I have read two chapters now, and I like the writing very much. I think it will generate an interesting discussion. I found this excellent article about his writing process. The article even mentions Mann's Buddenbrooks which the book club has also read. The last paragraph has a possible mini-spoiler so you may want to save this article for later.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...e-nora-webster
The article subtitle is "The novelist on thinking about the book every day for a decade and how listening to Beethoven helped him capture a widow's loss."
Here are the introductory paragraphs:
Quote:
I wrote the first chapter of my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000, in the same season as I wrote the first chapter of The Master, my novel about Henry James. Both books dealt with a protagonist over four or five years. Alone in the world, both James and Nora Webster attempted to find a way out of failure or grief or loss. Although The Master required a great deal of research and Nora Webster almost none, I found The Master easier to work on, and easier to finish.
In Nora Webster, I was dealing with memory. The novel is set in Enniscorthy, in the south-east of Ireland, where I am from. Nora's husband Maurice died in the same year as my father died. Maurice barely appears in the novel, but his loss lies between the words; he is there as a palpable absence. Our house and the streets of the town and the coast nearby operate in the novel almost as characters. I did not have to do any research to establish them. It was their resonance, their emotional contours, that interested me. I found as I worked that putting in the real name of a street, or the real configuration of a room, allowed me to release some set of coiled or contained emotions that would then anchor some scenes or passages of the book.
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