Mrs. Daleoway. nrc c cz3k feeling that formula fiction finally is unsatisfactory, and the way this book has turned out, i think i do break a few rules, and that pleases me. What i was really trying to do is in that setting where people are a little more open than usual, trying to make the case that kindness is not this kind of amorphous, gauzy, optional thing that we add on but is actually annilk essential humanxdzv lan characteristic. In effect,co it should be part n an intellectual life. Its a valid intellectual concept that anybody whos a writer or artist or citizen should take time to think about. I tell you what its like, charlie. Its like watching someone walking towards you out of a mist. You have the faintest outlines, and you serve those outlines with a few sentences. Those few sentences bring that person a little closer. You see the outline of their shoulders, their face and something of their personality begins to emerge. So you write them into existence. One sentence generates another, one thought generates another. And suddenly, when youre lucky, if youre lucky, she has a life of her own, she tells you what to say, as it were. Charlie conversations with authors when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by rose additional funding provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Charlie Margaret Atwood is here. She has written more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her new book turns to short fiction for the first time in nearly a decade. It is called stone mattress, nine tales. I am pleased to have her back at this table. Welcome. Hello. Charlie why did you return to short stories . I think its just kind of happened, but the first one, i really was on a boat in the arctic and i really did startni< writing a story about how you had murdered somebody on a boat in the arctic and get away with it, and there really were five people called bob on board. Charlie five people called bob . Yeah, you want a number of bobs on board so you can change them around. Charlie you call them tales, though, not short stories. Yeah, i called them s because i didnt want pem to think we were in the land of total social realism, although we kind of are in a way because i dont cheat, i dont think there are any real zombies or anything in the stories, but there are certainly people who are interested in cut off hands that crawl around by themselves and other means of the form. Charlie you would think, dear reader and writer,niq short stories would be easier, but it is not necessarily so. It is not necessarily so. But, on the other hand, some of the problems are similar in that, if you cant get the person reading past the first page, youre doomed, whether its a novel or short story or a book of history, wouldnt you say . Charlie if you dont get them past the first page, youre in trouble. I think probably you should start with stonenr mattress. Charlie inicninrni know. But thats true inni everything. Attention anco send them roc d forward. Sometimes its thenki sometimes its the first paragraph or the second paragraph. But, for instance,gn withco . ; , we start withniq who is telling us a tale of being on ani train ando o everyl this iscov we know something he doesnt know andni what wen tktle of the bookconi isxd drac coming along that he doesnt know about. Charlie so anger, death, feminism, in the farm world you explore, and all these stories. Richard ii iii,co cutofpi stories, where if you lose your vision or just feeling quite isolated, you see little people. Charlie this is an actual disease. An actual syndrome strangely costumed often in green and usually in multiple. So dancing in groups or marching in groups. But they dont interact with you. You can talk to them, but they dont talk back, an its called Charles Benet syndrome because hes the first person who identified it. Charlie how did you find out about this . I found out about it through the author who wrote the man who mistook his wife for a hat. He has a book about hallucinations of various kinds, which is fascinating, and i wish i could remember the title but its probably Something Like hallucinations. Charlie but revenge is the theme, isnt it . Unfortunately it is. Fortunately, it is, because we like reading about it, even though we might never do those things ourselves. I was an early reader of Edgar Allan Poe and a couple of his Famous Stores are about revenge, so i got that idea quite early. And a freend of men, alberto mangel, a writer and collector of stories, was doing a collection called dark waters and black arrows, and said canadians havent written any revenge stories. So i thought, well have to change that. laughter so i wrote a revenge story backd interesting tonrxd write. Charlie due like betterco characters . 4a ] writexd about . Charlie uhhuh. Equally well, but im verynri, fond of gavincoq 4 charlie yes. Incnsr a very articulate, vei4 o his students, one affep the other, and thex to now isconri quite a lotnixdir than he is,r interestingusituation,ni bu l personni in the firstni is a fantasy writer. Im fond of her asnr technical difficulty then they turn on the radio and they hear this has become a fairly widespread phenomenon and in some cases the mob has burned down the retirement homes, and they are younger people who are very annoyed that this generation has sucked up all the money and is spending it on themselves and not creating any jobs for them. So they have a movement going of burning down the nursing homes, and one of my excuse me retirement homes. They do have a wing attached called advanced living. You dont want to end up in that one. So one of my favorite parts, which you would like, is when they have a Panel Discussion about it on radio, and they have this wonderful Panel Discussion in which they talk about why its happening and the social phenomenon and this and that and the other thing and the economic factors, but nobody does anything about it. Sound familiar . Charlie yes. Whats the future Library Project . Thats so interesting. To me, i got a letter about it. And it is connected with the library in oslo, norway, and they teamed up with a conceptual artist called Katy