The Classical World: guest blog by Thomas Fuller

While composing The Classical World, I was also reading Honey from a Weed--Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia" by Patience Gray, one the most extraordinary books I've ever read. So much of the information in Honey from a Weed caused me to hyperventilate, as did the writing.

Here are the recommendations given to me by an old anarchist in Carrara for cooking a fox:

'A male fox shot in January or February. Skin it, and keep the carcase in running water for 3 days, or otherwise, hang it up outside in the frost.' (p.241).

And

"Irving was sufficiently eccentric to arrange his book-buying forays to coincide with the season of new peas in Florence and young asparagus, and installed himself at Sabatini's to enjoy them. Eccentricity: living according to principles established by one's own experience. (p.111).

Patience Gray's book is essentially a recipe-book and mini-travelogue, and very well written. By reading it I learned that a writer really doesn't have to make anything up, that everything a writer needs to write already exists, if he or she can see it that is.

It's one thing to hope to write like another, and another thing to write like yourself: both are difficult but the latter is more difficult than the former. 

In making the transition from poet to novelist I gradually became aware of how patient a poet, a real poet, must be when writing, patient to the point of not writing, as opposed to a novelist, a writer who tends to keep writing no matter what. 

I'm looking at a proof of my new novel, The Classical World, the last time I'll be able to look at it before it's printed. If there's a story lurking in The Classical World--and I'm not saying there is or there isn't one, that determination is left entirely up to the reader--it's that ones' life is best spent asking questions, the more questions the better, the deeper the questions the better too. I hope it's a book a reader can pick up anywhere, open, and get something out of, and I'm giving it that test right now, randomly opening to a scene at the Termini, the major train station in Rome, where the narrator is misled by a local, who is, it turns out, a crook:

I've been lied to so many times in the classical world that I begin to see the link between lying and the liar's innate feelings of social and political oppression. When people lie to you the present looks out of place and all the faith you might have felt in the beginning of your relationship, the desire to have your questions answered with honesty, for instance, stands no chance against the power and influence of the lie. (p.102).

Reading this passage now I see it's the best I could do, as is the whole book as it now stands, and that the best I could do is to make the writing all my own, while having absorbed as many influences as possible. The subtitle of The Classical World is, A Novel of Ideas, and I think that it's so, from beginning to end.

Thomas Fuller's new novel, The Classical World, A Novel of Ideas, will be published by IFSF Publishing in June, 2018. His novel, Monsieur Ambivalence, published in 2014, was a Finalist in the Fiction Category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.