On tour: Meet the author Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is an author and classicist, whose books include a collection of critical essays Waiting for the Barbarians (NY Review of Books); a memoir The Lost (HarperCollins); The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy (HarperCollins), a translation of the works of the Greek poet. He will be a guest of Sydney Writers Festival in May.
What would you put on a shelf-talker for your latest book Waiting for the Barbarians?
From the Iliad to Mad Men—does anyone have more fun than critics?!
What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading several things at once—most for work, but I do sneak time every night before bed to read something for myself. Currently my bedtime reading is oscillating between the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon (this will probably take me a few years to get through!) and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (Portobello Books), about the life of a woman in Galicia (the Austro-Hungarian province that my own family came from, as I detail in The Lost) at the turn of the last century, imagined in five different ways. Marvellous.
What are you planning to read next?
I think I’ll finally try the Elena Ferrante series. I tried to read the first one a few years ago and couldn’t get through 40 pages, but at this point it seems I should try again.
Which book do you always recommend?
Two books I am always trying to put into people’s hands are The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanazaki (Vintage)—‘the Japanese Jane Austen’—and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s extraordinary Sepharad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a parable about 20th-century history that’s not like anything else I’ve ever read. On a lighter note, I think Noël Coward’s only novel Pomp and Circumstance (Methuen Drama) is the single funniest thing ever written and I read it every summer on vacation and laugh myself silly. So that’s nice to push, too.
What was the defining book of your childhood?
Probably The Persian Boy by Mary Renault (Virago), which I read when I was 13. It awakened me to my love of ancient Greece, which naturally has affected the course of my professional life and interests; and made me realise I was gay. It was amazing to finally have an external correlative to all my secret feelings. So in both instances, it made me aware of the power of books to, literally, change a life.
If you were a literary character you’d be …
Much easier to say who I’d like to be: Darcy, of course.
What’s your favourite book adaptation (film, television or theatre)?
It’s funny, because of course there are so many fabulous movies that are adaptations and yet are so authoritative that people don’t even think of them as being adaptations—The Wizard of Oz, say. That said, I think The English Patient is among the most successful adaptations of a modern novel. Instead of trying to slavishly mimic the novel, it somehow ‘gets’ the novel while being persuasive as a film … I do wish you’d asked what my least favorite adaptation is—much more fun to answer!
What’s your favourite books website or blog?
I don’t read book blogs or look at book websites. Too busy reading books.
Hardback, paperback or digital?
As long as it’s legible, I don’t really care.
Facebook or Twitter?
I think both are pretty silly, although that said, as an author I have to do both. DMendelsohn1960 on Twitter, Daniel.A.Mendelsohn on FB.
In 50 years’ time books will be …
I’m a classicist—I never make predictions about the future, but I’d be happy to make them about the past.
(Photo credit: Matt Mendelsohn)
Tags: ontour
Category: Features