Patterson and she put it together for them. So the future library is a forest is growing in norway, and it will grow for 100 years, and each one of those 100 years, a different author will be asked to submit a manuscript to the future library, and you will put it in a box, you will seal the box. It can contain no images. There shall be only one copy and you cant tell anybody thats in it. All that will be known will be the title and the name. When the 100 years is up just like sleeping beauty, they will open all the boxes and then they will cut down enough trees from the forest to make the pape tore print the 100 books. So its like a time capsule. Charlie yes. And my book will therefore be the oldest one, 100 years old, and the newest one only one year old. During that 100 years, all the people today who are alive unless something radical happens, will no longer be so. The committee will have to renew itsself a couple of times and the youngest authors havent been born yet and their parents havent been and they have no idea who they will be. Charlie isnt darren oske doing some of you work to make it into a Television Production . He is. Charlie youre selling him the rights . About to, yeah. Hes doing the madd adam trilogy, the oryx and crake and the madd adam. Theyve cheese cheesen a write theyve chosen a writer and soon well see the script. Charlie do you have any role in offering an opinion . Well find out, its all a process. Charlie whenever i have you, it reminds me of how delightful you are. But you have this reputation of being tough. I know. Charlie when you tell people that Margaret Atwood is coming, they say, watch out she doesnt suffer fools youve got to be good. Well, youre not a fool. Charlie they do say that. I mean, what is it that makes you why do i have that reputation . Charlie thats a better question. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, before you were born, charlie, it was that you would have a journalist or something and they would say women cant write, or why should i read your book, or i havent read your bach and im not going to, tell me in 25 words what its about. Like that. Charlie yes. So, in those cases, i would push back a bit. Charlie how . Well, i would be mean. Charlie thats right thats your reputation. But didnt you worry about not being invited back . No. Charlie you didnt care whether you promoted your book or not . Yeah, i did. Charlie you had the luxury to choose wherever you wanted to go. Thats not always true. Thats true now but, once upon a time, you did whatever. I did give my first book signing in the mens Underwear Department of the Hudson Bay Company in edmondton, alberta. Charlie my feeling is when you write a book, you spent five years of your life, you want to sell the hell out of it, dont you . I think you and the publisher are united in the view. Charlie its not about the money, you just spent so much time on this. Well, you want it to be read, of course, which is why people say, well, in the future library, no one will read this book for a hundred years, why would you do that . Books are time capsules anyway, this is just a much longer wan. There have been many phases of book promotions. There is one called mofortfication of publishers and writers and their shame, talking about what happened to them while presented their work in public. It makes you feel better because some of the things are so awful theyll never happen to you, you hope. Charlie what do you think of amazon . What a loaded question. I think were into very complicated conversation here because there is no doubt that publishers quite depend on amazon in many ways to be an efficient distributor of books, so that is the good side. The bad side is that monopolies are bad. I think competition is productive within limits, but i think once it gets to the stage of the monopoly, that does away with the competition and people get lazy and exploitive. Charlie there are so many interesting things you said about writing including this, the older you get, the more you know about the plot before you begin to write because youve lived longer, youve seen more, you know more, and, so, therefore, its readily available for you to pour into the vessel of the soon to be book. Yeah, possibly not the plot. Probably a bit more the characters. Charlie youve seen people you want to model your characters after . I have more data at my disposal. Charlie very good way to express it. Yes, you have data. By my age, youve known more people and read more books. Charlie suppose the Nobel Commission because you up is it a panel, a commission, a board, whoever it is a secret person. Charlie oh, its one person . I dont know who it is. laughter i have no idea. Charlie but theres one person . No, i made that up. Charlie maybe it is. Could be. Could be. Charlie i dont know. The phone rings and somebody says something. Charlie says to you, margaret, can you hear me . Im calling from oslo, or stockholm, or wherever it is. The phone rang in 197 and theres a little voice on the end, im a Film Producer and my name is oscar i said, who is this really . So i would probably say, who is this really . Charlie but is there somebody you think should get the noble prize in literature next year . There are a bunch of them, there are a lot of excellent writers around the world. Charlie who havent been recognized with the highest accolade . Well, theres only one a year, of course. There are more good writers than nobel prizes. So charlie you know youre observe the list. Everybody thinks youre on their list. Its rumored but no ones ever actually seen the list. Its a phantom list. Charlie its like the great mentioner. Let me put it to you this way, Charlie Charlie please. The devil comes to you and says, charlie, you can either keep on doing your show or you can win this big prize charlie id keep on doing my show. Exactly. Thank you. Charlie ive won enough prizes and youve won enough prizes. The book is called stone mattress. You must love it because you do it so well. I do. Charlie thank you. Thank you. Charlie e. L. Doctorow is here. His newest novel called andrew brain. This is what the book of the New York Times