{"id":18354,"date":"2011-09-06T10:32:07","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T00:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.booktopia.com.au\/?p=18354"},"modified":"2016-03-01T09:50:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T23:50:58","slug":"elliot-perlman-author-of-the-street-sweeper-answers-ten-terrifying-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2011\/09\/06\/elliot-perlman-author-of-the-street-sweeper-answers-ten-terrifying-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliot Perlman, author of The Street Sweeper, answers Ten Terrifying Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0The Booktopia Book Guru asks<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elliot Perlman<\/h1>\n

author of Seven Types of Ambiguity<\/em><\/a>, Three Dollars<\/em><\/a>, The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming<\/em><\/a> and now, The Street Sweeper<\/em><\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ten Terrifying Questions<\/strong><\/h2>\n

—————————-<\/p>\n

1. To begin with why don\u2019t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was born in Melbourne and spent my earliest years in the south-east suburb of East Brighton.\u00a0 In primary school I went to Gardenvale State School.\u00a0 In secondary school I went to Mount Scopus College.\u00a0 After school I did an honours degree in economics with a double major in politics and economics and a sub-major in economic history.\u00a0 Then I did a law degree.\u00a0 Both degrees are from Monash University in Clayton, Melbourne.<\/p>\n

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

From memory, at 12 I think I wanted to be a kind of Australian Bob Dylan who played football for Carlton and was the kind of footy-playing troubadour who was also a doctor.\u00a0 At 18 I probably had more-or-less the same aspirations I had at 30, although at 30 I was no longer playing in bands.\u00a0 I wanted to be a barrister and a writer.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 They both involve working with language and can involve arguing a point of view.\u00a0 They both permit working for yourself.\u00a0 They both have the potential to help people.<\/p>\n

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what it says about me (although I\u2019m sure it\u2019s not good) but I think that at 18 I probably had pretty much the same views on important issues that I have now.<\/p>\n

4. What were three works of art \u2013 book or painting or piece of music, etc \u2013 you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to limit it to 3 but I\u2019ll try.\u00a0 As a kid I didn\u2019t enjoy the same kind of books as my older sister and my parents were worried about my lack of enthusiasm for reading the book she\u2019d liked.\u00a0 Then at about 11, because my mother was teaching it and so didn\u2019t want me to take it away from her bedside table, I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/em><\/a> by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.\u00a0 This was a turning point for me because it seemed to be political, railing against injustice but also a kind of adventure story, one where we see how Ivan manages to get through the day in a Soviet gulag.\u00a0 On the opening page he\u2019s trying to capture a bug to eat for extra protein.\u00a0 Eleven-year-old boys like that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Then not long after I was moved by To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Again I think I was grabbed by the fabulous story, the warmth of the writing and the various injustices that are dealt with.<\/p>\n

A little later came Arthur Miller\u2019s Death of A Salesman<\/em><\/a> \u2013 capitalism\u2019s evisceration of a man coupled with a domestic drama, a father-son struggle. It\u2019s one of the highlights of my life that I got to meet Arthur Miller and to tell him how much his work has meant to me<\/p>\n

5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been a religious person and I found that in the absence of any other-worldly spirituality it was literature that helped me in difficult times.\u00a0 Books were always there for you. They weren\u2019t fickle.\u00a0 They were rich with emotion and experience and points of view. They could help you feel less alone in the world.\u00a0 I wanted to try to do this for somebody just as it had been done for me.<\/p>\n

Also, my father once came to hear my band and said \u201cPeople should pay you not<\/em> to sing\u201d.<\/p>\n

6. Please tell us about your latest novel\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong>It\u2019s called The Street Sweeper<\/em><\/a>. It took me almost 6 years to conceive, research and write. Spanning the 20th<\/sup> century to the present and the globe from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw, Berlin and Auschwitz, it explores how breathtakingly close we are to lives that at first seem so far away and how it is the story of only very few of those lives\u00a0 survive to become history.\u00a0\u00a0 The novel is propelled by the fates of two men whose path unexpectedly cross. One is an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital, father of a little girl he can\u2019t locate, who befriends an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor.<\/em> A few miles uptown lives the other man \u2013 an Australian historian at Columbia University whose career and romantic relationship are falling apart.\u00a0 As these two men try to survive in 21st<\/sup> century New York, history comes to life for each of them in ways neither of them could have foreseen.<\/p>\n

