Interview with Book Blogger Lauren Smith from Violin in a Void
Violin in a Void is run by South African book blogger Lauren Smith. She's well known among the book blogging community, spending her free time writing reviews for both larger publishing houses and independent presses alike. She'd been generous enough to review several 1889 Labs books (Hungry for You, The Antithesis), and has also hosted giveaways (Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes) on her blog.
Her reviews are often extremely insightful and give readers an excellent idea of the conceptual elements and premises of each book. One can tell she spends a lot of time doing this, so I would like nothing better than to return the favor.
And pick her brain.
TW: How long have you been a book reviewer/blogger? What made you become one, and what initially generated your passion for fiction?
LS: I started blogging in July 2010. Before that, I'd joined LibraryThing, and later Goodreads, in search of a space to chat about books. I don't have any real-world friends who read the same books I do, or as much as I do, so I went online to have those conversations. Eventually I started writing reviews to post on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Most of them were fairly casual – short pieces that were simply a quick write-up of my immediate thoughts. However, I also started writing more serious reviews. I'd take notes while reading, mark important passages, make a list of topics or issues I wanted to discuss, write up a draft or two, and then revise it a few times before posting. Because I was putting in that much effort, spending several days reading and then several days writing (I'm an easily distracted, procrastinating perfectionist) I wanted a much better platform for my reviews than Goodreads or LibraryThing could offer.
Blogging seemed intimidating, but I was encouraged by the fact that loads of people had taken it up as a hobby, and many weren't afraid to blog about random, everyday things, or to just pour out their unstructured, unedited thoughts on anything from current affairs and religion to movies and books. If they could do it, so could I, especially since I felt I was taking the task relatively seriously and trying to provide people with information and opinions I hoped they would find useful. I looked to professional and well-established blogs as role models for what I wanted, but the more casual blogs put me at ease about putting my writing out there for the world to see.
Finding a name for the blog was the hardest part – I just couldn't come up with anything I liked. Eventually I stumbled across the phrase "violin in a void" in Vladimir Nabokov's prologue to his novel Invitation to a Beheading. It's such a beautiful image, and I thought that that's what the best books feel like once you've finished reading them – this singularly exquisite thing in a world that seems to have faded, briefly, to insignificance.
My passion for fiction is something I've had for as long as I can remember. As a child I was a voracious reader, making frequent visits to the library and dipping into my parents' novels once I'd worked my way through all the children's books in the house. It's not something I can analyse in search of a source – I just love reading stories, and I'm incapable of imagining how I could not.
TW: If you absolutely had to pick one, what is your favorite genre? Sub-genre? Why?
LS: Oh god, I'm the most indecisive person I know. Questions like this fill me with anguish. Umm… My favourite genre is probably science fiction. This is a relatively recent development. As a kid, I'd read almost anything. I remember mostly reading fantasy and then a lot of horror as I got older, but I never really thought of myself as preferring any particular genre. There were stories, and some were more interesting than others.
I did a course in my second year at the University of Cape Town called the Victorian Fancy, about Victorian genre fiction (sf, fantasy, horror, and nonsense literature). The next year I signed up for Postmodernism and Science Fiction, which sort of sealed sf as my favourite genre. The lecturer, Jessica Tiffin, was a major genre fan herself, and she really gave me an appreciation for sf as the genre of ideas. In addition, the books and short stories prescribed for the course must have been the most enjoyable works I've ever read for educational purposes. Literary + Entertaining = Awesome
Favourite sub-genre is probably weird/dark fantasy (you didn't explicitly say they had to be linked…). I don't have a particularly good explanation for why I like it. I just like weird things…
TW: What are the most important components of a good story, in your opinion?
LS: I wouldn't single out any particular component of a story as the most important. Ideally, a story should be strong all-round, but a good story might just excel in one or two areas. The plot might be so entertaining that it doesn't matter that the characters are a bit flat. On the other hand great characters can carry a simple or barely-existent plot. A story might be good because of its ideas, its satire, its social commentary, or its depiction of a particular place or time. As long as the story can engage the reader, it doesn't really matter which aspect of it manages to achieve that.
However, I will say that it's essential that the writing is sound at the very least. The words you choose and the way you use them are the most basic component of a book. They are the means through which the characters, plot, dialogue, ideas, etc. exist, and as a result they define the existence of those things. I don't know if a story can be great based on writing alone, but I will definitely say that, for me, a badly written book is a bad book, period.
