'I think it’s something writers often confront... What you remember and what you’ve imagined become difficult to separate.' Ivan Vladislavic on writing fiction from memory.
, moves between two different voices, those of the brothers Joe and Branko. Joe is a novelist, Branko is a film and TV editor. There is, between them, a kind of brotherly friction, competition as well as care.
You have these different streams in the novel, and the kinds of language that arise in them. Some of the language in the Branko stream, particularly, was very resonant for me. Is that language generative for you? Does it take you to the sensory memory, or is it the other way round? So that split takes place, these different kinds of language, the different narrators, which also introduces a certain antagonism between the brothers, which becomes a sort of buzz in the background.
I had a fair amount of quotation from the boxing writers, and I wanted this because the text is a sort of museum of that kind of writing. Initially I had all that in quotation marks, and all the dialogue between the characters, between Branko and Joe, in quotation marks, and it felt like the text was bristling with them. So I tried dropping the quotes on the dialogue, and I found that quite challenging. That involved a lot of rewriting. I like the fact that it produced a more fluid text.
But it’s a fascinating question: What does it mean to be faithful to a memory? In terms of writing, it’s maybe about what feels right. My father drove Zephyrs and Zodiacs; it would be impossible for me to write about that memory and make my father drive, say, a Rover.
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