Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Martin Amis:" fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life"


Isabel Fonseca on an interview,“Well it is fiction,” she said last month over lunch at the River Café in Brooklyn, where one of the book’s scenes takes place. “The character is really not me at all. I didn’t consciously avoid any of the parallels, but I didn’t seek them either. It wasn’t a special area of play. I just didn’t worry about it.”
“Attachment” came about largely by accident, Mr. Fonseca explained. When she began it, she and Mr. Amis were living in Uruguay, where they had moved partly just to get away from London and partly because she hoped to work on a book about that country and her family’s history there. “Uruguay is a fascinating little country that’s very dear to me in some unearned way,” she said. Her older sister, Quina, has lived thereon and off for years, an aunt has a daily radio show in the capital, Montevideo, and one of her cousins was imprisoned for two years during the military dictatorship o the 70s.
“I never imagined that I’d spend half my life in England,” she said, looking out over the East River. “I never meant to give up my country,” and she added: “Do you know what ‘domicile’ means — in the poetic, tax sense? It means where you’re going to die, and when you go to the tax accountant, that’s what they want to know.

And here ,for another cup of coffee:

“The idea of leaving Manhattan permanently irritates me,” said Mr. Koch,who represented the East Side in the City Council and in Congress before being elected to the first of three terms as mayor in 1977.
Former Mayor Edward I. Koch said on Monday that he planned to stay in Manhattan — for good.Mr. Koch, who turned 83 in December, said that he had purchased a burial plot in Trinity Church Cemetery.

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