Thomas Fuller interview, Part 2
Part 2 in the on-going series of interviews with Thomas Fuller, author of the soon-to-be-released "The Classical World, a Novel of Ideas", in which Mr. Fuller makes a plea for his new book, presents a case against mass tourism, and speaks of authorial influence:
Q: Why read The Classical World?
A: To appreciate the fact that there was, and is, a classical world; that there was a time when certain primary questions were asked--what is love, what is truth for instance--and that those fundamental questions are still worth asking.
Q: There's an interesting sort of time continumm at work in the book, a fuzzing up of epochs soe that one blends into another...
A: If the past is all we can really know of the present, The Classical World updates the past in a way that proposes the past can be made into a presentable future. Just as I'd once wanted to call the book "a novel of a film" I'd earlier wanted to call it a "novel-log". So much of the narrative literature that's stayed with me comes through what I call 'travel' books, where place is a major character.
Q: Do you mean to say that we're living in the classical world at this very moment?
A: Something along that line!
Q: Your geography is somewhat confined--Sicily and the southeast coast of Italy--to be entirely representative of what I think of as 'the classsical world.'
A: There's a big stop in Rome, a place not insignificant in the classical world, and in Naples with its wonderful panorama of Mt. Vesuvius.
Q: The passage where the narrator is walking along the Amalfi Coast and thinks he is seeing the Mediterranean Sea--the image he holds is seeing the sea from behind the branches of an olive tree--and then discovers it's not the Mediterranen at all but is the Tyrrhenian Sea, is quietly hilarious.
A: At least part of the book is a screed against mass tourism, and the idea that you can drag people around from place to place and feed them these snapshots, tidbits, crumbs--that that kind of travel is not travel at all but a kind of consumption of pre-determined experience...
Q: So would you say your book encourages free independent travel?
A: Yes, I would say that's as good a reason as any that anyone should read The Classical World: to take it and then go on their own adventure, and walk like crazy or ride a bicycle if they're able.
Q: Your compositional technique is to write while on the road?
A: My compositional technique is to make the reader feel as if I am writing while on the road. Actually I take many more pictures than I write while traveling. And pictures play a real part in the book itself.
Q: Which writers are important to you?
A: I keep Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy near me at all times when I'm writing, opening up the book randomly when I'm feeling blue or mired in my own prose, and reading a chapter or so--sometimes I only have to touch the book to get back on track, it exerts that sort of influence. I'm reading Rabelais now, and Thomas Bernhard's On the Mountain which is quite extraordinary. Have you read Clarice Lispector? There's no one like her.
San Lorenzo, Italy, a hilltop village evoked in The Classical World.