Linda Grant: ‘a shiver of vanity-inducing joy’
Linda Grant on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Congratulations on being longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. How does it feel?
Seeing one's name on a the same list as Salman Rushdie cannot help but give you a shiver of vanity-inducing joy.
Your novels have been short-listed and won prizes in the past. What do you think about this year's longlist?
I'm really pleased to be on the list with Michelle de Kretser. We shared a platform together at the Hay literary festival and found ourselves so simpatico that we have been emailing back and forth ever since. I very much want her to be on the shortlist so she comes to London. As ever the Booker produces lists which are unexpected. This year inevitably it has drawn me to the wealth of literature coming from India and Pakistan. I was riveted by the portrait drawn in The White Tiger of the conjunction of the globalised economy with India's caste system.
What inspired you to write The Clothes on Their Backs?
It began with the characters of Vivien's parents, Ervin and Berta, who appeared out of nowhere and cried out for a novel to be written about them. Despite a general assumption that the novel must be autobiographical it isn't at all. I was fascinated by this pair because they were so very unlike my parents in their timidity and their reclusive lives. They led me to think of the moral dilemma posed by the sheer existence of people like Peter Rachman, on whom I loosely based the true main character, Sándor Kovacs. His flashiness and lust for life. The ethical problem he poses - a man who is a Holocaust survivor and goes on to become a slum landlord - is the central one of our age. Much literature is written about the innocence of victims, less so about the complicated nature of victimhood. Suffering very rarely ennobles. If it did, Primo Levi and Nelson Mandela would not be famous men.
You have said that the character of Uncle Sándor is loosely based on Peter Rachman. Do you often base characters on real people?
No, this is the first time. It's not really a portrait of Rachman himself, but as I say, the questions that arise out of his existence.
The Observer calls your book a 'masterclass in the perils of hypocrisy'. Do you think that is a fair assessment?
I hadn't thought of it that way, but I suppose it's a strong current. For myself, I think the hypocrisy lies in those who accuse Uncle Sándor of being ‘the face of evil,' which was a genuine headline about Rachman in the Evening Standard in the early Sixties. I am much less comfortable than I used to be about the moral judgements of the righteous.
The title of your book has several meanings, and clothes feature throughout. Do you believe that 'clothes maketh the man'?
When you have nothing, the last nothing you will have left are your clothes. Clothes are what distinguish us from animals, an intrinsic aspect of what characterises the human race. Clothes are the costumes we put on, our disguises and masks and how we form our identity. Vivien is always being dressed by others as she tries to form a self. Both Sándor and his black girlfriend Eunice profoundly understand how clothes are bound up with dignity and the earning of respect. The only characters who are not concerned with clothes are Vivien's parents, because they never go out, and have no presence in the world
Who or what inspired you to become a writer?
A solitary childhood.
Could you describe your working day?
Wake up, make a cup of tea. Turn on computer. Start. Imperative that I am working as soon as possible after waking up, as close as possible to the dream state and the unconscious. Work until late morning. Stop, Print out what I've written. Do something else for a few hours. Read the printed pages, scribble on them. Read them again before falling asleep. Intermittently fall into despair, ring my agent, say I can't finish, get talked out of handing back the advance. Go to Harvey Nichols. Return refreshed.
Are you working on a new book at the moment?
Yes, a short, non-fiction book called The Thoughtful Dresser, which brings together some of the things I had been thinking about while I was writing The Clothes On Their Backs, and also tells the story of an extraordinary woman in Toronto who survived Auschwitz to become the owner of the excusive fashion store in the city.
Can you recommend a book you have read recently?
I recently re-read L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, published in 1953. I was stunned by its emotional range and depth and concrete solidity of its characters and settings. Its opening line, 'The past is another country', has become an aphorism - the novel unravels that telling contradiction of the juxtaposition of space and time.
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