Summary
The Pesthouse (Doubleday)
Jim Crace
makes lies masquerade as truth in this post-apocalyptic tale of
toxified America.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:04.0 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:10.0 | You are a very special breed, |
| 0:14.0 | or you are the only animal, |
| 0:18.0 | who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:22.5 | From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:27.1 | Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Jim Crace, who's back with a novel called The Pest House. |
| 0:33.4 | Now, the first time I met Jim Crace, we were in Cambridge, in England, and he managed to convince me late one night that he has a prosthetic limb. |
| 0:43.8 | Not just a prosthetic limb, but the very best prosthetic limb. |
| 0:47.8 | It looked absolutely like an actual leg. |
| 0:51.3 | My God, I've forgotten about that. |
| 0:52.8 | Yes, now it comes back. |
| 0:55.2 | And so I've forgotten about that. Yes, now it comes back. And so I've come to expect from him a certain amount of leg pulling, and this is, you know, known. |
| 1:05.2 | He has frequently provided epigraphs from non-existent books for his novels. |
| 1:10.2 | And I think the Pest House, although it's being read as a somber yet optimistic post-apocalyptic |
| 1:20.3 | novel about the future of America, I think it's the biggest leg pool of all, because as we |
| 1:26.7 | read, we discover on one page a character |
| 1:29.6 | who can barely walk anymore is two pages later lifting a woman on his back or carrying her in a |
| 1:37.8 | barrow that a cloud hat that has overnight killed the entire population of a town somehow |
| 1:43.9 | just manages not to kill off |
| 1:47.3 | our hero and our heroine who come back into the town to discover everyone dead. |
| 1:52.1 | And so I decided that he was writing in the conventions of an improbable romance, not about |
... |
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