A week after the reading, I corresponded with Johnson a bit more about this uncanny way her words jump off the page and the challenges of contemporary mythmaking.ĪMY E. Or when she reads the line about “old words sneaking back in,” a radio blasts a few lines of an old song from the other room. During a passage describing a mysterious monster, for instance - the “Bonak is here” - a latecomer charges up the center aisle to take a seat up front. During Johnson’s reading, the room seems to echo her words on the page. In true mythic mode, the novel’s characters crusade for their own safety by evading memories, recovering memories, avoiding monsters, becoming monsters, recording language, and making up new languages to tell the stories that resist expression. The book has an almost mystic, magical quality. Widely celebrated as the youngest Booker Prize nominee, Johnson deflects questions about her early career success, instead promoting the work of other writers, and speaking about the significance of telling women’s stories in new ways. They’re here to see the author of Everything Under, a Man Booker shortlisted retelling of the Oedipus myth that stays with the reader well after the final page. A dark, snowy night in Minnesota, people arrive cocooned in outerwear with frost-nipped noses, and stand around in little puddles of melted snow. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.IT’S DAISY JOHNSON’S last reading on the last day of her American tour. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.ĭaisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.Ī phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. Words are important to Gretel, always have been.
0 kommentar(er)
