Saturday, September 13, 2014

Sara Paretsky: By the Book


The author of the V. I. Warshawski novels, most recently “Critical Mass,” was hugely influenced by “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: “I felt as though I’d fallen into words and wanted to drown in them.”

What books are currently on your night stand?
I’m trying hard to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” but keep returning to fiction. Right now: John Williams’s “Stoner,” Claude Izner’s “Strangled in Paris.”

Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today? 
I don’t have an all-time favorite. There are books I reread or wish I’d written. I love the Victorians: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, in that order. I loved “Gilead” and “Wolf Hall,” which is a staggering achievement. I reread Barbara Pym and Jane Austen and my old detective favorites when I’m stressed out.

Who are your favorite writers of detective fiction?
Margery Allingham among the classics. Peter Dickinson, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Dorothy Hughes.

Which do you consider the best detective stories of all time, and why?
Anna Katharine Green, for defining the consulting detective for the 19th century; Wilkie Collins, for playing with the form and transforming it; Dashiell Hammett, for reinventing the form for the 20th century; the Holmes oeuvre, for making detective fiction popular in both Great Britain and America; Amanda Cross and Lillian O’Donnell, for opening the door that enabled Marcia Muller, Linda Barnes, Sue Grafton and me to challenge the form in new ways.

What makes a good detective novel?
Believable characters first, a good story, an understanding of how to pace dramatic action. I like commitment by a writer, to the form, to the story — there are lots of slick writers of crime fiction who aren’t writing out of passion, but for the market. They write good English sentences, but for me, the lack of commitment makes them uninteresting.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite? 
My books all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if I had to choose, I’d pick “Hardball.” It’s very personal because the back story is in the civil rights movement in Chicago in the 1960s. That’s when I first came here, working as a volunteer on the city’s extremely turbulent South Side.
Partway through “Wolf Hall” I went to England on tour. I carried that big, fat book across the Atlantic, couldn’t wait to finish my events so I could go back to it — I’d read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

What do you like reading right before bed?
Short stories, mostly. Joan Wickersham’s “The News From Spain” and Jaan Kross’s “The Conspiracy” are two that I’ve just finished. I have insomnia, and sometimes at 3 in the morning, I read from “The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon,” a journal kept by a woman at the 11th-century Japanese imperial court, and then write in my own journal in her style: Seven Things That Bring Me Pleasure; Eight Things Over Which I Have No Control.

What kind of reader were you as a child? 
I was a flashlight-under-the-covers reader. I loved books about girls doing active things — biographies of women like the astronomer Maria Mitchell, or Harriet Tubman or Marie Curie. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, all the Alcott books and a wonderful out-of-print German novel, “The Wicked Enchantment.” As an adult, I realize it is a parable of the Nazi takeover of Germany, but as a child I loved the brave heroine, her little dog Winnie and the aunts who look after them both.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be? 
When I first read “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” at 17, I felt as though I’d fallen into words and wanted to drown in them. I reread the book 20 or 30 times and longed to write like Joyce. I used to practice Joycean sentences and punctuation.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

P. D. James, who is always witty and engaging; Shakespeare, to hear that language spoken by himself; and Sappho. The four of us would all miraculously understand modern and Renaissance English and ancient Greek. 
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