But rather than write what I know, I write what I want to know, which was how those walls protected Byzantine book culture. I was like, Constantinople? We didn’t learn about it at school for one second. I’d been researching the history of defensive walls to write All the Light We Cannot See, particularly Hitler’s Trump-like dream of a wall from Sweden to Portugal, and everything I read would mention Constantinople, whose walls withstood 23 sieges over 1,100 years. I guess I’ve always had a terror of erasure, going back to when I was 12 or 13 watching Alzheimer’s devour my grandma’s sense of self, and I found myself wanting to tell a story about the beauty of how culture endures. When I had a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, it was the first time I’d been around classical scholars, who taught me how few ancient texts actually survive. You’ve described Cloud Cuckoo Land as a “literary-sci-fi-mystery-young-adult-historical-morality novel”. Doerr, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, spoke to me from his home in Boise, Idaho. His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, spans medieval Constantinople, a 22nd-century spaceship and a public library held under armed siege by a teenage environmentalist in modern-day America. The story of a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy during the second world war, it is the biggest selling title in the history of its UK publisher, Fourth Estate, home to Jonathan Franzen and Hilary Mantel. A nthony Doerr, 47, is the author of six books, including All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2015.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |