Alexander Chee

The text is, it's very experimental by Teresa Hak-Yong Cha, who was an avant-garde artist and writer in New York City, who had come out of Korea through China to the United States eventually.

and who was writing about her experiences and trying to create a sense of a kind of

continuous narrative for herself out of all these very different places that she had been, that combined, you know, the word, the title itself is for that kind of French education, which is part of what's interesting about it.

But it's, I think now it reads almost more familiarly to us than it did at the time that it was published in the 80s.

Now I think we're more comfortable with fragmented narrative, with someone who is combining myth and biography and autobiography and invention into a single narrative.

Well, it is significant to me because it showed me something really powerful about fragmented narrative, which is that there's a way in which a fragmented narrative is something broken to fit around the shape of something else, that if it was contiguous, it couldn't describe what it describes.

And so aesthetically, I would say I learned that lesson from that book.

It also was about belonging, which I think I am still writing about, and finding your heroes wherever you find them, and locating a kind of connection to the spiritual that's apart from any particular religion.

Those kinds of things, I think, are inside of that text.

in addition to the ones that I already have?

I should mention, first of all, Villette is actually my favourite novel.

Nice.

Of the Brontes.

Fight, Bronte, fight, fight.

Yes.

And I have read both Asterix and Tintin.

I confess I may be a Tintin person, but... Yeah.

I think...

Lately I've been thinking a lot about this book of poetry that I mentioned, For Love Alone, 18 Elegies for Raj, by the writer Paul Manette, who was not really known as a poet at the time that he published the book.

It was a book that he wrote after the death of