Speaker 1: One of my favorite videos on YouTube that I periodically
Speaker 1: delight myself by rewatching is this BBC report about Doris
Speaker 1: Lessing being told that she's won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Speaker 1: In it, she climbs out of a black cab, absolutely
Speaker 1: laden with these bags of groceries and looking deeply fatigued
Speaker 1: even before she clocks the reporters coming at her with
Speaker 1: microphones and cameras. She looks confused, even irritated, and asks
Speaker 1: who they're there to photograph, and one reporter replies, we're
Speaker 1: photographing you.
Speaker 2: Have you heard the news.
Speaker 1: You've just won the Nobel Prize? At eighty eight years old,
Speaker 1: and with no fucks to give, Lessing's shoulders slump even
Speaker 1: further than they already were. She drops her groceries and
Speaker 1: with an impressive eye roll, she simply says, oh, Christ, perfection.
Speaker 1: That's how to receive a Nobel prize. No notes, the
Speaker 1: Nobel is a funny prize. It's this rarefied, generally hyper
Speaker 1: literary Scandinavian panel who ye're on year, ignore the predictions
Speaker 1: and the gambling odds, and anoint a literary worthy with
Speaker 1: their garlands. Writers receive the recognition, not for a single work,
Speaker 1: but for a body of work, or in the case
Speaker 1: of Bob Dylan, just to piss the literary world off.
Speaker 1: My favorite thing about the Nobel Prize for Literature is
Speaker 1: how often it favors writers outside the anglosphere, perspectives and
Speaker 1: voices that the English language world only encounters in translation,
Speaker 1: people like Olga Tokuchuk or Annie Orno. For those keeping score,
Speaker 1: Patrick White is the only Australian born writer to win
Speaker 1: the prize, back in nineteen seventy three. John Kurtseyer, now
Speaker 1: based in South Australia, is also a previous winner, and
Speaker 1: every year we're subjected to endless think pieces devoted to
Speaker 1: predicting that former read this guest Gerald Manane is a
Speaker 1: shoe in to win. Speaking personally, I think Alexis Writer
Speaker 1: and Helen Ghana might both be more plausible prospects at
Speaker 1: this point, but one way or the other, for a writer,
Speaker 1: it's an accolade that typically is more transformative than Doris
Speaker 1: Lessing's experience of being inconvenienced on her own doorstep. Tanzanian
Speaker 1: born London based writer Abdul Raza Gerna was awarded the
Speaker 1: Nobel back in twenty twenty one. Over four decades, he's
Speaker 1: published short story collections and essays, but he's probably best
Speaker 1: known for his extraordinary novels, including nineteen ninety four's Paradise,
Speaker 1: which was on the Book A shortlist, two thousand and
Speaker 1: one's by the Sea, and two thousand and five's Desertion.
Speaker 1: He's a gorgeous writer. It's hard to think of many
Speaker 1: who have so evocatively explored stories of refugees and human displacement,
Speaker 1: the long shadow of colonialism, and the heartbreak of exile.
Speaker 1: His latest novel, Theft, he began writing before his life
Speaker 1: was reshuffled by the Nobel win and it follows three
Speaker 1: very different young people whose lives intersect and are then
Speaker 1: thrown into disarray following a shattering false accusation. It's a
Speaker 1: sharp and moving reminder that, as nice as the recognition
Speaker 1: provided by awards might be, true writers take the barrage
Speaker 1: of external interests in their stride. They walk on past
Speaker 1: cameras and microphones alike, carry their shopping inside, and get
Speaker 1: back to the desk to write. And Abdul Razak Gerner
Speaker 1: is a true writer. I'm Michael Williams, and this is
Speaker 1: read this show about the books we love and the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winners behind them. I might start with what is,
Speaker 1: in many ways the ultimate obvious and banal question, which
Speaker 1: is the tyranny of expectation your first novel after being
Speaker 1: awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and whether that felt
Speaker 1: like a burden or at the very least something that
Speaker 1: got into your head as you were writing theft.
