If you have loved David Grossman's fiction, as I have (see
here on To the End of the Land), then you will appreciate this 2007
Paris Review interview with him on Arabs and Israelis, his writing process, and his life.
In recent years, I feel I’m less and less influenced by writers. I do
not see this as a good sign, by the way. I want to be influenced by
writers. I think it is a sign of being open...
...the books that really matter, the books that I cannot
imagine my life without having written, are the more demanding ones,
like The Book of Intimate Grammar, Be My Knife, See Under: Love,
and the book I’m writing now. I may occasionally like to write an
entertaining book, but I take literature seriously. You’re dealing with
explosives. You can change a reader’s life, and you can change—you
should change, I think—your own life.
Usually a lighter book will serve as a kind of recovery for me. I
devastate myself when I write a certain kind of book—there is a process
of dismantling my personality. All my defense mechanisms, everything
settled and functioning, all the things concealed in life break into
pieces, because I need to go to the place within me that is cracked,
that is fragile, that is not taken for granted. I come out of these
books devastated. I don’t complain, of course. This is how books should
be written. But my way to recover from this sense of total solitude is
to write books that will bring me into close contact with other people. I
wrote The Zigzag Kid because I had to recover from The Book of Intimate Grammar and Sleeping on a Wire.
