TiSHANI DOSHI

AN INTERVIEW WITH SALMAN RUSHDIE IN THE CORRIERE DELLA SERA'S SETTE MAGAZINE

Roy is quick to acknowledge the privilege in her life and in the life of her characters. “Most of them are quite wealthy,” she says, “they can travel, they can speak English, they can eat caramel pudding. I’m completely aware of the class that dominates the book, but I wanted all along to be this sense that there are all these Lambus on the outskirts, who live on the fringes, and have a completely different sense of the world.”

“Now that I’m 50 and my friends are losing their parents, I say to them, ‘You will grieve for a long time. You will actually grieve forever. The difference between now and ten years is that you will have got used to the feeling.’ And some people are shocked by that because they want the grieving process to be over in a year, and if it’s not over, then it has become pathological and requiring of treatment. My experience of grieving is that it is simply endless.”

HAY DIARY

It is hard to imagine Atwood succumbing to fashion trends because there is such defiance about her. Not just in the abundance of grey-white curls, but in her demeanour. She is not just mischievous, she slants heavily towards the grotesque. One minute she is making fun of the invention of the two-way girdle, which allows you to play better Bridge, the other she is talking about filming a scene with hanging bodies on the city’s ramparts. She likes to shock, and delivers one-liners with the deftness of a slap. “The black death was quite good for women,” she says, “With half the population dead a lot of jobs opened up.”

Strange apparitions have been sighted in the village of Hay-on-Wye. Normally, a sleepy Welsh border town of 1,500 people, famous for its many second-hand book shops, it explodes annually during the Hay Literature Festival, which brings in over 100,000 people over 10 days. This year, there are the usual festival goers armed with wellies and programme guides who bravely camp along the River Wye, but there is something else. A group of women in red cloaks and white bonnets have been seen walking up Church Street, wandering through the surrounding fields, following in the wake of one of the festival’s star authors, Margaret Atwood. The women go where she goes, presumably because they owe their creation to her.