The Milestone, vol.1,no.3,2010, September-November Issue.

An Interview with David Flusfeder, the Famous British Novelist

The Milestone: How was your first entrance into the world of writing? Which one is your first story? Where was it published? Tell us something about your childhood.

The Author:

My first published story was called ‘Newman’s Studio at the Time of His Death’. It was published in a student magazine that, shamefully, I can’t remember the name of. But I’d been writing for years before that. Like many writers, I suspect, I lived through reading books as a child and therefore wanted to write them.

About my childhood? I was born in the USA and came to London when I was six. We then moved around London quite a lot. This experience¾of change, possibility, movement and flight, dislocation¾was a formative one.

The Milestone: Your novel ‘Morocco’ is based on the settings of Warsaw where your father was born. How deeply you are connected to your father’s birthplace?

The Author:

I’ve been there once, a year or so after writing ‘Morocco’. It isn’t, of course, the same city he lived in. But, my preoccupation in my fiction is generally person rather than place.

The Milestone: How do you make the settings of your novels so live, pulsate with joy and sorrow? What’s the secret behind it?

The Author:

Very kind of you to say so. And  it’s tempting to say that there is a secret, that a few of us are in possession of some occult knowledge that is kept in a guarded room that… But what you’re really saying is that, for some readers at least, my writing produces a powerful effect. I’m very glad of that.

The Milestone: Paranoid characters are often delineated in your story. Is there any special reason behind choosing such characters?

The Author:

One man’s paranoia is another man’s realism. Also, it’s no accident that writers, readers and paranoics all have some interest in plots.

The Milestone: Sometimes you put the characters in extreme situation. This sense of extreme situation recurs in your novels. Is there any special reason for it?

The Author:

That’s one way to get a story. Put characters under pressure and things happen. But an ‘extreme’ situation doesn’t have to a war zone or a crime scene. It can equally be a child making a visit to his grandmother or two strangers alone in a room.

The Milestone: Sometimes the characters of your novels are put under the surveillance of other characters that make their life strenuous. And sometimes you change the point of view in the fiction. Is it a part of your technique to give maximum effect to your characters?

The Author:

Of course.

The Milestone: Does any personal experience inspire you to write a story?

The Author:

I generally end up mystified whenever I try to understand what generates the impulse to write fiction. I don’t have an experience and then think, ‘Oh! Yes! That’s a story.’ Like every other writer, I write out of some kind of necessity. And perhaps to investigate things I don’t understand. My most recent book, ‘A Film By Spencer Ludwig’, was written in response to my father dying. Or in response to being a son whose father was getting ready to die. But that was an exception. I’ve also written novels that were sparked by a news headline, or the faces of three people glimpsed outside a train station.

The Milestone: Do you believe that translation can expose the inner thought process of a poet or a writer? How many stories of yours have been published in other languages?

The Author:

I’m more a novelist than a short story writer. (And my books have been translated into most of the major European languages, although not, so far, to my chagrin, any Asian ones.) Robert Frost wrote, ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation.’ There is always a compromise in translation between what can be baldly and perhaps misleadingly called ‘content’ and ‘style’. So, yes, translation can expose the inner thought processes, but perhaps to the detriment of the work. Saying that, there are some languages that seem to have secret correspondences. For example, French literature translated into English almost always reminds the reader that it is a translation, whereas Japanese translates much more plausibly.

The Milestone: What is the present trend of fiction writing in UK? Tell us about the experiments that writers like you are doing with writing.

The Author:

I have to confess that I don’t read much of my contemporaries’ work. Probably because I need the space in my head for my own writing. Sometimes I think I’ve lost the capacity to read with innocence. However, one trend that I have noticed is that the publishing industry here and in the US looks as if it is becoming a junior partner of the film business.

The Milestone: How would you identify yourself- a post modern?  If so, please tell us what are the specific features for which a writer should be called post modern?

The Author:

I wouldn’t identify myself with that kind of label, or indeed any other. I’m sure there are more similarities between my books than I realise, but each of them has been intended to be different, in kind, in style. And if one of the defining features of post-modernism is a sort of historylessness, in which each element has the same weight or value as any other, then I’d resist it.

The Milestone: Who is your favourite novelist? There are many Indian writers who are writing in English. What’s your opinion about them?

The Author:

My favourites are invariably dead: Franz Kafka, Julio Cortázar, Denton Welch, Jean Rhys, Italo Svevo, Patricia Highsmith, Georg Büchner. Of living writers, my favourite is probably Thomas Pynchon, although my liking for him is based, at least partly, on a sentimentality for the reader I used to be when I was a teenager. As for contemporary Indian writers, again (and again shamefully), I’ve hardly read any. I’d be grateful for recommendations.

The Milestone: Finally, will you give any tips for the aspiring writers?

The Author:

Write what only you can write. It’s fine to mimic, steal from, emulate, other writers, but why bother spending all that time and effort unless you’re making something that only you could make? And, just as a painting only really exists when there is someone to look at it, a novel or a story only really exists in the presence of a reader.