I have this pet peeve: I hate it when others recount a movie to me. My father tries to avoid watching movies for some reason and my mother loves to give him very detailed, elaborate summaries of whatever last Lars von Trier she saw. These accounts can last a whole dinner. Usually, I entertain myself by affectionately observing their contentment in this marital ritual, otherwise I would probably faint from boredom. As you can see, I’m not much for the oral tradition. Books are a little bit better, but I always wonder: Why not go straight to the source? There is a craft to movie making and book writing and it seems silly to me to just leave that out of the equation.
The other day, I was sitting at a very odd little bar with a friend. He is an Italian writer and his books, though successful in Italy, haven’t been translated into German yet. “What was your last book about?” I asked innocently. He explained that he usually doesn’t answer that question but that he’ll make an exception. Now, you would think that with my aversion to summaries, I would have tried to stop him. Thankfully, I didn’t. I became so engrossed in the story that I didn’t notice an hour had passed when he finished. It was almost as if we were two children, sitting in a fort and telling ghost stories. Except, in this case, the ghosts were those of pyramid schemes and corruption.
It’s not that my mother is a bad storyteller, quite the opposite, but I guess there is a difference between hearing about a story that somebody else invented and listening to someone explain their own novel. You can make out hints of the personal, you can ask about the process and –probably most importantly – you can actually (literally) hear what people call the writer’s “voice”.