Speaker 3: No Actually, OK, I can say without any sort of
Speaker 3: pretense it or whatever. It so happened that I was
Speaker 3: some way into the writing of the book when the
Speaker 3: announcement was made, maybe the first quarters of the book
Speaker 3: in the end, but with the announcement that had to stop,
Speaker 3: because I mean, there's just too much going on, and
Speaker 3: my sort of slight anxiety as they're doing all these
Speaker 3: wonderful things for the next several months or a year,
Speaker 3: and several months, I should say, was when I go
Speaker 3: back to it, it's still going to be alive. And
Speaker 3: I went back to it, and it was so I
Speaker 3: just picked up and carried on. And I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: because I wasn't writing it, but I was thinking about it,
Speaker 3: I was able to get back to it and move
Speaker 3: quite rapidly in the writing because I had so much
Speaker 3: time to plan and think and anticipate.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that process or that feeling of a
Speaker 1: liveness when it comes to writing a book. How much
Speaker 1: is that about a narrative or a story, and how
Speaker 1: much of it's very much about character? Because this book,
Speaker 1: perhaps alongside several of your earlier ones, but this one
Speaker 1: is very acute la a kind of three hammer, and
Speaker 1: character is essential to the energy and the beating heart
Speaker 1: of this book is that what's alive? Is it that
Speaker 1: you can return and see those people.
Speaker 3: Yes, not only that, but the loveliest thing and the
Speaker 3: most wonderful thing you can I can feel as a
Speaker 3: writer is to say, I haven't said this yet, and
Speaker 3: I haven't done that yet, and I haven't done the
Speaker 3: other yet. So it's not only what's there is alive,
Speaker 3: but they anticipated next parts are also already kind of
Speaker 3: like stirring. So in that sense, you see, you feel
Speaker 3: there is a destination. It isn't something that feels as
Speaker 3: if it's kind of so what. There are things to write,
Speaker 3: So that's the thing.
Speaker 2: That's a life.
Speaker 1: That's a nice thing. So I'm not static that there
Speaker 1: is that kind of a desire to kind of push
Speaker 1: forward and for motion.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: There is something to continue with, you know, So it's
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel as if it's kind of running into
Speaker 3: the ground or something like that.
Speaker 2: So there was that sense.
Speaker 3: But also in the meantime, of course, if you're talking
Speaker 3: about those figures, the characters, then I've had all the
Speaker 3: time to think about them and to sort of shape them,
Speaker 3: perhaps more in greater detail. Often I think of writing
Speaker 3: as this kind of process of accretion. I starts the
Speaker 3: core idea, and many of the things that end up
Speaker 3: being the novel are not there already, but there is
Speaker 3: the core idea, and then as you write, things pile up,
Speaker 3: as it were, and get more dense and more intense
Speaker 3: and so on.
Speaker 1: I want to return to the three young people at
Speaker 1: the heart of Theft in a moment. But it seems
Speaker 1: to me the other element that's integral to this book
Speaker 1: is the setting, not just in terms of place, but
Speaker 1: in terms of time. And I'm curious about that period
Speaker 1: of the nineteen nineties in Zenz and what it was
Speaker 1: about the kind of nineteen nineties into the turn of
Speaker 1: the millennium that so captured your imagination that you knew
Speaker 1: that was a period in life and zens about that
Speaker 1: you wanted to explicitly write about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, it was very much the period that it
Speaker 3: does start earlier, So I wanted that to be the
Speaker 3: kind of the focus period. But I also wanted to
Speaker 3: have the before as well. And the before was the
Speaker 3: period of just independence and the possibilities of that, the
Speaker 3: usual disappointments that almost all our former colonial territories countries
Speaker 3: experienced one way or another. But the nineties was a
Speaker 3: period of kind of change in the sense of some
Speaker 3: of the early ideas about what transformational society had already
Speaker 3: been abandoned in a way. The various attempts to make
Speaker 3: a socialist corporative state clearly.
Speaker 2: Did not work for Tanzania anyway.
Speaker 3: The excesses of the revolution designs but had quietened down.
