![]() But, she says: “When my books get talked about, people go much more to the familial and the romantic elements of them. A retelling of Antigone in the context of the war on terror, it covers deep contemporary themes with an overlay of complex relationships between three Anglo-Pakistani siblings and the son of the home secretary. Kamila Shamsie won the 2018 Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Home Fire. Often they are unfairly cast that way, even when they’re not. Though, of course, it is wrong to pigeonhole women’s novels as purely about relationships. It is the stuff of our life.” It’s wrong to pigeonhole women’s novels as purely about relationships – often they’re cast that way, even when they’re not And I think it is the most interesting subject. “I like the fact that they write about love a lot,” he says. Yet this is precisely why the novelist Howard Jacobson turns to fiction by women. So the bounce off into fantasy versions of the working life is more attractive, because you jump away from an area that you find hard to talk about, and you’re not quite sure of the words.” “And if you don’t talk about it very much, you’re less likely to read about it. The broadcaster Andrew Marr points out that men have traditionally not been encouraged to talk about their emotional life. That’s been the engine of English literature for three and a half centuries.” “But of course there are loads of men writing about relationships and parents and despair and suicide, and all the ways in which love can go wrong. Men are said to be more interested in violence than relationships: they often prefer war or crime novels to ones about couples or families, or so the stereotype goes. Why should that be? “I think subject matter has a lot to do with it,” the novelist Ian McEwan says. On average, women will read roughly 50:50 books written by men and by women for men, the ratio is 80:20. Yet there are still many men who, like Curtis until recently, barely read books by women. CBC Books, September 15, 2021.Women read roughly 50:50 books by male and female authors for men the ratio is 80:20
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |