Few writers have the desire to complicate their lives so much. Lionel Shriver (1957, North Carolina), a determined difficult subject. boldly debuted ‘We need to talk about Kevin’A controversial ‘bestseller’, published shortly after the Columbine massacre, about the mother of a teenager who committed a massacre. He has written about deadly diseases (“What’s all this for?”), against the dictatorship of the weak (“Big Brother”) opposes the elite (“Los Mandibles”) and romantic love (“The world after your birthday”).
Now his anger—also his extraordinary clarity— addresses the contemporary obsession with conformity and opposition industryfitness‘. ‘The movement of the body in space’ (Anagram) is about a sixty-year-old married couple who go into crisis when Remington makes a decision. running a marathon He challenges the age, common sense, and patience of his wife, Serenata, who is a born runner and quietly suffers from arthritis. A funny novel full of anger and compassion. what it really means to be married and the stupidity of society.
Compared to her other novels, her double perspective seems to have improved a bit. Really?
This novel is about the ending. There is a certain point where you implicitly make a contract with your spouse: whatever he requires, you will stay with him until old age. In my own marriage, I feel this: a deep obligation to respect marriage vows, as “in sickness and in health” seems so much more valid now. Leaving at age sixty violates this unwritten contract. It greatly increases your chances of ending your life alone.
Do relationships get stronger when passion wanes and two people grow old together?
Yes, the drama of love tends to fade as you get older with someone. My husband and I don’t usually buy each other Christmas presents and rarely celebrate birthdays. All that remains is to face life’s greatest challenges: how to age well, maybe recover from a serious illness, and finally die.
Political correctness has had a fatal effect on contemporary literature.
Not enough novels about mature love?
Probably not. Most novels and movies focus on the beginning of relationships, and culturally we are more concerned with young people.
You love sports, why did you decide to write against ‘fitness’?
Exercise is not the same as sports. Our obsession with fitness has nothing to do with being good at playing football, for example. It’s about self-actualization. Becoming the best version of yourself you can be. But this ‘better self’ is defined in purely physical terms. It’s about the surface, the appearance. It is a superficial version of perfection. It’s like being weak.
All I see in obsessive fitness people is wasted time and mind-numbing boredom.
He also dedicated a novel called ‘Big Brother’ to his obsession with weight loss.
If your goal is to be superficial, doing sports requires hard work. At least not eating won’t waste your time. But the physically ambitious now spend hours at the gym every week. When I see people who are so flashy that they can make sports their number one priority in life, I don’t even find them attractive. All I see is a lot of wasted time and mind-numbing boredom.
Do you run regularly? Definitions of knee pain are so well written it’s hard to believe they aren’t.
Oh yes. I ran for 45 years. For decades, I had a routine of running ten miles every day. But I’ve had arthritis in my knees since my early forties, and I eventually reached a point eight years ago where I came back in so much pain from running home. I decided to save my knees for something I love: tennis. I don’t have a knee replacement yet, I’m afraid, but I won’t be able to postpone them forever.
“Chronic disgust, you can call it human hostility, is exhausting. I expend a tremendous amount of energy every day in anger, disbelief and anger.”
You wrote about the disease and this novel is also very physical, why are you so concerned with the body?
The relationship between the self and the body has always intrigued me. Being a person living in a body over which you have only marginal control is incredibly complex. I have always been a very physical person and since childhood I have tried to preserve the body I was born with for comfort and aesthetic pleasure. But I think of my body more like a house where I need to keep it organized. I’m not my body and I don’t want to be remembered how many sit-ups I’ve done. The strange thing is that we know that we ourselves are not the same as our bodies, but we gladly judge other people by their appearance.
There is a harsh critique of political correctness in the novel, progressive ideas seem to drive him mad, why?
I have a rather ‘anti-wake-up’ pedigree. I write a lot of journalism and the crazy stuff on the left fuels my columns, especially since 2012. I find the whole ‘progressive’ package reactionary, anti-liberal, humorless, judgmental and bleak. I personally hate being told what to do, especially being told what to write. Political correctness has had a fatal effect on contemporary literature.
All of his novels radiate deep human hostility. At what point is your frustration with humanity?
I am chronically disgusted. This is why the ending of the novel is so comforting. Serenade stops worrying. It takes refuge in a liberating indifference. Chronic disgust, call it human hostility, is exhausting. I spend hours every day reading the newspaper and expend a tremendous amount of energy in anger, disbelief and anger. At some point, I can definitely see that I have given up on getting involved with this weariness with human affairs. I decided that I don’t care about anything. Disconnecting is highly recommended, especially at the end of your life.
I’m not my body and I don’t want to be remembered how many sit-ups I’ve done.
The book is also about smoke dealers and those who blindly follow a leader; Do you think there are more sheep today?
At first, the Internet seemed to throw us into a world of individualism and whims. We were able to find what and who we wanted. But it has become a harmony machine. Thanks to the Internet connection, I was sometimes horrified by the social frenzy that spread all over the world in a matter of days (and that’s what my next novel is about). Suddenly everyone is consumed by transsexuality. Suddenly everyone is in the middle of sexual harassment. Suddenly everyone believes that the only way to fight a pandemic is to shut down the world, and soon after, everyone is walking down the street and putting up ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs in their front yards. All this makes me cold. I don’t have the social contagion gene. I am immune.