Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that my current WIP, A Wild Goose Hunt, has been 'coming soon' since at least May. Hopefully, it is now in its final editorial and production stages, but the experience suggested this week's theme—books that took a long time to write. In the light of these examples, my own dilatoriness seems a mere drop in the ocean…
1. Donna Tartt takes a mere decade to write her novels; ten years between The Secret History and The Little Friend, and the same again before The Goldfinch made its appearance.
2. Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also took ten years, during which time the author apparently almost gave up on completing a novel that then won, among other accolades, the Pulitzer Prize.
3. James Joyce took sevennteen years to write Finnegans Wake; he is said to have predicted that it would take most people the same length of time to read it.*
4. Susanna Clarke apparently began Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in 1993, and a full twenty years later, it was finished, and picked up by Bloomsbury. Fans of Clarke had to wait another sixteen years for the exquisite Piranesi.
5. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, controversial as it was, took fifty-seven years and still was not complete when the poet died. Now there's something to which I can aspire!
*I don’t think that the Backlisted podcast has tackled Finnegans Wake, but in one episode one of the presenters had just read it and commented on how it is (as Beckett said) not meant to be read; and that perhaps it is meant to be read aloud or sung, and how it is very funny.
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