Interview with Camilla Grudova
A converation with the novelist about her reading habits and her favourite books
This week, I have been thinking about my inability to finish books. When I write one of these entries, I often get a flash of inspiration about a person I could ask to help clarify my ideas on a subject. Who better to ask about reading than a writer?
Camilla Grudova is a Canadian writer, based in Edinburgh. Her debut collection of stories, The Doll’s Alphabet (2017) was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, the small publishing house whose authors keep winning Nobel prizes. She followed this up with Children of Paradise (2022), an immensely enjoyable novel about the wanton activities that take place in and around an old cinema.
In this interview, conducted over email, Grudova talks about her reading habits, her writer ‘Daddy Issues’, and why she doesn’t buy books as gifts any more.
Neil Scott: How does reading change when you're a writer?
Camilla Grudova: Like many writers, I sometimes read things to figure out how they did it but I’ve realised this doesn’t work. You need to approach reading with pleasure in mind or you won’t get anything out of it as a reader or a writer.
What are your reading habits like now? How much do you read? How many books do you have on the go at the same time? What's your mix of fiction and non-fiction?
I tend to read too many things at once and am trying to get out of the habit. I probably have fifteen or so on the go and one “main sweetheart” which at the moment is Berg by Ann Quin. I will probably finish reading it today.
I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction — I am especially drawn to biographies because I like how they have to take into account the messy and chaotic shape of a life so they aren’t written like other books. I just started a biography of Stravinsky. I am a natural curtain twitcher and gossip, so reading biographies fulfills those desires in a more constructive way. I read a lot of non-fiction for research for my own writing practice but try not to overdo it. If you overdo it you get a gout of the soul which restricts you imaginatively. I learned that the hard way with a failed novel project a few years ago.
If you're not enjoying a book, whose fault is it: yours or the author’s? I sometimes think if I was more sensitive or better educated I would enjoy it more. Do you plough on and finish boring books? How long does it usually take you to give up on a book? What kind of things make you want to quit?
I have impeccable literary taste so it is certainly the author at fault. I give up on the first page if I don’t have a spark with it. That said, some canonical authors have their sludge moments, such as Dostoevsky, but if you plough through you will find treasures that give you a sort of ecstasy on finding them. I am more apt to give up on contemporary novels because so many of them are the same and with novels from the past, no matter what the quality, you are learning something about the past.
Some people think that getting kids reading Harry Potter is a good way to get them into the reading habit. Others think that reading dreck rots the brain. What do you think about this question of encouraging the next generation? What books did you grow up reading?
I think reading is a habit that needs to develop early to have it for life, and it doesn’t matter what you read. I was really lucky in that I grew up in a house with a lot of books, and unfiltered access to those books, so before I could read I would flip through big art books and creepy old National Geographics. The things I read as a child still have direct influence on my work now, for example my mom is a bit of an Anglophile so I had a lot of old-fashioned British children’s books — Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Doctor Doolittle, The Water Babies, mixed with fairytales — Baba Yaga, in particular, we had the Ivan Bilibin version, sentimental Edwardian books like Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden I loved, my mom’s Polish Alphabet book about a girl named LaLa which had lots of communist factories in it, I also did read Harry Potter and a bunch of unicorn-based fantasy books aimed at adolescent girls, weird occult books. As a kid you have so much time to read everything in a way you don't as an adult.
I think I read Mishima quite young because I was attracted to the macho image of him on the back. I am driven mad by two stories I read/heard as a child which I can’t source: one was a scratch and sniff book from the 1970s in which some weird elf or doll-like characters eat cloud sandwiches and you could scratch and smell the cloud sandwich but of course it was an old book and just smelt like mildew. Another was a boy with a talking eagle and to reach a flower in a sand dune the boy cuts off the eagle’s claw with her permission to reach the flower.
Your new novel is about the activities that take place in and around a cinema. Can you conceive a novel set in a bookshop being as fun? What do you think about the difference between reading a book and watching a film?
I have tried to set a story in a bookshop but I think the setting is too “cute”, also I have not worked in a bookshop so I think it would be extra twee as I wouldn’t know the nasty reality. I don’t want to work in a bookshop as I worried it would ruin them as havens for me. I am a very visual reader so I have a projection contraption set up in my brain which transforms the text into images which play out in my brain, but through the text, as if through like a wrought iron fence, so I can appreciate the structure of the fence i.e .the text while at the same time basically watching a film.
