When the wonderful Steve Wasserman from Read Me Something You Love asked me to join him on his podcast, Rikki Durcornet jumped to mind immediately. As readers of my blog will know well, I have been shouting my love of her novel Netsuke from the rooftops for…well, it’s coming up to a year.
The book was recommended to me by a critic in Los Angeles and on a visit to the Granta offices in NYC, I found an extra copy in our stacks of books. (We have, as you can imagine, the most wonderful stacks of books.) It was one of those magical reading experiences. The book broke open my understanding of the novel and the possibility of language. I read a few of those books this past year: Play It As it Lays (Didion), The Color of Night (Smartt Bell), The Passion (Winterson), Welcome to the Goon Squad (Egan). It was a great year for reading as a writer working on book.
I won’t go on and on about Netsuke, the powerful, precise poetic prose here… I’ll leave that to Steve and me on the podcast. Click here for a reading of an excerpt from Netsuke and a chat about lust, lies and unethical analysts. When you’re done visit the Human Reading Beings project, particularly of interest to lovers of the print book.