says. Ive always responded. He has no choice, though, responding to the history of ones times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by e. L. Doctorow, who has in his halfcentury of writing fiction, placed a remarkable number of people, both real and imagined, in their history, just to watch them respond. Thats interesting. Charlie do you agree with that . Not entirely. Charlie what do you disagree with . I dont want to be ungracious. The label of historical novelist is not only welcome. Charlie whats wrong wit other than its accuracy . All novels are set in the past, if you think about it. Charlie yes. Even h. G. Wells Science Fiction is very victorian. Some novels have a wider focus and include public figures and major historical events. Some have a narrower focus about family, about personal relationships and so on, but theyre all about the past. Theres no entological difference in the two. My novels are set in different parts to have the countries the dakotas, georgia, north carolina, the adirondacks, new york city so you might as well call me a geographical novelist as well as historical novelist. I like the word novelist without modifications. Charlie responding to the history of ones times is sworn duty of a character by e. L. Doctorow. Im looking for the word historical novelist but i dont see it. Maybe i overanticipated. Charlie maybe later. laughter so what you do say in the book, that the book judges the reader somehow. Yeah, i think this is not formulated fiction. After you do this kind of work for a while charlie this kind of work is writing novels . Well, yeah. What you want to do is find new ways to do it. And thats equivalent to i mean, writers have been doing that for a long time. Jane joyce is a beautiful writer, a realistic sense of fiction, and then he went off and did ulysses and ended up with finnigans wake. Charlie did all right, didnt he . Virginia wolf decided she wanted to write a novel without a plot, to forgo that device, that convention, and she did a couple of times. The one i like best is mrs. Daleoway. So writers have always had this feeling that formulating fiction finally is unsatisfactory. And the way this book has turned out, i think i do break a few rules, and that pleases me. Charlie who is andrew . Andrew came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding an infant, swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap, and thats the image that came to me, and it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. I found myself writing that, and then i had to figure out what was going on, and thats how the book developed. Charlie he is a neuroscientist . Hes a cognitive scientist. In his own opinion, no great distinction. He also suffers from the fact that all his life hes been what i call an inadvertent agent of disaster, an earlier infant he, it turns out that he administered medicine to and it was the wrong medicine and the infant died. He was responsible for a car crash that killed a driver and so on and so forth. So all his life, hes had this trail of awful things that have happened. So he imagines that he is now unable to feel anything, which, of course, is a selfdelusion, because hes very feeling. Charlie but you make no distinction between real and imagined. Thats correct. Thats oneo the rules ive happily broken. You dont know when hes imagining what hes seeing or whether hes reporting on what actually happened. Theres the convention of the unreliable narrator, of course, but this really takes it to extremes. So in that way, the book does test the reader, does judge the reader. I just think that fiction can be too comfortable. You know, it is the most conservative of the arts. I think whats happened historically in music, like in 1900, stra stravinskis rights f spring, in art, the picassos and abstract expressionism and conceptual art, there were always these enormous changes. Charlie revolutionary and evolutionary. Right, fiction hasnt moved that much. Of course, weve gone through a period of postmodern writing, but thats rather timid in terms of finding a new way to charlie but arent you partly responsible for that . Well, not i came along a little later than the first postmoderns. Charlie but you are a novelist and, as i said, one of our great living novelists. I appreciate that, yes. Charlie so, therefore, arent you responsible for the quality of novels in our life . Certainly for the ones ive written. Charlie but have you been experimental enough, revolutionary enough . Have you tried to bring some molds . Its a matter of personal dissatisfaction. You always want to top what youve done in the past, and thats the prime motivation. Once somethings done you cant do anything about it anymore, youve got to move forward. Charlie were you in search to have a conversation about neuroscience and philosophers of the mind and show their conflict . Well, i come at this from the point of view of philosophy. Its a fascinating subject, an area of philosophical concern. Its the subject is mysterious. What has happened historically is the materialist conception of thinking has taken over from the old cartesian dua dualism. So modern science, there is no soul, the soul is just fiction, there is just a brain. But the problem that creates is to figure out how the brain creates feeling, thought, wishing, longing, falling in love and all of the subjective states of mind that we think of as consciousness, how does that happen . Nobody knows. And theres all sorts of immense amount of activity going on to map brains and figure out these charlie exactly. Theres a huge story about it in the New York Times. Yeah, so i have a separate thought about that. Its wonderful work, and if it can do things about figure out what to do about parkinsons or alzheimers, thats terrific charlie thats primary what the motivation is. I understand, and its noble and necessary, but ive just projected in this book to the point where an do you suggests, supposing we do figure out how the brain works, if that happens, then we can build a computer that has consciousness. Now, this sounds like movie stuff, but there are actually some serious people in this fie