Steve Toltz: ‘I still get my thrills on a reader by reader basis’
Longlisted author Steve Toltz on four ‘longish years’
Congratulations on being longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. How did you feel when you heard the news?
Knowing that there were five judges for this year's Booker Prize I was just excited that five more people have read my book. I still get my thrills on a reader by reader basis.
A Fraction of the Whole is your debut novel. Can you tell us about any previous writing you've done?
I have written unproduced screenplays and stage plays, poems, short stories, essays and shoddy first chapters of unfinishable novels.
What inspired you to write the book?
The idea for the book came from my curiosity about how it must feel for the children of those people who are skinned alive in the media, and also from a desire to explore how a child of a rebel himself rebels.
One review has described A Fraction of the Whole as 'a wildly looping rollercoaster'. Do you agree?
I enjoy the description - that means the experience of reading the book has something in common with the feeling that accompanied the process of actually writing it.
It's a big book at 700 pages. How long did it take you to write it?
It took four longish years.
Many Man Booker nominated novels have been adapted for film. Do you think your novel would work on the big screen?
Considering the story takes place over forty years in three continents and contains a lot of internal as well as external adventures, it would be a difficult task to translate it to the screen. In order for it not to be seven hours long, it would have huge chunks cut out of it. I'd have to brace myself - but I'd love to sit in a dark room and eat popcorn and watch a director's interpretation of the material.
You spent some time living in Europe. Is that where you wrote the novel?
Yes, I wrote much of the book in Barcelona and Paris.
What inspired you to become a novelist?
Not wanting to be a telemarketer, a career extra or a data-entry clerk was very inspiring. I should admit that A Fraction of the Whole didn't actually begin as a novel. A magazine had asked me to write a 500-word short story, which I wrote but couldn't bring myself to submit because I thought I could quickly expand it to a larger story. So I kept it, and began expanding it, and continued expanding it. 670 pages and four years later, I finished.
What's next? Are you writing a second novel?
Yes.
Can you recommend a book you have read recently?
Roberto Bolaño's incredible By Night in Chile followed closely by his longer novel -- The Savage Detectives.
Read more author interviews in the Perspective section.
