If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would it be, and why?
This is a great question, one I've never been asked before – and a tough question because so many of my favorites aren't exactly immersive-friendly. Pale Fire, anyone? The World According to Garp? I'd be Strongbow in Edward Whittemore's achingly underrated Jerusalem Quartet because he got to explore the Levant while it was still somewhat innocent and find out all kinds of strange exotic and erotic knowledge. Or I'd be Stern from the same series when he was still idealistic, before he became a gun runner, because that kind of passion is rare. But, heck, then I'd stick with him the bitter end in a bombed-out café in Cairo.
Or I'd be the journalist in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, just so I could be beguiled by the impossible circus act known as the flying woman, Fevvers. That would also mean I'd get to travel to Siberia. (Hell, I'd be any female character in Carter's work just to try to understand what it's like to another gender.) In a slightly similar vein, a kind of travel mode, I'd be any character in Frederic Prokosch 's The Seven Who Fled, a kind of cult classic of seven people who must travel across Mongolia and China in extreme circumstances.
There are definitely more personal answers that I'm just not thinking of at the moment, but the truth is, too, you always inhabit characters when you read. You become part of the fictional world. So in a sense I've been a thousand and one characters for a day already. Especially since you inhabit the characters you create, and that's for more than a day, and often much more intense. I'm just coming off of writing a novel called Finch, titled after the main character, and it's tough to do that--it's tough to become someone, like an actor, and then one day no longer be that thing.
Do people have to understand a book in order to enjoy it?
No, not at all. In fact, I welcome a book I can't understand, as a reader. One of my first formative experiences was with a series of books I could only partially understand: The Lord of the Rings, which my parents gave to me when I was eight or nine. It was incredibly surreal, because we were travelling around the world, going to these insanely exotic places, and my dad bought me the books in Singapore or someplace like that. And I remember it was like getting something that needed to be interpreted. It was highly revelatory.
I was a fairly advanced reader but I still didn't understand all of the words. And so Lord of the Rings for me was this mystical experience of receiving a text that I had to decipher. And I remember to this day that I most enjoyed those books *not* being able to fully understand them.
I also believe that books are like software--you need to load some types to enjoy other types. I've always loved Pynchon, for example, but never been able to get into Gravity's Rainbow. So every year, after months of reading, I pull it out again and I start it again. I don't know that it's necessarily that I don't understand it, but there's some kind of *key* missing for me, and I know that if I just read enough, one day that text will open up for me in a visionary way. But, again, even as an adult reader, I love a text that doesn't reveal itself to me right away.
There's nothing more explosively orgasmic for a writer than to experience a text that won't sit still, that won't allow you to pin it on the page, that keeps changing before your eyes, that you have *work* for. And I hope I'm not the only reader who feels that way.
Read more from Jeff Vandermeer here
Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer has just finished the final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch. With his wife, he recently edited Fast Ships, Black Sails and Best American Fantasy 2. His short fiction has or will soon appear in Black Clock, Tor.com, and two year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The Believer, the B&N Review, the Huffington Post, and many others.
Lynne Jamneck - Lynne Jamneck lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Short listed for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards, she has published short fiction in ...
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