Episode 42 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Part 2

In part two of my interview with Michel Faber and David Mitchell, we begin by talking big books and the attempt to say everything in fiction.  As Mitchell puts it: 'I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in – the world itself and the human world with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of human emotions.'

 

After trading Freddie Mercury and Ringo Starr quotes, we returned to the idea that Faber had written his last novel and from there to: 

 

• the consolations of poetry

   

• improvising The Book of Strange New Things

   

• Faber talks about caring for his wife, Eva, and the impact that her illness had on the novel's composition

   

• love letters and how letters transcend space, time and grief

   

• inciting the reader's emotions for certain characters

   

• the hubristic insanity of online Clouds.