Speaker 3: And one of the biggest factors, and this was tourism.
Speaker 3: You don't want to have people being restreated and whatever
Speaker 3: when you have tourists around, because they won't come back.
Speaker 1: It does take the edge of the cocktail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does, so in a way, it did lead
Speaker 3: rather strangely to quieting things down, But that's not the
Speaker 3: only reason. The other reason was also the kind of
Speaker 3: new generation of politicians and leaders now who many of
Speaker 3: whom were people who traveled elsewhere, studied elsewhere, and coming
Speaker 3: back with different ideas about.
Speaker 2: What is possible and what the future should hold.
Speaker 3: So it's a period of possibilities. But possibilities can also
Speaker 3: be seductive. They can seduce people from acting with integrity
Speaker 3: if you like, and or strength and others into saying no,
Speaker 3: this is what I think is the best thing to do.
Speaker 2: So I wanted that sort of suggestion of things.
Speaker 3: Opening up, but also opening up in ways if were
Speaker 3: not always as clean as they looked.
Speaker 1: What was your relationship with zenz Aba at that time,
Speaker 1: during that period you had returned after the many years
Speaker 1: in which you hadn't visited. Did you feel it all
Speaker 1: on the outsider returning after your period of exile or
Speaker 1: was it still your place?
Speaker 2: Can I just change that word exile?
Speaker 3: Yes, I don't like to use that word because I
Speaker 3: don't think it it's a description of my circumstances. Really,
Speaker 3: because can me tell you why I think of exile
Speaker 3: as a condition one finds oneself in a principle, usually
Speaker 3: because you've said something in opposition, and in addition to that,
Speaker 3: your life is at risk in some way. So you
Speaker 3: choose exile rather than prison or being shot or whatever
Speaker 3: it is. I left because I wanted to study and
Speaker 3: it was impossible at that time, So my life was
Speaker 3: not at risk when I left. I was not in
Speaker 3: danger in any way at all. I was deprived of
Speaker 3: this or that, or that or the other, but I
Speaker 3: was not in danger. I think of exile as a honorable, dignified,
Speaker 3: indeed an admirable position. I don't blame that for what
Speaker 3: I did, which was to leave in order to improve
Speaker 3: my life.
Speaker 1: I'm very interested to hear that. I absolutely understand and
Speaker 1: respect that distinction. I mean, in that period you're away,
Speaker 1: even though it was by choice, did you feel a
Speaker 1: sense of estrangement from your homeland.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, I did what I did because I was eighteen
Speaker 3: years old and didn't know what I was doing. I'm
Speaker 3: not suggesting that it was simply a straightforward, heroic thing
Speaker 3: that I thought, right, this is what I'm doing. Perhaps
Speaker 3: somebody who was older and knew a little bit more
Speaker 3: about the world would not have done that. But then
Speaker 3: at eighteen, you don't know those things. You do something
Speaker 3: which may be reckless, which may which may be brave,
Speaker 3: or what you don't know you you act because certain
Speaker 3: situations are intolerable.
Speaker 2: No, I don't want to live like this. So yeah,
Speaker 2: as soon as I left.
Speaker 3: One of the first questions I asked myself when I
Speaker 3: arrived in England was what have I done?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's a reasonable response to England
Speaker 1: in many respects historically, So that's a fair question, even
Speaker 1: beginning with culinary opportunities and they're moving on from there,
Speaker 1: what have you done?
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it was more. It was more the being
Speaker 3: so far away from everything I knew. And I think
Speaker 3: this probably is not spectacularly unique or anything like that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it's the reaction of a stranger in a place,
Speaker 3: particularly young, without skills, without money, without you know, any
Speaker 3: kind of preparation. Really, but your question really was how
Speaker 3: did that feel when I return? Yeah, So the very
Speaker 3: first time I returned show was after about seventeen years
Speaker 3: of being away, because like I said earlier, knew new
Speaker 3: leaders and so there was an amnesty it is okay,
Speaker 3: everybody who left can return if they want.
Speaker 2: To, and so I went.
Speaker 3: At that point, I was not sure what kind of
Speaker 3: reception I would receive. I thought, and this is to
Speaker 3: do the guilt of the person who's been away. You
Speaker 3: think either they will have forgotten me, or they'll say
Speaker 3: as soon as you open your mouth to say you've changed,
Speaker 3: you're different, we don't know who you are, or something
Speaker 3: like that. In fact, none of those things. The welcome
Speaker 3: was incredible, and sure I was able to just come back,
Speaker 3: go back rather and feel at home, and subsequent returns,
Speaker 3: which have been many since then, I have kind of
Speaker 3: simply reassured and endorsed and whatever all that feeling. The
Speaker 3: first thing my father said to me after I sort
Speaker 3: of greet at him, and he said, yes, hello, have
Speaker 3: you said your prayers today? And I said no, not yet.
Speaker 3: She said, well, you got to the mosque. Now I
Speaker 3: say your prayers. And I felt like I was a
Speaker 3: he seen me for seventeen years. The first thing he
Speaker 3: says is have you said your prayers?
Speaker 2: Go to the mosque?
Speaker 1: Reverting to type with one's parents is exactly is a
Speaker 1: great privilege.
Speaker 3: You're still my son, I think, and do it what
Speaker 3: I expect you to do. So it was very easy
Speaker 3: to not even think about that, apart from obviously one
Speaker 3: almosts but it was very easy to sort of put
Speaker 3: that one side and be this other person that I
Speaker 3: recognizably like the one I left, even if obviously I'm not.
Speaker 1: When we return, we discussed the three characters of the
Speaker 1: heart of Theft, and Abdul Razak shares the problematic phenomenon
Speaker 1: of tourism in his hometown of Zanzoma.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: So coming back to theft, of the kind of central
Speaker 1: characters Kareem and was one of them prominent in the
Speaker 1: conception of this book or was it the interplay between
Speaker 1: the three of them that was your kind of insighting idea?
Speaker 3: Yes, but it was the starting point. In fact, I
Speaker 3: think I began by writing that section which is now
Speaker 3: like the third chapter where he's taken to the house
Speaker 3: of Uncle os Man. I think that's where I started.
Speaker 3: But because the starting point was the accusation or theft,
Speaker 3: so that was the starting point of the injustice of that,
Speaker 3: and it did how somebody in his situation.
Speaker 2: Powerless to resist.
Speaker 3: Such an accusation, how he might take that accusation or
Speaker 3: what he might do about it. Yeah, So it was
Speaker 3: to start with, it was to see to position him,
Speaker 3: prepare him, if you like, for that episode that it's
Speaker 3: going to be that he's going to be accused and
Speaker 3: as I was thinking of that, I was thinking, well,
Speaker 3: how what are going to be.
Speaker 2: His options as he were?
Speaker 3: And then that's how Kareem came to mind that he
Speaker 3: was going to be somebody who befriends him and takes
Speaker 3: him away. And then I'm not saying anymore because he
Speaker 3: really might spoil for the reader.
Speaker 1: Part of what I think is so acutely realized in
Speaker 1: this book is that the nature of a wrongful accusation
Speaker 1: is so embedded in ideas about how you are perceived
Speaker 1: by others and the ways in which they get to
Speaker 1: define who you are and what your capacity and your
Speaker 1: limitations are. And that seems to me to be a
Speaker 1: particularly interesting idea in this book.
Speaker 3: Yes, indeed, one of the reasons we're making better as
Speaker 3: he is, which is that he's a set powerless, but
Speaker 3: he's also aware of his powerlessness. He's an intelligent young man,
Speaker 3: which in a way is precisely what makes him so
Speaker 3: watchful and looking and seeing, trying to understand all the time.
Speaker 3: So for me, it seems that this is his greatest defense.
Speaker 3: He doesn't protest, he doesn't try to defend himself against
Speaker 3: these accusations, or rather, he does only feebly as well.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have an answer because he has no position,
Speaker 3: he has no power, he has no support. But what
Speaker 3: he has is this ability and capacity to see and
Speaker 3: kind of think about it and learn something. And as
Speaker 3: you know, as as you said, you've read so many
Speaker 3: in my books, I'm always interested in how people manage
Speaker 3: to draw back from a traumatic situation, At a situation
Speaker 3: which is which is oppressing, how do they find the
Speaker 3: means to retrieve something from that, to get out of that.
Speaker 3: Whereas somebody like Kreem moves on because of his dynamism,
Speaker 3: I suppose it's his ambition, et cetera. Somebody like Whether
Speaker 3: doesn't move on but kind of calmly tries to understand.
Speaker 1: And at the heart of that is that kind of
Speaker 1: relationship between passivity as a character and active kind of engagement.
Speaker 1: And you know, between those two that becomes a kind
Speaker 1: of a major point of tension. There's that and I'm
Speaker 1: sorry I'm going to misquote this, but there's a wonderful
Speaker 1: moment when but things to himself, I've learned to endure that,
Speaker 1: you know, the steadiness that that not being reactive, that
Speaker 1: not defining yourself in opposition to the things that happen
Speaker 1: to you can be a virtue in and of.
Speaker 3: Itself, well, especially if you don't have the means to
Speaker 3: defend yourself, if you don't have the means to say
Speaker 3: that's nonsense, I'm not having that. Don't talk to me
Speaker 3: like that or something like that. It won't it won't
Speaker 3: achieve anything because of the situation that he's in. But
Speaker 3: in any case, it's also a kind of defense, courtesy
Speaker 3: and silence, and I can sometimes work to disarm.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the kind of third key figure in
Speaker 1: the present day narrative or the latter narrative of the book, Fausia.
Speaker 1: Tell me about her and where she came from and
Speaker 1: how you say her.
Speaker 3: Well, I got interested in the idea of epilepsy as
Speaker 3: I started to write, and somehow, you know, this is
Speaker 3: what I think of his writer's luck. I had this
Speaker 3: idea that I was starting to work or whether and
Speaker 3: I heard a story of somebody I knew whose son
Speaker 3: was born epileptic and very intelligent, gentleman, really talented, and
Speaker 3: the anxieties and difficulties that the parents had for this boy,
Speaker 3: this young man growing up. I think it was about fourteen,
Speaker 3: and so I became interested in the idea, well, what
Speaker 3: are the symptoms, what is it?
Speaker 2: How can it be dealt with? If you know what
Speaker 2: I mean?
Speaker 3: And in the circumstances of a place like Zanziba, where
Speaker 3: we're really health services are not very advanced still in fact,
Speaker 3: if anything they've gone down, how would that have been
Speaker 3: perceived and how would the parents have coped with that?
Speaker 2: So that first gave me from.
Speaker 3: There, but it also gave me Faxia's parents in to
Speaker 3: see how they might cope, particularly the mother. And naturally,
Speaker 3: you know in a novel you've got to have a
Speaker 3: romance going on somewhere.
Speaker 1: You have a deeper romantic heart. It has to be said.
Speaker 1: You know, you know more than many novelists with ten
Speaker 1: eleven books, And then I think I come to expect
Speaker 1: when I read a book from you, that there is
Speaker 1: going to be a romance.
Speaker 3: Absolutely okay, So it was obvious that this young woman
Speaker 3: was going to be part of the relationship with either
Speaker 3: possibly with career. But it becomes it's not just romance
Speaker 3: for on its own sake, it also becomes away of
Speaker 3: trying to understand human relations and how people are sympathetic
Speaker 3: or kind to each other or the opposite. And it
Speaker 3: seems to me that one to one, that is to
Speaker 3: say that a loving or not a loving relationship is
Speaker 3: the most intense kind of stage in which to explore
Speaker 3: capacity for compassion and kindness and empathy and all of
Speaker 3: those six And so we see how people cope.
Speaker 1: And I think compassion and kindness and empathy, but also accommodation.
Speaker 1: You know, that thing about modifying one's life for one's
Speaker 1: expectations because of love for another. And I think you
Speaker 1: capture those rhythms of a love story incredibly well, that
Speaker 1: that idea that there is stuff that you give up willingly.
Speaker 3: For love, absolutely, and not only for love of man
Speaker 3: and woman, of course, but also for love of a
Speaker 3: child to parent parent child in all of these ways.
Speaker 3: So Farsier is also, of course a dutiful daughter as
Speaker 3: well as you know, clever and interested young woman. As
Speaker 3: Karim says of her, you think, maybe slight condescension, she's
Speaker 3: an intellectual.
Speaker 1: Coming back to the thing that you flagged before about
Speaker 1: Zanzibarron the nineties and the rise of tourism, because I
Speaker 1: do I think that that's one of the threads in
Speaker 1: the book and one of the kind of pressures that
Speaker 1: I just don't remember reading before. Is it's such a
Speaker 1: kind of potent postcolonial theme, but you deal with it
Speaker 1: very gracefully, very sharply.
Speaker 3: I think, Well, of course, I know that tourism is
Speaker 3: a problematic phenomenon, and I know that very well, whereas
Speaker 3: anser base can sern. But that wasn't the show I
Speaker 3: was interested in here, or rather, what I'm interested in
Speaker 3: is also in a kind of marginal way, the way these.
Speaker 2: Become disruptive forces. There is a way in which they're very.
Speaker 3: Much disruptive forces in the way they affect the economy,
Speaker 3: the way they encourage our leaders to become more corrupt
Speaker 3: than they're inclined to be, because of all these commissions
Speaker 3: to get here, commissions to get there. But there is
Speaker 3: another way in which, as I said earlier, it forces
Speaker 3: the administration, like the government, to provide a more peaceful environment.
Speaker 3: It forces all kinds of developments to happen, roads to
Speaker 3: be made, so the country kind of gains something even
Speaker 3: as it loses some of the normal you know, rules
Speaker 3: of behavior and so on. The people are drawn into
Speaker 3: less so now than I think at first. You know,
Speaker 3: where drugs become a problem, for example, or young women
Speaker 3: become involved in, you know, relationships that are are going
Speaker 3: to be exploitative. But what also has happened is that
Speaker 3: the kind of tourists who now comes to Zanziba. In
Speaker 3: the nineties it was very much people who are low
Speaker 3: budget or whatever the phrase is, whereas now people come
Speaker 3: as families and you get a different atmosphere with the
Speaker 3: tourists from the hedonistic young men and women who are
Speaker 3: coming When in the early eighties, sorry, the mid eighties
Speaker 3: and early nineties, it doesn't mean that the ugliness of
Speaker 3: tourism isn't there, but it's more restrained, I think. But
Speaker 3: what the most corrupt part of it is the way
Speaker 3: I wish money money gets used to build flash hotels
Speaker 3: rather than money gets used to build better hospitals and
Speaker 3: better schools.
Speaker 1: And there is culturally an idea about the tourists, and
Speaker 1: I think it's Felsia's mother who has this amazing speech
Speaker 1: about tourists kind of furious about them, that culturally the
Speaker 1: idea that it's a superficial engagement with the place to
Speaker 1: be a tourist, that you're there in a purely kind
Speaker 1: of extractive sense without actually engaging, and it's struck me
Speaker 1: reading the book that to a certain extent, the argument
Speaker 1: seems to be that the tourist is almost the opposite
Speaker 1: of the novelist, That the novelist tries to build something
Speaker 1: and plant something and engage at a kind of deep
Speaker 1: level from the roots up, whereas a tourist is there
Speaker 1: taking what they can and skidding across the surface.
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean all we are all tourists, of course,
Speaker 3: one way or another. But I think sometimes the relationship
Speaker 3: between the tourists and the local person or the native
Speaker 3: culture is so unequal that you can go in and pretend,
Speaker 3: you know, like you go into these all inclusive sort
Speaker 3: of places. A lot of tourists go to those places
Speaker 3: and answer, but they go to their hotel by the beach.
Speaker 3: They get taken on bus tours to this, to that,
Speaker 3: to that, they get sent back to the hotel and
Speaker 3: they don't really see anything. It's not so easy to
Speaker 3: be able to do that if you're a tourist, saying
Speaker 3: the UK, because you're not in that position of an
Speaker 3: unequal power. You have to get on the underground, you
Speaker 3: have to rub shoulders with people, you have to hail
Speaker 3: a taxi, you know, sneered up by the waiters and
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. But I think I tried to
Speaker 3: do that to show how disengaged the tourist is, and
Speaker 3: of course in the mother's outbursts at the end, is
Speaker 3: to have somebody say, you know, this is what do
Speaker 3: they want here? Why don't they have beaches in their
Speaker 3: own countries? Where do they come here?
Speaker 1: It feels like a very as far as albust good,
Speaker 1: feels like one that you have either heard on many
Speaker 1: occasions or maybe even out of yourself.
Speaker 3: I certainly aparaly on many occasions, definitely, especially when when
Speaker 3: something unpleasant has come about, it has happened, as in
Speaker 3: this case, why did they come here?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: But even then you're undercut of there's a wonderful idea
Speaker 1: about all ages. Imagine they knew what was a value
Speaker 1: and now no longer do that. That this is that
Speaker 1: we all have this kind of failure to see the
Speaker 1: ways in which we're guilty of some of the same things.
Speaker 3: Yes, although of course that is as an aspirational took.
Speaker 2: There is an argument about that because.
Speaker 3: I think it's some mother who says that, or the father,
Speaker 3: and it's Fauzier who says, but that.
Speaker 2: We need them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, they bring money, so we need them.
Speaker 2: So both sides. You know, there is an argument to
Speaker 2: be made on both sides.
Speaker 1: Abdul Razaggerner's latest novel, Theft, is available at all good bookstores. Now,
Speaker 1: before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
Speaker 1: been reading this week, and it's another book of the
Speaker 1: Booker International long List. This one is written by a
Speaker 1: guy called Christian Kracht and translated by Daniel Bowles, and
Speaker 1: it's got the excellent title of euro Trash. It follows
Speaker 1: a writer who's taking his mum a kind of monstrous
Speaker 1: figure on a road trip. And it's comic, it's tragic,
Speaker 1: it's very effective. It's only a short little book, but
Speaker 1: it is a terrific read and kind of dark and weird.
Speaker 1: You will enjoy it. And it's readily available in your
Speaker 1: local independent bookshop or maybe even in your public library.
Speaker 1: Go and have a look, and have a look for
Speaker 1: all the other books we've discussed this week. That's it
Speaker 1: for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Speaker 1: Next week I read this. I'm chatting with the wonderfully
Speaker 1: charming calm toy Bin whose latest novel, Long Island, as
Speaker 1: him returning to his beloved Eilish Lacy and even more
Speaker 1: beloved in a scorthy.
Speaker 4: The word sequel only came up when the book was
Speaker 4: delivered and people were trying to work out how we're
Speaker 4: going to place this book. What's going to jacket was
Speaker 4: and the word sequel started And I hadn't really put
Speaker 4: a thought into it, in the way that you often
Speaker 4: don't put it all into something for a good reason,
Speaker 4: because you're avoiding thinking about it. And I know it's
Speaker 4: for avoiding thinking. How am I going to justify this one?
Speaker 4: I'm not going to say about this business. Oh here
Speaker 4: we are again with these characters. And the problem is
Speaker 4: that this has been the most successful book of my
Speaker 4: commercial So here.
Speaker 2: Am I jumping on the.
Speaker 4: Bandwagon and uh riding it retired horse to death. And
Speaker 4: I suppose the first thing is that I got a
Speaker 4: lot of energy from the film read.
Speaker 1: This is a Schwarz Media production made possible by the
Speaker 1: generous support of our group. The show is produced and
Speaker 1: edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
Speaker 1: original compositions by Zolden Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by
Speaker 1: posey mckacky, thanks for listening, See you next week.