(BBGuru:<\/strong> Read Booktopia Buzz editor Toni Whitmont’s review here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0 What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One probably hopes for different things from different works.\u00a0 Sometimes you want to make people laugh or just smile. At other times you want to move people, remind people of things they hadn\u2019t thought about in a while or tell things they didn\u2019t know. Always you want to engage people, to entertain them.\u00a0 However fortunate we might be with our friends, lovers, spouses, children or our parents, ultimately we live inside our heads.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the thinking, the ruminating gets done.\u00a0 It\u2019s where we spend most of our time and that\u2019s where you cannot help but be alone. I\u2019d like to make the reader feel less alone.<\/p>\n

8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s really difficult to chose only one person but if you force me to chose only one (and you are), I\u2019d have to choose Thomas Hardy<\/a>.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 As a writer he could do anything.\u00a0 He wrote novels, unjustly too frequently-neglected short stories and poetry and he was a master of all three forms of writing.\u00a0 Had he done only one as well as he did all three we\u2019d still be talking about him. You read him and wonder, who was this small, shy nineteenth-century rural man \u2013 so thoroughly of the Victorian age \u2013 who yet so understood the plight of women, the poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed and who could express this understanding with such linguistic precision, such sad beauty, such dark but invigorating wisdom, uncommon, erudition and unprecedented empathy?<\/p>\n

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that if the circumstances of your life permit, you want to try to create a body of work, one that, without compromising,\u00a0 finds as many readers as you can all around the world,\u00a0 that builds a relationship with them over the years, one that nourishes both them and you.<\/p>\n

10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a tendency in the middle of the writing of a novel for the writer to feel adrift, lost floating aimlessly in a rough swirling, uncharted ocean of words.\u00a0 You are too far away from the beginning to feel the enthusiasm that set you on your way all those words ago and too far from the end to see the land of your completed tale where you may rest finally. There are so many obstacles between you and your completed manuscript. I would want to tell the aspiring writer the same thing I need to remind myself sometimes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Do not let this sense of aimlessness stop you from finishing. From my own experience and that of many writers I\u2019ve met, I\u2019m convinced that this feeling is normal. While feeling this is no guarantee that your novel will be artistically, critically or commercially successful, neither is it a sure sign of failure.<\/p>\n

When overwhelmed by this feeling, remember those novels that have had the biggest effect on you as a reader.\u00a0 Look at those novels.\u00a0 Take them from your shelves.\u00a0 Flick through their pages.\u00a0 Remember the characters, the settings, the plots.\u00a0 Remember how they made you feel.\u00a0 There was a time when the book in your hand, the book that means so much to you, was unwritten.\u00a0 Perhaps the manuscript upon which you drift aimlessly now will come to be such a book for people you have never met. Dwell on this, that this could happen.\u00a0 Take a deep breath and go back to your page.\u00a0 Perhaps there is someone who needs you to tell this story.\u00a0 Perhaps someone is waiting.<\/p>\n

Elliot, thank you for playing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>Pre-order your copy of The Street Sweeper<\/em> from
\nBooktopia, Australia\u2019s No.1 Online Bookshop \u2013 click here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6W3TiniTYJ4&rel=0]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0The Booktopia Book Guru asks Elliot Perlman author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Three Dollars, The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming and now, The Street Sweeper Ten Terrifying Questions —————————- 1. To begin with why don\u2019t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled? I was born in Melbourne and spent my earliest years in the south-east suburb of East Brighton.\u00a0 In primary school I went to Gardenvale State School.\u00a0 In secondary school I went to Mount Scopus College.\u00a0 After school I did an honours degree in economics with a double major in politics and economics and a sub-major in economic history.\u00a0 Then I did a law degree.\u00a0 Both degrees are from Monash University in Clayton, Melbourne. 2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why? From memory, at 12 I think I wanted to be a kind of Australian Bob Dylan who played football for Carlton and was the kind of footy-playing troubadour who was also a doctor.\u00a0 At 18 I probably had more-or-less the same aspirations I had at 30, although at 30 I was no longer playing in bands.\u00a0 I wanted to be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[4,84],"tags":[1803,4784,5184,5989],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57612,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18354\/revisions\/57612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}