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Interview with Justin Hill by Elena Fysentzou
Justin you’ve done quite a few jobs. You’ve
worked as a postman, furniture delivery man, security guard, hospital kitchen
cleaner, volunteer aid worker in Yes I did, but when you are at school at
careers’ day no one ever says ‘if you want to be a writer come and sit in
this corner.’ I think I finished The Lord of the Rings and I thought
‘wow!’ To be able to create such a coherent world, that’s an incredible
thing. When I was young, around 14, I thought ‘yes I want to write a book’
but at no point did I ever think I was going to write one really. When I look
back now I can see the steps that got me there but at the time they felt like
blind steps, and very kind of private, and there was no real hope of a book
coming out of them. You once said that it seems as if you’ve always been travelling. Do you prefer living abroad than at home? Yes I think so. It’s always more interesting
when you are abroad because every time you go out the door in the morning, you
know you are going to see something different. But I see In
A Bend in the Yellow River you criticise western style economics. How
difficult did you find it returning back to Yes that was a problem. At first the thought
of going to a supermarket was just overpowering. It just seemed like a gross
kind of consumption, like 10 choices of the same thing. That was tough. When you
go travelling a long time it’s much more difficult to go back home than it is
to go and live at someplace new. The culture shock is more extreme because you
don’t expect things to be different when you go home. You expect things to
still be the same. It’s when you look back that you realise it’s you who’s
changed and your home hasn’t changed at all. I always said I’d stop if it got to the
point where I stopped enjoying it, if it got to the point I felt there was
nothing new I was saying. I hope my books are very different I spend a year on
my own each book at least before I sell it and to entertain myself for a year,
or to make that book interesting that I’m going to sit there for a year and
write it, then I have to be able to write something different. I realised when I
was writing Ciao Asmara that it started being like A Bend in the
Yellow River but with all the names changed. And I stopped writing for a
bit, I thought ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I have a horror of the writer
using the same formula over and over again. So I just stopped and put it down
for six months, and I read some other books, and I thought what I was trying to
do and then I went and wrote it a different way. How
authentic is the material you use? A
Bend in The Yellow River
is 100% true; the characters are true, all the things that happened are true. Ciao
Asmara is also true but is much more fictionalised. I think Ciao Asmara
is a much better book for being fictionalised. I think if you try and stick to
the facts the facts can be quite limiting. I always suspect that the truest book
I’ve written is The Drink and Dream Teahouse, which is a novel. The
trouble with travel writing is that the essential character of the book is the
author who turns people foreigners in their own country, which is weird. When I
wrote The Drink and Dream Teahouse I felt it did things sop much better.
Instead of having a Western character hold your hand, it takes you inside the
characters. Oh, definitely yes. There’s always
my-mother’s-going-to-read-this syndrome! You
wrote your first book A Bend in the Yellow River 6 years ago. Looking
back are there things you’d change about it?
Generally, are you pleased with your work when rereading it or do you
tend to be judgemental about it? I don’t read my own stuff very often. By the
time it’s published I’ve read it around 7 times at various stages so I’m
kind of sick of it by then. I read The Drink and Dream Teahouse a while
ago, I suppose I always wanted to see why everyone gets so excited about it for,
and last time I read it I thought the writing was a bit, perhaps slightly trying
too hard. But then again I think that’s pretty much a matter of taste. That did worry me. I think poverty is a very
good inspiration for an artist of any kind. I don’t think it has affected me.
