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BONNIE GREER talks to Picnic
Publishing about the novel in the 2lst century . .
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‘One of the realities
today for publishers and writers alike is that
publishing has become a part of the entertainment
industry.
Maybe it always was and it’s just becoming
more apparent now, but this fact seems stronger
than ever.
There is a huge challenge for publishers as
to how to keep the next generations reading
at all, buying books. I don’t envy anyone
publishing today. It’s hard to see what’s
ahead.
But it seems to me that people will always read
because reading is not only about pleasure-which
is important-but is also the way that we expand
consciousness.
That old cliché about expanding the mind
through reading is true, and more than that-it
also helps us to move beyond the known.
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The novel, to me, should be true to its name “novel”.
That most of us read-and write-19th Century models
means that, in some senses, the form itself has not
moved on. And in not moving on, our minds-WE-have
not moved on.
If novelists and publishers cannot imagine or make
room for other ways of telling stories, other ways
of mapping out reality-they have, in effect, retarded
us.
It’s a bit like an industry that continues to
manufacture carts for horses-the world is a much more
complex than the typical novel explores.
But that “typical” novel is the bedrock
of the industry, what keeps the lights on, and I have
immense respect for the likes of Dan Brown, for example,
because that kind of book is damn hard to do.
But, as Picasso and the Cubists, Pollock and action
painting; Freud in re-inventing the portrait; downloads
and You Tube; Heston Blumenthal and scientific eating;
Barrack Obama and his internet campaign for President
of the United States; even haute couture in the Mouret
wrap dress that can remake your body; theatre; dance;
everything is moving except the form of the novel.
Partly this is because the novel is taken as the repository
of story and story is considered a, b, c. But we remember
in fragments, in streams of consciousness; we make
links between things that don’t look related
on the surface, but actually are, and we play. We
play a lot with all the elements which make up the
world that we come to, every moment, understand.
For me, the novel that is truly novel, roots us in
the present and takes us forward.
The novel is not nostalgic.’
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