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Latest chat
Questions asked are listed below, click on the comments link to read Anthony's answer.
Use the link on the left to ask a question.
Question
Hi Anthony,
I'm sure everyone reading The Various Flavours of Coffee must wonder if you had the idea sitting in a Starbucks.
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Answer
It’s strange, but I can’t now remember where this idea came from. I do remember thinking that having written about someone who abandons duty for pleasure in The Wedding Officer, I wanted to put the case for the opposite point of view, i.e to write about someone who in the course of growing up realises the limitations of unfettered sensuality and hedonism… which, of course, also gave me the perfect excuse to write about sensuality and hedonism.
It’s a darker book in parts than either of the previous two. I think it’s still a comedy – just – but it’s a comedy of characters rather than events. I think of it as a coffee-comedy: dark, intense, with just a touch of bitterness…
Another difference is the setting. I’ve always wanted to write a story about business – not in order to portray it as something either particularly evil or particularly good, but simply because business is the dramatic backdrop to most of our lives today, and it’s an area which fiction seems to steer away from. There are films and plays set in the world of work, but rarely novels. Yet business brings together so many great dramatic themes – conflict and struggle, families, change, ethics…
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Question
Hi Anthony,
Your novels seem very sensual. Is that a reflection of your character, or do you think it's just the type of stories you like to write?
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Answer
Both, I think. I am a bit of a hedonist, and I do like to write about sensual things, but I try not to write about them in a self-indulgent way. Just listing or describing pleasure becomes very boring… what interests me is what pleasure does to people, awakening their senses perhaps, or making them selfish or blind, as happens to Robert in The Various Flavours of Coffee.
I took a conscious decision when I wrote The Food of Love that I wasn’t going to try to write clever or impressive or literary books: I was going to write enjoyable, story led boks - comfort books, if you like, the sort of book you’re happy to curl up with and re-read when you’re stuck in bed with the flu. If I were a restaurant, I’d like to be a much-loved neighbourhood trattoria that serves up strong, simple flavours, not an icily-correct temple of haute cuisine.
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