I think working at an Internet company affected me much more in that I was
taking my writing and then trying to put it through sausage machines to produce
the outcome that someone else wanted. When I quit the job and started working on
the next novel, it took me 6 months to a year just to get out of that kind of
mind-set. I’ve always said that the reader can smell fear, and if you make a
slip up or repeat facts the reader will tell immediately, and I think you need
to know exactly what you are doing, or to at least pretend you know exactly what
you are doing if you want to be a good writer. Your book has very graphic sex scenes. Do you think the harshness of these descriptions fits in well with the overall style of the book? This is because the book has got a sort of
camera, it’s got a very cinematic spin and then the camera suddenly focuses
very intensely on a certain moment or an image. I think the sex scenes in this
book are very differential. The rest of the book is beautiful and then the sex
scenes come in which are also beautiful but in a sort of Reservoir Dog
horrible way. If I said it didn’t bother me I’d be
lying. It does bother me more because I see the whole world of literary scene as
very incestuous. It would be nice to have the recognition but I guess if I keep
doing what I’m doing I’ll keep getting better. I’m quite happy being the
outsider. I’d rather be the outsider than someone like Zadie Smith. I’d much
rather have no expectations than having such huge expectations. Both. I would like to have my grandchildren reading my work at school. I always think of Dickens as a great example of someone, whose writing was very much contemporary, but at the same time he was also read by the academics and that’s what I’m aiming to do. Ultimately though I’d choose the public. I think being poor it just got to the point
where I had to write something, and I couldn’t get Ciao Asmara
published, and I just became so focused! I wanted to write a book about Actually all the characters are
autobiographical, I look at the characters and they are all me, they are as much
me as Da Shan but probably the most me is Da Shan obviously because he leaves
and comes back home and it’s not there and that’s a difficult thing for him
and also he’s like revisiting memories. I say it’s a contemporary novel but
it’s also very much set in the memory of the characters which take them back
to the 1930’s. Both. Without The Drink and Dream Teahouse
I doubt Ciao Asmara would had got published. I still have the rejection
letters somewhere! But rejection either makes you stronger or it makes you want
to stop writing, and I was determined I’d get this book published. At first it
was twice as long as it is now, it was probably far too big and I had kind of
given up on it. But one day I said right I’m going back to rewrite that book.
I spent a bank holiday weekend locked in my house just going through it, just
cutting, cutting, cutting, until there was nothing left to cut really. I’ve been likened to Lawrence, Orwell and
Tolstoy so far. I swear a lot at criticism! It depends if
it’s good. It’s very rare you’ll get an intelligent review. I don’t mind
criticism as long as it’s intelligent. The only criticism I’ve seen is from
Eritreans who are very pro-government from government websites. It’s a
totalitarian state so they can’t have any dissent, it’s not allowed in When I was writing it I kept my Chinese
friends very much in mind and I wrote it hoping it would get translated in
Chinese. We sold the translation rights and I was so happy! But then half way
through the translation they went to a censoring board that said ‘no way!’ I
don’t know whether it was the sex or the politics, or a combination of both. I
don’t think the book is critical of the Chinese government; there isn’t
anything in it that Chinese people don’t say amongst themselves or you don’t
read in the Chinese press. It might have been the sex scenes but I’m sure they
could have been edited out. I guess it had to do with being a foreigner and
writing about these things. But it’s a testament to the book that it’s been
banned; it shows the book is very powerful. I don’t think I have. There are similarities
between I don’t think I’ll be writing a book about
It’s about a female Chinese poet of the Tang
Dynasty, which was in the year 600 to 900, and I came across her poetry in an
anthology by Stephen Owen and I thought wow! I was really interested in this
person who 1200 years ago wrote these poems, it’s really incredible. At first
I thought I’d write a literary introduction at the front telling everything
but then I thought why not break up the introduction so that poems and prose
work together and take you through a journey. The novel has grown from that. The
core of the book is still poems but it won’t be a biography of the poetess. It
will be a novel about her and the fact that all that’s left of her are these
poems. The only thing that’s going to be true is these poems. It’s
fascinating that I could get 49 poems about the moments of a person’s life and
write a novel in which these poems will be the only thing true. I imagine it will be finished by the end of
September, maybe early November, and we are planning to have it out next May. I feel the strongest about Ciao Asmara just because it’s a story of a place no one knows and I struggled to get it published for so long, but then The Drink and Dream Teahouse was like a mad love affair! I couldn’t think of anything else as I was writing it. I’d be out with friends and I’d be thinking about the book. It’s very close to me personally. Obviously it’s about Chinese people and Chinese situations but there were moments that were very close to my life, so when I’m reading those I find myself getting quite choked up. So my favourite one is probably The Drink and Dream Teahouse. I look at it like an old girlfriend, a sort of mad love affair. I’m glad it’s over but it was certainly good while it lasted! Copyright 2003 by Cyprus Mail |
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