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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. |
0:27.0 | Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Sadie Smith, whose third novel on beauty |
0:32.0 | has recently been published in paperback by Penguin. |
0:37.2 | She's the author as well of white teeth and the |
0:40.7 | autograph man. Now, I'm fascinated by this book, actually, and you've said that you used it as the |
0:50.4 | occasion to teach yourself to write an English novel. What does that mean? You know, actually, I think I used it as the occasion to teach yourself to write an English novel. What does that mean? |
0:56.0 | You know, actually, I think I used it as the occasion to finish writing a certain kind of |
0:59.9 | English novel. There's something about my, I suppose, my childhood and my education that |
1:05.5 | when I started writing, I really wanted to prove I could do something pretty traditional, I suppose. And when |
1:11.8 | I think of contemporary American writers, my peers, their instincts were all the other way. They |
1:16.3 | would want to do something unusual and outside of their tradition. But I wanted to prove, I suppose, |
1:23.1 | I could walk before I could run. And this book, to me, was like paying a tribute to the gods, |
1:30.1 | or at least a tribute to the writers that have sat on my head for 15 years. |
1:35.2 | And I really wanted to escape from under their influence, |
1:37.7 | but to write the kind of book that when I was a child, I read, |
1:41.5 | and I suppose dreamt of producing. |
1:44.5 | It takes, to my mind, a very radical position, which is that none of its characters can express |
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