Regular readers of this blog, or anyone who has stood next to me in a bookstore, know that I found The Elegance of the Hedgehog the best book I’ve read in years. I’m not saying how many years because I found the number growing like a the size of a trout a proud fisherman caught. Muriel Barbery was in Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She appeared at a panel and answered a couple of questions (I wasn’t there) and then she was at a NEA fundraiser sponsored by Literary Affairs for an interview that I did attend. She is lovely, elegant and a joy to spend time with. Here are some of the highlights of the interview:
- Muriel doesn’t write in a coherent fashion. No outline, she doesn’t know how the story is going to progress before she is actually writing it. She didn’t know the end of this book until five minutes before she wrote it.
- Renee was a standard concierge character with a small part in Muriel’s first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (which will be published by Europa and available in September, 2009). Muriel decided to create an erudite and base a new book around Renee.
- Initially, the book was only from Renee’s voice, but 200 pages into it, Muriel’s husband read a scene with Paloma and said she looked interesting and the two voice narrative was born.
- Muriel is passionate about art (one of the reasons I love her work) so she writes about art in her novels, but she wouldn’t write art essays.
- Muriel purposefully used archaic French words and asked that the translators keep this aspect because she believes “a new word is a new Read the rest of this entry »
Claire
Kim
