“At thirty-three, and newly married, I spent four months in the infectious ward of a hospital — no visitors,” he said. “People could send you books, and my friends did send me books, but because it was an infectious ward the books were non-returnable. The literary works my friends were able to part with without breaking their hearts were old detective novels.” He took to them, not surprising given the alternatives: “True, the hospital had a library, but it was full of Lenin and awful socialist-realist fiction.”
Toronto writer Josef Škvorecký's discovery of the detective genre, as described in The Walrus.
the book room: novelist, John Degen interviews other writers, and talks about copyright way too much
No comments:
Post a Comment