They’re all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
Q: Let’s begin on your book selection with Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, which is linked at the hip to Umbrella.
A: I must have first read this book in the early eighties, and found it – like a lot of Sacks’s writing – absolutely fascinating. Not just because of the philosophical and scientific perspectives that he is involved in, but because of his involuntary self-characterisation. I used some of Sacks’s modes and mannerisms quite shamelessly as one of the sources for my character Zack Busner, who is a repeat presence in my fictions. So in a way the seeds of Umbrella were planted here, many years ago.
The book, according to the author