TW: Who are some of your favorite authors? Why?
LS:
Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams
They write in different genres, but I'm putting these two together because I love them for the same reasons – their whit, satirical observations, wonderfully bizarre characters, and endlessly re-readable stories.
China Miéville
As I said earlier, I like weird things and China Miéville's novels are definitively weird. They're also incredibly cerebral, exploring brilliantly bizarre, intellectual ideas. In doing so, Miéville plays around with language in ways that revitalises it or creates new meaning. All this is found within wonderfully inventive cities, among strange and fascinating creatures and characters. For all these reasons – as well as a few rather superficial ones – he's the only author I have a serious crush on.
James Tiptree jr.
I'm not a big short story reader, but Tiptree's stories leave in me in awe. Her writing is a beautiful landscape of exquisite, subtle details. Her stories are a combination of boldness and tragedy that I've never experienced with any other writer. Her titles are sublime. She portrays gender as a complex tangle of influences to the extent that there's an award named after her, for works that best explore gender and gender roles. Hers is the only biography I've ever been interested in reading, and it revealed an amazing life full of adventure, tragedy, contradiction and passion.
Her story, The Last Flight of Dr Ain is my favourite short story, ever.
Iain M. Banks
Elegant, cerebral sci fi that's also loads of fun. I discovered Iain M. Banks in that sci fi course I mentioned before and I loved his sci fi from then on. If I could choose any fictional society to live in, Banks's Culture would be it – endless resources, mind-blowingly advanced technology including sentient machines that are basically considered people in their own right, cool biological modifications, no government, no crime, no need for money or a job. You spend your life doing what you find most fulfilling, and die when you choose to. How awesome is that? I also love the odd personalities that the drones have, and the ships' quirky names.
Banks's novels also have intense conflicts, often based on the ethical and physical clash between the utopian Culture and a dystopian society. I'm less enthusiastic about Banks's mainstream fiction, with the exception of his debut The Wasp Factory – one of the best, darkest novels I've ever read.
Margaret Atwood
Or at least, I love her sci fi (and it is sci fi, even though she refuses to call it that). Beautifully written, her sf deals with two issues that are particularly important to me – gender and ecology. Her mainstream fiction tends to be hit or miss, but I thought Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride were brilliant, and thus she has a solid spot in my list of favourite authors. I'm not crazy about her short stories, but her short short stories, found in collections like The Tent and Bones and Murder, are delightful, punchy little things.
TW: Fiction has been one of the most profound elements of all societies, dating as far back as early human civilization. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, was one of the first written works, created in the Sumerian/Babylonian Era. What do you think story-telling, and books in general, contribute to our world? What is it about fiction that humans crave?
LS: Oh god, where to begin? I feel like just answering "everything". Without storytelling I think humanity might as well just curl up and die because who'd want to live as a piece of flesh carting around an emotionless void?
Storytelling is perhaps the most entertaining, meaningful and memorable form of communication. In telling stories we explore concepts that are important or valuable to us. Let's take the Epic of Gilgamesh as an example, since you mentioned it. A story about a man going on a journey to find the secret to immortality is so much more powerful and meaningful than simply saying how great it would be to live forever. Of course Gilgamesh fails: his cure is stolen by a snake and he's forced to accept that he will one day die, but he can at least take comfort in the thought that he will live on through his works. As a story, that's far more elegant than blunt facts stating that you will die but you might be able to create something to be remembered by.
In telling stories we indulge our creative impulses and, especially in social forms of storytelling, we tell people things about who we are or want to be. Stories are particularly efficient at doing this; their details convey a thousand things that, if you were to list them all individually, would be way too long, pretty boring, and easily forgotten. And stories, quite simply, can be these wonderful, thoroughly pleasurable things.
Fiction is necessary to do the job when life fails to be entertaining, meaningful or even 'lifelike' enough. Anyone who likes telling anecdotes knows how sometimes they're better if you tweak the truth here and there to make it a little funnier, a little more ironic, a little more meaningful. Fiction is a means of making the most out of a story, or conjuring up the story that hasn't or couldn't occur. It gives you what life has led you to ponder or long for, but which it cannot deliver on its own.