Life is short compared to the number of books there are in the world. How do you go about choosing what to read? Are you a respecter of the canon?
I am a massive old canon fan, especially when it comes to the Greeks and Romans, and I have my own personal canon as well. It's very important to read work by dead authors, I think. It’s a communion and communication with the dead. I trust my own taste and a few of my friends’ taste too. If they recommend something to me, I will read it. A friend gave me Ann Quin for my birthday and she is a new author I have added to my canon. It's basic, but often when book shopping, I am more apt to buy Penguin Classics or other classics, and in particular translated stuff, and like Fitzcarraldo or trusty american indies like New Directions and Dalkey Archive press. Often, I won't read a book by a new writer if they went to a Creative Writing course at university because those courses are so factory formulaic you know what the book will be like.
There are so many books in the world that I sometimes find it difficult to commit to one and finish it. What can I do?
Don’t feel guilty about giving up on books. Read everything by the authors you love, read the ones you have a “spark” with, that excite you. At the same time, I am really depressed about having to have a day job and not read all day. 80 percent of being a writer is reading, and I think one of the worst aspects of the reality of my life is not being able to do that.
I sometimes feel a parasocial connection with a writer when I'm reading their book, as if we are intimately connected, best pals in waiting. Which writers are you most intimate with in a parasocial way?
I have total parasocial, Freudian relationships with a lot of dead male writers because I don’t have a relationship with my father, so writers such as Nabokov, who in cultural and habitual ways resemble my maternal grandfather who died when I was young, are my “daddies” or “Grandaddies.” I don’t do that with living writers, maybe László Krasznahorkai a little bit. I have a weird psychosexual relationship with TS Eliot. I read all the biographies about him. He always appears in my fiction but if I went back in time and met him I would probably find him repulsive and annoying. It's much better to not know the writer.
Have you ever had weird parasocial reactions from readers of your books?
Yes, I have had people think they know me, or know what my opinions are from reading my work, but I have the opposite with a lot of my older friends, who knew me first then read my work and say “I am glad I knew you before as you are quite different than your work.” I think I am quite colourless as a person and can appear a lot of different ways, especially in different jobs and situations and that is a good mode of moving through the world as a writer.
Flaubert said "what a scholar one might be if one knew well only five or six books.“ What six books would you choose?
I do read a lot of books over and over: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov, Pliny’s Natural History, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, TS Eliot’s Complete Poems, Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. My mom said everyone has to read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann three times in their life: as a youth, as a middle-aged person and an elderly person and it will be a different book everytime so I am looking forward to the next two reads.
Books make a good present, being both cheap and compact, but I don't like the way it introduces tension into a relationship. How do you deal with the potential awkwardness of having been given books to read?
I stopped giving books as gifts because many dear friends did not like books such as Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by the Carson McCullers, which I rate highly. It's hard not to think less of the people you gave them to. I like getting books as gifts but only from certain people who know my taste, maybe three people in the world. The most humiliating thing is being given gag books which reflect things in your life. I get a lot of cat coffee table books from people because of my beloved cat, Ludwig, which in a way cheapens the beautiful relationship between cats and humans (Cocteau said cats are the soul of a house), so I get weirdly offended.
You live in Edinburgh, which is one of the places in the world with the most bookshops. How do you stop yourself from buying too many books?
Most of the time, my bank account only has negative digits, but I tend to buy lots of books when I get my paycheck then I can’t afford food. Luckily I have bookseller friends who can often get me free copies which has helped a lot with this issue.
Do all your books come with you when you move countries? What is the selection criteria for them to make the journey?
I have boxes and boxes of books in Canada in my mother’s house, and it's almost physically painful for me to think about. I want them with me and I don’t feel ‘whole’ without my book collection. Too many times I have succumbed to buying a copy of a book here I know I have back in Canada. I don't like giving books away.
Nabokov said that a good reader is a rereader. What do you think makes a good reader?
Approaching a book seeking pleasure and a childlike wonder.
Thank you, Camilla!