I didn't realise that I was going to write a memoir and I have been resistant to it. Ramona Koval: Well, Michael, this is unexpected, partly because, well, we didn't realise that you were going to write a memoir, but I must say, when I've spoken to you before you seemed to be a little resistant to highly personal talk. Michael Frayne joins us from his home in London.
But Tom Frayne ended up leaving a fortune for his son, but not in the form of conventional monetary riches. After a family tragedy, as you'll hear, he had a somewhat difficult time with his eldest, Michael. All his siblings were deaf and he had to support many of them, leaving school early, getting into sales, ending up selling that marvellous new stuff, asbestos. What can we know? What is real? What do we mean by the self? He even said in that book, 'Reality is the child of man's imagination.'Īnd now, as usual, Michael Frayn has produced an unexpected book: this one, My Father's Fortune, the story of his early life in the family headed by his father, Tom Frayn, a man who was born in straightened circumstances to a family with hereditary deafness. Last time we spoke, it was about a non-fiction exploration, The Human Touch, when Michael Frayn returned to his roots in philosophy-that's what he studied as a lad-this time in a non-fiction exploration of questions that have underscored most of his fictional work, the relationship between existence and human consciousness.
He's also a translator from the Russian-lots of Chekov and Tolstoy amongst others. In the 1960s, his first two novels won major prizes and his latest one, Spies, won him the Whitbread novel award in 2002. Did you ever see his farce, Noises Off, a very funny slapstick comedy, and so different from two more recent plays, the cerebral Copenhagen, about a meeting between two of the founders of quantum mechanics, and Democracy, about the East German spy who worked for Willy Brandt. Well known as a novelist and playwright who's always presented widely varying kinds of work. Today, a new book from English writer, Michael Frayn. Ramona Koval: Hello there, Ramona Koval here with The Book Show on ABC Radio National.
0 kommentar(er)
