Married to an Israeli poet, who is her second husband, an important influence on her has been another Israeli, her friend the writer Avner Shats, said (by Wikipedia) to be Israel’s token postmodernist. This peripatetic life changed when she went to live in Israel and became a technical translator, which she describes as ‘her first job with dignity’. ‘I was concerned, as I was involved with a committee of solidarity with the people of Nicaragua actually formed by the FBI to bundle the energies of people on the left - you know, the sort of revolutionaries who played bongos.’ She describes being paid by the FBI to think of alternative rhymes to such gems as: What is the solution - Revolution! She says she was fired for writing a mean letter on Agency paper to George Bush. She has waitressed, written a post-punk fanzine, worked as a clerk for the Defense Agency and for Washington organizations (‘being a very devoted, senile kind of person’). A veteran of the radical squat scene, she describes herself as ‘interested in anarchist theory, which most anarchists are not’.Įven at college she found it ‘difficult to find viable ways to exist’ and as for mainstream corporations: ‘there is some cultural thing, and I lack it.’ She’s done every kind of job imaginable. A teenage Maoist and ‘odd child’, she became a bricklayer ‘working with my hands so my thoughts were free’. Zink was - or is - an anarchist with a fascinating past. I said he should have kept quiet.’ And on it goes, weirdly and very funnily. Try this for a brilliant opening sentence: ‘I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.’ The swerve is because the nerdish husband wished to avoid hitting the wallcreeper - a bird he takes home and saves: ‘He said head wounds always bleed like that. The first part of the Wallcreeper was written in four days, she says, ‘to show him that I knew what I was doing as a writer.’ This very odd and very engaging book describes the break up of a marriage but is also about birds, eco-terrorism and how people live.
Franzen pushed her to believe in her writing and to take herself seriously. They met through their joint interest in birding.
She was championed and helped into print by Jonathan Franzen, also an ornithologist and conservationist. This droll and dry super-bright American had a huge success with The Wallcreeper, her first and perhaps still her best novel. Nell Zink at her only UK signing at Foyles in London
0 kommentar(er)
