Douglas Coupland is without doubt my favourite fiction writer. He’s the only one I can think of right now that writes in my language, where I don’t have to step out into someone else’s world to read it. Reading his books is like talking to friends you’ve known for years, with whom you have endless shared jokes and a whole private vocabulary.
I’ve just finished his book-before-last, Eleanor Rigby, which is wonderful – full of the usual Coupland-style reliance on huge coincidence and wrestling with the most enormous questions of modern life, without positing any particular answers, just challenging all of us to live for something bigger, better, more noble than the world as it’s presented to us.
There’s a wonderful interview in the back of the book, which I was trying to find a link to online, but all I found was this one which accompanied his latest book JPod. JPod’s another fine book, though it’s more impressive than deep, in the way that Eleanor Rigby is deep, or Girlfriend In A Coma… it’s back to the zeitgeist defining magic of Generation X, Life After God and Microserfs, rather than the more traditional novel narrative of Miss Wyoming or All Families Are Psychotic.
Anyway, if you haven’t read Eleanor Rigby yet, but the version got the interview in the back – the interview is worth the price of the book itself. Great stuff.
I just wish he’d keep a blog, but I guess after a day writing, the last thing you want to do is write more. It’d be like me putting tonnes of free music online daily. Great idea, but really, if I’m going to be recording music, it’s going to be working towards a bigger project, not just throw-away MusiBlog stuff…
And now that book’s finished, I’m reading ‘God Has A Dream’ by Desmond Tutu – more about this when I’ve finished it. Suffice to say, he’s one of the most profound and inspiring human beings I’ve ever come across.