[caption id="attachment_69611" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Robert Kanigel. "]
In his last book but one, Robert Kanigel looked at how Nice, in the south of France, has beguiled visitors for 2,000 years and became a byword for mass tourism in more recent times. On the face of it, his latest amounts to a radical shift of pace. It is about the Great Blasket, "a tiny, wildly beautiful Gaelic-speaking island off the far west coast of Ireland.
"It's about its people, about the pure Irish they spoke, and the rich communal lives they lived," said Kanigel, an award-winning science writer and a Guggenheim Followship recipient.
However, like "High Season," "On an Irish Island" is also about the impact a place has had those who went there.
"[I]t's about the scholars and writers from London, Paris, Dublin and elsewhere in Europe who visited the island in the first half of the 20th century,” he said, “became entranced by it, came to love it and its people, encouraged the islanders to tell their stories, and left the island forever changed by their experiences there. It is a book about the clash of culture between modern life and an older, sometimes sweeter world slipping away."
What is your writing
routine? Are there ideal conditions?
For the sorts of books I write, it's research and travel for a year and a half, then writing for a year and a half. When I'm writing, I'm usually up early, take a long break in the middle of the day, work through into the evening. Ideal conditions? A long chunk of uninterrupted time, day after day. And a head cleared, as much as possible, from the distractions of daily life.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Learn your craft. Keep learning it. Refine it. Nurture it. With this increasingly powerful tool at your disposal, apply it to the subjects that engage you the most.
Name three books that are memorable in terms of your reading pleasure.
"Barney's Version," by Mordechai Richler; "The Odyssey," Homer (Robert Fagles translation); "Emma," by Jane Austen
What book are you currently reading?
"Systems of Survival," by Jane Jacobs; "The Best American Noir of the Century," edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler.
Is there a book you wish you had written?
I'm happy to write the books I write and leave others to write theirs.
Name a book that you were pleasantly surprised by.
"Freewheelin'," by Suze Rotolo. About Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, but Rotolo, his girlfriend during that period, holds her own and makes it truly her book more than Dylan's.
If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be?
Virginia Woolf, John Updike.
What book changed your life?
All of them.
What is your favorite spot in Ireland?
The back side of the Great Blasket, around the hill from the ruined village, the west wind blowing softly, birds above and below, the seas crashing beneath you.
You're Irish if . . .
I'm not, so I'd best leave it to the Irish themselves to set the standards!
Robert Kanigel will read on this coming Friday at BookCourt, 163 Court St., Brooklyn. The event begins at 7 p.m. For more about the author, go to www.robertkanigel.com.
