Sanjeev Sahota
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2021
last heard Aug 2021
Sanjeev Sahota’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He says...
So this question of who is actually, who has the right to tell the story?
And it's something I wrestled with a lot when I was starting to write Mayor's Story.
What right does anyone have to tell the story of someone else who was alive and who lived?
You know, to kind of like give them voice and give them, put words into their mouth that they may not have thought and put thoughts into their heads.
But then I ended up thinking, actually, who else is going, if not me, who else is going to give voice?
any kind of voice to this potential story of my great grandmother and I stopped seeing it as an imposition and more as me and this book being more as like an act of love or a gift from me to her in a way and once I got my head around that then the story flowed much more easily but the question of authorship kind of remained and I wanted it to be I wanted a sense of openness at the end that actually we don't know you can never know
how it might have felt for this young girl.
Because she wouldn't have been any more than 16 years old when they got married.
And that bears thinking and writing about and reading about, I think.
I mean, there are.
I think the correspondence is between my life and the unnamed narrator's life in 1999.
So I'm always wanting to be truthful.
But I was also always conscious that I'm writing a novel.
I'm not writing...
memoir you know I'm not interested in confessional truth or making a confession I'm interested in dramatic truth and the meaning that comes out of watching characters interacting in a hypothetical space of the novel and what meaning and truth comes out of that so that's one reason why I kept everyone unnamed in the 99th strand because I don't have copyright over anyone's life who is at the moment I only have copyright over my life but equally also being true to this idea of
the novel and actually the truth that comes out of writing drama as well so it was a delicate balance I felt I was walking but I never felt as if I was on the precarious end of it always kind of I trust the novel novels and you know the idea of the novel so much that I think it will always kind of like keep me on the straight and narrow I guess yeah.
Oh, um...
Well, Isabel Archer is mentioned in the book at one point, the unnamed narrator or the person who has a great deal of affection for Radhika mentions Isabel Archer, who of course is another, from Henry James, a portrait of a lady, who's another character, another woman who's fighting to really forge her own path in life.
And I put that in there because it does light up a lot about the structure of China Room and it speaks to Meher and her story in Radhika.
Showing 41–60 of 109 · page 3 of 6
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