Echo of soul maintenance8/18/2023 ![]() ![]() In 1979, talking to Christopher Ricks, after the appearance of two story collections and one novel, he recognised the need to “broaden”: “the adult world adultly observed… must be faced.” The immediate result was The Comfort of Strangers (1981), a grisly suspense story executed with uncanny precision, about a doomed couple, set in an unnamed city full of canal bridges. He made sure of that, with each book “a completely new departure”. The joy, he once told the Paris Review, “is in the surprise”. “I couldn’t bear that thought: creeping up this pole.” Instead he took a bumpier option. In an interview to mark his birthday, he told the journalist Mick Brown that a careers officer, advising a job in the foreign office, showed him a graph showing the arc of his salary from the age of 22 until retirement. What emerges consistently from McEwan’s recollection is his sense of his career as a path, with elements of strategic thinking, but crucially no roadmap or grand plan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |