Speaker 1: I don't know if you're anything like me, but there
Speaker 1: are some authors who when I hear they have a
Speaker 1: new book coming out, and get nervous more than excited.
Speaker 1: Not because I don't love their work, quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: It's because I've loved everything they've written, so a new
Speaker 1: book can almost only disappoint. And let's face it, with
Speaker 1: the world as it is right now, do we need
Speaker 1: any more bad news. Rachel Kushner was one such author.
Speaker 1: I've loved everything she's done. Her debut was fiendishly talented.
Speaker 1: It was called Telex from Cuba, and she followed it
Speaker 1: up with one of my favorite novels of the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, The Flamethrowers. Her third novel, The Mars Room,
Speaker 1: was shortlisted for the Book A Prize, and it won
Speaker 1: France's biggest literary award, the pre Medicia Tranjeur, which is
Speaker 1: for Literature and Translation. And so with all of this
Speaker 1: weight of expectation, I couldn't help but approach her new
Speaker 1: book with a sense of trepidation. But I'm very happy
Speaker 1: to report it was utterly unnecessary. About two pages in
Speaker 1: and you ares in the capable hands of one of
Speaker 1: the greats, and Rachel Kushner had done it again, another brilliant, funny,
Speaker 1: clever book, and once again on the book a shortlist
Speaker 1: as well. The novel's called Creation Lake, and it follows
Speaker 1: a character called Sadie Smith. She's a spy, well actually,
Speaker 1: she's probably closer to a mercenary. She's been cut loose
Speaker 1: from the FBI after a case has gone wrong, and
Speaker 1: she's working freelance for some sketchily described corporate types. Her
Speaker 1: mission to infiltrate a commune of radical ego activists in
Speaker 1: the French countryside, led by the enigmatic Bruno lacom Bruno's
Speaker 1: rejected civilization. He lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes
Speaker 1: the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. The
Speaker 1: whole thing is so much more than just a spy thriller.
Speaker 1: Creation Lake is a novel of ideas, and I think
Speaker 1: it might just be her best work yet, Michael, and
Speaker 1: this is reread this to show about the books we
Speaker 1: love and the stories behind them. All the elements that
Speaker 1: have made Rachel Kushner such a respected and beloved author
Speaker 1: are here in her fourth book. But perhaps what's more
Speaker 1: remarkable is the obvious ways in which he's developed and
Speaker 1: grown as a writer. There are thematic echoes, to be sure,
Speaker 1: but it's apparent that this is not an author inclined
Speaker 1: to repeat herself.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I try to do something different
Speaker 2: with every book, but each book does feel to me
Speaker 2: like a singular universe that I'm not building really in
Speaker 2: conscious conversation with other novels, because it's as if each
Speaker 2: novel it feels like the only chance I get to
Speaker 2: finally figure out how to resolve and unify form with content,
Speaker 2: because each book has a different form and a different
Speaker 2: set of themes, and so it's like I have to
Speaker 2: invent the wheel all over again, and I'm never thinking, oh,
Speaker 2: I did it this way last time, so this time
Speaker 2: I'll do it in this other manner. There's a curious pattern,
Speaker 2: which is when I'm finishing a novel, I make a
Speaker 2: decision rather impetuously, my next novel is going to be
Speaker 2: about X, and if there are struggles along the way
Speaker 2: to building the novel about X, I always feel that
Speaker 2: the problems are with me and not with X. If
Speaker 2: that makes sense, it could be that it is a
Speaker 2: way of resolving the quotion of the arbitrary. Like as
Speaker 2: a viewer of art, whether it's cinema or visual art
Speaker 2: or literature, I never want to feel that decisions could
Speaker 2: have been made one way but just happen to have
Speaker 2: been made another. I don't want to get a whiff
Speaker 2: that there's something arbitrary about the plans that were laid
Speaker 2: in how they were executed. So when I make this decision,
Speaker 2: it's very concrete and there's no turning back from it
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: Are you certain about many things in your life?
Speaker 2: No, I'm a really indecisive person. And in fact I
Speaker 2: still call my mother all the time if I can't
Speaker 2: decide something, and she's used to it, and she'll say, Rachel,
Speaker 2: I really can't decide for you. I can't help you
Speaker 2: with that. I could be bungling this, but for my
Speaker 2: uses it has served me. There's a line in a
Speaker 2: William Gaddison novel I really love the Recognitions where he says,
Speaker 2: decision is indecision crystallized. So there are times when I
Speaker 2: wait so long to decide something, and I invest so
Speaker 2: much energy in trying to discern which is the right
Speaker 2: to decision, that in fact I have more or less
Speaker 2: decided through my refusal to act. There's this Nino Simone
Speaker 2: song that I really love. Either way I lose. It's
Speaker 2: on the same record that has Lilac Wine. Yeah, a
Speaker 2: song that Jeff Buckley made famous by covering it. But
Speaker 2: either way I lose is like it cuts to the
Speaker 2: heart of what is challenging about choice, which is that
Speaker 2: if I choose A, I lose B and if I
Speaker 2: choose B, I lose A. But when it comes to
Speaker 2: artistic direction, I am not indecisive, and I'm not sure why.
Speaker 2: It's always just like the new world that you plunge into,
Speaker 2: and each one does feel really different to me. This
Speaker 2: experience was completely different than writing any of my other novels.
Speaker 1: And what I understand about this experience is the wood
Speaker 1: that you've applied to it a number of times. Is
Speaker 1: fin that this was one of the most purely fun
Speaker 1: writing experiences or fun experience is full stop that you've
Speaker 1: ever enjoyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. I mean, it gave me great pleasure
Speaker 2: to write the novel. I had the idea for this
Speaker 2: book for quite a long time. Sometimes I just know
Speaker 2: right away when I sort of pick up an image,
Speaker 2: a notion, a scene, it just goes sort of inside
Speaker 2: the mind and gets stashed someplace. And I had known
Speaker 2: since probably late two thousand and eight that someday I
Speaker 2: would want to write a novel like this one, in
Speaker 2: the sense of it being a novel that takes place
Speaker 2: in France and deals with young people who want to
Speaker 2: figure out a way to live that is protected from
Speaker 2: the predations of capitalism and are set on a collision
Speaker 2: course with the French state. And then when I finished
Speaker 2: The Mars Room, my previous novel, I started working on
Speaker 2: this book, and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 2: And it was three and a half years of trying
Speaker 2: things out, and then I let go of everything I
Speaker 2: had done, and when I started over, I wrote what
Speaker 2: became the first two sentences of the book. Those are
Speaker 2: the first two things I wrote. And I knew right
Speaker 2: away that I was transposing the language of somebody, this
Speaker 2: character Bruno, who's a kind of mentor who thinks that
Speaker 2: we need to look carefully at the deep past in
Speaker 2: order to assess the direction for the whole human project.
Speaker 2: And I knew that his words were being transposed by
Speaker 2: somebody else. And I was really interested in the formal
Speaker 2: challenge of two storytellers inside of one that this woman
Speaker 2: has a monopoly on the telling, but that somebody else
Speaker 2: has kind of invaded her telling to a degree invaded,
Speaker 2: And it would sort of be he is an unreliable
Speaker 2: narrator to some degree. She's just a moral person. Is
Speaker 2: like adopting the tone or the voice of a kind
Speaker 2: of devil, a hostile force. She doesn't have malice. Her
Speaker 2: intention is not to hurt other people for the sake
Speaker 2: of hurting them. But she has no sympathy for other people.
Speaker 2: And that's not the way that I am at all.
Speaker 2: And so I sort of had to develop the contours
Speaker 2: of an alien sensibility at the same time that I
Speaker 2: was seeing her, to look at the writings of somebody
Speaker 2: who felt much closer to a person I could understand
Speaker 2: and know, and had depth and dimension and a more
Speaker 2: classical and to me literary biography. He has a passed.
Speaker 2: He's a man of the twentieth century. He lost his
Speaker 2: family in World War II too. He was swept up
Speaker 2: in what for many people was significant historical passage through
Speaker 2: May of nineteen sixty eight, and then decides eventually that
Speaker 2: no revolution is coming, and in recognizing the devastation of
Speaker 2: that which isn't for him a kind of nihilism, but
Speaker 2: an acknowledgment of reality. He decides, we can revolutionize consciousness instead.
Speaker 2: There's a way of renovating being, rather than waiting like
Speaker 2: people sort of desperately waiting for a messianic change that
Speaker 2: is not coming. The more I worked on it, the
Speaker 2: longer I spent each day writing, the more hours I
Speaker 2: was there, the more vivid the world I was creating
Speaker 2: became to the point where I could really see it
Speaker 2: and feel it, and I was eager to get there
Speaker 2: every day. And it was It's like I was building
Speaker 2: this parallel universe that really glowed for me. And I
Speaker 2: love my life. I love this world. But during the
Speaker 2: kind of intense fourteen months I was writing the book,
Speaker 2: I started to prefer it the world of the book
Speaker 2: for the duration that I was there.
Speaker 1: There's so much I want to unpack from your answer,
Speaker 1: but I just before I get to Bruno and Sadie
Speaker 1: in particular, why French youths as a group of idealistic
Speaker 1: young people. Was it the nineteen sixty eight shadows that
Speaker 1: made it being in the French countries side particularly important?
Speaker 1: What is it about that place that makes that youthful
Speaker 1: idealism and radicalism different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question, and my answer is it's
Speaker 2: not that I was looking to describe a group of
Speaker 2: young people with ideals and then assigned them the nationality French. Rather,
Speaker 2: it's constructed differently from me, which is that I was
Speaker 2: looking at the French milieu. That's where I started. So
Speaker 2: it can't be generalized to say the United States or Italy,
Speaker 2: both countries I'm familiar with than have written about. I
Speaker 2: am familiar with French politics. I'm interested in French culture
Speaker 2: partly through exposure because I'm married to somebody who has
Speaker 2: written pretty extensively about Guidebor, particularly as films. My husband Jason,
Speaker 2: is also a translator and translated to books by the
Speaker 2: Invisible Committee, who had a commune in the northern Correz
Speaker 2: in the village of Tarnac, and they were rated by
Speaker 2: the French police in two thousand and eight, and we
Speaker 2: watched that happen and the police used against them as
Speaker 2: evidence a book, and that book, the Coming Insurrection. It
Speaker 2: was translated by a group of people anonymously, but you know,
Speaker 2: I know some of the principal people who were involved
Speaker 2: in establishing the tone of the writing, and I'm really
Speaker 2: interested in that writing. I think The Coming Insurrection is
Speaker 2: a kind of brilliant book. I couldn't reproduce a fictional
Speaker 2: version of that book. I think it would be flat
Speaker 2: if I did a version of it. But in my
Speaker 2: novel there's reference Le Moulin the commune. You know, it
Speaker 2: just means the mill, very simple. The Muleinards have a
Speaker 2: book called Zones of Incivility, and it's kind of my
Speaker 2: version of The Coming Insurrection. I did a few lines,
Speaker 2: but I was interested in that world and the way that,
Speaker 2: as you say, you know you site May sixty eight,
Speaker 2: a lot of culture fans out from there, and like,
Speaker 2: I'm really interested in French cinema. I'm interested in French literature.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like it's a colorful milieu to me,
Speaker 2: and it's enriches my love of the literature to understand
Speaker 2: the political and social and cultural references that you would
Speaker 2: find in books by people like Marguerite Duross. And I
Speaker 2: know young people in France and I'm interested in the
Speaker 2: way that when they moved to the countryside to learn
Speaker 2: how to farm, people from Paris, they're following upon or
Speaker 2: looking to learn from a version of knowledge and wisdom
Speaker 2: that is part of a kind of romantic conception of
Speaker 2: what people call LaFrance profond, you know, like the deep
Speaker 2: France is the peasant class, and peasants have been the
Speaker 2: site of political resistance and revolt over hundreds of years,
Speaker 2: and the French resistance during World War Two, you know,
Speaker 2: was like famously organized in fierce in certain parts of
Speaker 2: southwestern France, where I set my novel. It's also the
Speaker 2: case that we go to southwestern France every summer, and
Speaker 2: so I'm familiar with the landscape and I love it
Speaker 2: in a way that frees me to describe it with
Speaker 2: that labor or research because my love of it and
Speaker 2: my understanding of the people there, my conversations with people, farmers,
Speaker 2: young people who've moved, maybe let's say, from Bordeaux to
Speaker 2: a village and gotten a business going processing walnuts, and
Speaker 2: I meet them and I'm taken on a tour of
Speaker 2: the walnut processing facility, and they're like, these are these
Speaker 2: turn of the century machines. We've figured out how to
Speaker 2: repair them. Those are all things that are just casual
Speaker 2: happenstance in my personal life, and they start to accrue
Speaker 2: in a way that allows me to write with a measure.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say authority, but maybe, but with a free hand.
Speaker 2: I'm not looking at notes. I'm just putting into an
Speaker 2: assemblage things that I care about and that stay vivid
Speaker 2: from me because I've witnessed them firsthand.
Speaker 1: When we return, Rachel explains why all the characters in
Speaker 1: Creation Lake are in fact her. That's coming up in
Speaker 1: just a minute. I can't help but wonder how much
Speaker 1: your pleasure and fun that you had occupying this world,
Speaker 1: your desire to return to it, how much of it's
Speaker 1: about the medieau, and how much of it's about the voices.
Speaker 1: As you say, there's an amorality to Sadie. She's something
Speaker 1: of a that must be a fun voice to inhabit.
Speaker 2: It was for me, I mean, you know, And I
Speaker 2: think whether somebody likes the book might come down to
Speaker 2: whether they can tolerate her or not. She's not for everybody,
Speaker 2: but no novel is, and if you set out to
Speaker 2: please everyone, you know, God forbid. I think of these
Speaker 2: artists Komar and Melamed, who came up with this project
Speaker 2: for making like world's most popular painting, and they went
Speaker 2: around asking people like, what components do you like in
Speaker 2: a painting? And oh, well, I like if there's a
Speaker 2: cabin and it should be near a body of water,
Speaker 2: and I like some trees in the painting. And so
Speaker 2: then they come up with this pastiche painting that's not
Speaker 2: a pestition in terms of form, but a pestiche in
Speaker 2: terms of a set of the desires of the multitude
Speaker 2: over what a painting should be. I mean, that's maybe
Speaker 2: like a wordy way for me to say. A novel
Speaker 2: has to sustain the dream of the writer and cannot
Speaker 2: really stop to pause to insecurely ask, but what will
Speaker 2: other people think of my dream? You cannot audition for
Speaker 2: your own dream. Instead, you have to be present for it.
Speaker 2: I knew that a character like Sadie who has arrived
Speaker 2: with the intention of doing whatever she needs to to
Speaker 2: produce evidence that these people are saboteurs and she doesn't
Speaker 2: care if they really are or not, and she has
Speaker 2: experience as an agent provocateur and has arrived with the
Speaker 2: intention of being an agent of destruction. So I knew
Speaker 2: that there was the possibility for a woman like that,
Speaker 2: based on some incidences in real life that had happened,
Speaker 2: namely one in the United States, when a female FBI
Speaker 2: agent had infiltrated a group of green anarchists in California,
Speaker 2: and she was getting a lot of pressure from her
Speaker 2: supervisor to produce evidence that they were planning sabotage, and
Speaker 2: they weren't. And there was one member of the group
Speaker 2: who was quite sweet on her, and she sort of decided,
Speaker 2: I will give him hope that there's going to be
Speaker 2: a courtship between us, and you know, as part of
Speaker 2: the process of our courtship, he'll just have to acknowledge
Speaker 2: that I want him very badly to build a bomb
Speaker 2: or to plan to build a bomb with me. And
Speaker 2: that's what happened, and he got twenty one years in
Speaker 2: federal prison, served nine of those years, and then his
Speaker 2: lawyer was able to prove that this woman had entrapped him.
Speaker 2: And I knew people who knew this poor guy. And
Speaker 2: my question was what kind of person would do that,
Speaker 2: which isn't to pose it rhetorically where you know the answer,
Speaker 2: you know a bad person, and rather to ask with curiosity,
Speaker 2: what is the mindset and what's it like to only
Speaker 2: have aliases to go from job to job to job
Speaker 2: and to be fundamentally alone. And then there was a
Speaker 2: British agent who was caught infiltrating a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: different groups, and then was having affairs with women in
Speaker 2: these groups in France, Germany and the UK, and a
Speaker 2: bunch of them sued the UK police. And I was
Speaker 2: following the story partly because he had infiltrated these French
Speaker 2: people and I knew about it through them. So Sadie
Speaker 2: refers to him as a kind of object lesson. In
Speaker 2: real life, his name is Mark Kennedy. So in the
Speaker 2: books she says, well, well, this guy makes mistakes and
Speaker 2: I don't make mistakes. But then after a while, you know,
Speaker 2: she decides to have an affair with the kind of
Speaker 2: resident hawk guy in the commune. So maybe part of
Speaker 2: the fun was not just riding through the highs of
Speaker 2: her overconfidence and more managing it and allowing and establishing
Speaker 2: and maintaining a secret link between the author and the reader,
Speaker 2: even if that reader is me and not a group
Speaker 2: of people I'm imagining, but to let that reader know
Speaker 2: that maybe Sadie has miscalculated in terms of who's on
Speaker 2: to her and who isn't. And she was always counterbalanced
Speaker 2: for me by the voice of Bruno, so they were
Speaker 2: different pleasures. But she she was the one who had
Speaker 2: the more caustic and juvenile sense of humor, which probably
Speaker 2: comes from me ultimately, but all the characters come from me.
Speaker 2: That's the weird thing about novels. One is not more
Speaker 2: the author than the other, even as sometimes you read
Speaker 2: a review of a novel and it's like the reviewer
Speaker 2: has decided that one is a proxy for the novelist,
Speaker 2: and it's never the case, because they all.
Speaker 1: Are, and not just they all are, but the conflict
Speaker 1: between them, all, the tension between their different world views,
Speaker 1: that's actually the sweet spot where the author lives. Like
Speaker 1: it's reasonable to assume that the divide between idealism and
Speaker 1: pragmatism that plays out the different relationship to an idea
Speaker 1: of how we are in the world. Those questions I'm
Speaker 1: assuming best in body where your brain's at, rather than
Speaker 1: either side of the divide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe, I mean, I see what you're saying. I
Speaker 2: think it's complicated to testify to the psychic structure of
Speaker 2: the imaginative mind in terms of where their selfhood or
Speaker 2: their ego formation or their social identity lies in the
Speaker 2: synthesis of the thing that they've created. I will say
Speaker 2: that one thing I've realized in the wake of writing
Speaker 2: this book is there's something about Bruno Lament and his question.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to quote myself, but early on he says,
Speaker 2: at least in Sadie's transposition, about the human project and
Speaker 2: its future. And I feel that my own character, if
Speaker 2: I may say so, takes the human project really seriously
Speaker 2: and believes in such a thing as grace, and believes
Speaker 2: in the idea that there is incredible meaning for us,
Speaker 2: and that maybe if we have squandered some of that
Speaker 2: meaning or taken a wrong turn somewhere, that the human
Speaker 2: project itself is worth saving. So I mean, who would
Speaker 2: disagree with that? Perhaps, but still, nonetheless, there's something about
Speaker 2: having a character feel it and commit himself to it
Speaker 2: as his life project. So when he says early on
Speaker 2: in the book, currently we are careening off of the
Speaker 2: cliff in a driverless car, and the question is how
Speaker 2: do we exit this car? I think Bruno asks a
Speaker 2: fair question. And the sort of myths or half myths
Speaker 2: that he produces about the past as a manner of
Speaker 2: speculating about the future, like where did we take our
Speaker 2: wrong turn. What are we comprised of? Did prior cultures
Speaker 2: of people in prehistoric times live in a different or
Speaker 2: better way? Are there any messages hidden for us that
Speaker 2: we don't know how to uncover, etc. I think that
Speaker 2: I've found the process of creating a character who would
Speaker 2: ask these questions and speculate into responses, if not answers.
Speaker 2: I think I found that quite healing. So I think
Speaker 2: that Bruno's questions and his lament could be mine as well.
Speaker 1: I was going to say they are stealthily compelling, even
Speaker 1: through Sadie's lens and her kind of initial skepticism and
Speaker 1: growing obsession, it's hard not to be swept up in it.
Speaker 1: What draws you to radical politics in your novels? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's funny how different the underlying energy of it in
Speaker 1: Creation Lake and the French context is to the Italian
Speaker 1: context in Flamethrowers is to the experience in you know,
Speaker 1: a correctional facility in California, in the Mars Room. And
Speaker 1: yet each of these are about communities built around ideas
Speaker 1: about how the system is. Accurrently, this might be inadequate
Speaker 1: for our purposes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe, because it feels that way to me. But
Speaker 2: you know, novels are not for me what I would
Speaker 2: think of as a political project. You know, to make
Speaker 2: art is it is different than making an analysis, making
Speaker 2: something analytical. I mean, I think CD borrows this for me.
Speaker 2: In the book she says that or Bruno says that
Speaker 2: to make art is to render the unseen scene, to
Speaker 2: take something that exists in this world but has not
Speaker 2: attained a form that we can apprehend. And to me,
Speaker 2: that's the best I can do in terms of the
Speaker 2: definition of art. The novel feels like a real calling
Speaker 2: and which to do that. So I respond to the
Speaker 2: reality around me and build a parallel universe that seems
Speaker 2: to put into a synthetic whole. Things that go into
Speaker 2: me and stay there because they seem important, whether to
Speaker 2: the world or to me. It almost doesn't matter which,
Speaker 2: but they have something to do with life as I
Speaker 2: know it, and it's like it's my job to put
Speaker 2: them into a form. So I wouldn't say that I'm
Speaker 2: looking to write novels about radical politics, but maybe one
Speaker 2: draws for their fiction from the material to some degree
Speaker 2: of both their life and their interests. I sometimes have
Speaker 2: this theory that, like or as this crude manner of
Speaker 2: categorizing that there are writers who look inward and very reflective,
Speaker 2: and they're writers who face outward. And I've just always,
Speaker 2: since I was a little girl, been someone who faces outward.
Speaker 2: I'm interested in the world. The world includes people who
Speaker 2: are asking is the organization of society the best that
Speaker 2: it can be? Is it functioning? Is it working?
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the traditions into which you place your
Speaker 1: own books. I think you have both a very American
Speaker 1: sensibility and very European sensibility, and maybe none of those
Speaker 1: things matter or mean anything at all. Do you have
Speaker 1: an idea that you're writing into a tradition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I actually love this question. It's forcing me
Speaker 2: to think on my feet. Well, First, I am deeply American,
Speaker 2: and I realize that more and more, just lately, in
Speaker 2: a kind of new way. So Sadie obviously is not
Speaker 2: me in the book, but she has some thoughts on
Speaker 2: American culture. She says something like, you know, I miss America,
Speaker 2: I miss our I can't remember what she says our
Speaker 2: pension for you know, stupidity and violence, And that's not
Speaker 2: how I personally would put it. But when I think
Speaker 2: about the English language as it expands and develops in
Speaker 2: an American milieu. You know, we're Anglophone, but our language
Speaker 2: is a bit unique in the sense of how we
Speaker 2: build out and just how supple and specific and precise
Speaker 2: it is. And then the culture here. It seems in
Speaker 2: a way ridiculous to try to summarize it, but there
Speaker 2: is some inheritance of violence and tragedy here that is
Speaker 2: unique to us. But what it has produced as a
Speaker 2: sort of dialectrical force in terms of cultural phenomena, like jazz,
Speaker 2: you know, like abstract expressionism, like hip hop, like streetwear.
Speaker 2: It is a complicated place, and like lately I've been
Speaker 2: thinking about the form of the sermon and American religion
Speaker 2: and how deeply might be tied in with our very literature,
Speaker 2: with what the American novel is as this sort of
Speaker 2: like runaway hallucinated Bible. It's a strange place, and there
Speaker 2: are streams of pride when I think of how difficult
Speaker 2: it is for other people to comprehend the discontinuities in
Speaker 2: different forms of disruption and violence that comprise American life.
Speaker 2: At the same time, I am really interested in France,
Speaker 2: and I, you know, have friends there, writers filmmakers with
Speaker 2: whom I can speak about French history. And I live
Speaker 2: with a Francophile. My husband was a student of Jacques
Speaker 2: gry Dai as a PhD in Combatted Furinature. Our son
Speaker 2: went to French school. So I can't help but be
Speaker 2: exposed to these things. And maybe it originates, as I
Speaker 2: said before in my Love Cinema First, that I've come
Speaker 2: to want to learn and know things about France. So
Speaker 2: I'd say that I'm both. I spend time there, I'm
Speaker 2: interested in Europe, but I do I am myself at
Speaker 2: the same time invested in coming to understand the peculiar
Speaker 2: horizon for the American and it is a tragic horizon,
Speaker 2: and it also is what the word is. It produces
Speaker 2: amazing art. I'm not talking about myself, but what I
Speaker 2: witness and see in terms of what this convulsive place
Speaker 2: has made, what people have made.
Speaker 1: Rachel Kushna's latest novel, Creation Late, is available at everywhere.
Speaker 1: Now before we get out of here, you can't fail
Speaker 1: to have heard the news about the twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: book a Prize this week, and Samantha Harvey took it
Speaker 1: home with Orbital. I did give a little parted review
Speaker 1: of Orbital in an earlier read this episode. But it's
Speaker 1: an extraordinary story, said on the International Space Station. It
Speaker 1: is a tiny, little intimate novel and you're in for
Speaker 1: a treat. You can find it and all the other
Speaker 1: books on the book a shortlist at your favorite independam bookstore.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
Speaker 1: please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: helps a lot. Next week I read this we're bringing
Speaker 1: you my chat with journalist Rick Morton. We had it
Speaker 1: live in front of an audience at Canberra Writers' Festival
Speaker 1: this month, and we're discussing his new book Meanstreak, which
Speaker 1: is all about the robot crisis, the topic that continues
Speaker 1: to bring out the best in people.
Speaker 3: I did a session on robodett this week and a
Speaker 3: guy came up to me at the end and he
Speaker 3: said how many people still owed money? And then he
Speaker 3: started talking to me about how he paid a lot
Speaker 3: of tax as a small business owner. Even when he
Speaker 3: bought his Mercedes, he had to pay a lot of
Speaker 3: tax on it, and I felt very sorry for him
Speaker 3: and all that he's been through. But then I woke
Speaker 3: up from my comra and I realized what an idiot.
Speaker 3: He kind of embodied and embodies that kind of theory
Speaker 3: that these people can't be getting something for nothing. Read.
Speaker 1: This is a Schwartz Media production made possible thanks to
Speaker 1: the generous support of the AAR group. It's produced and
Speaker 1: edited by Clara Ames and mixed by Travis Evans. Original
Speaker 1: compositions a by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you
Speaker 1: next week.