The singer-songwriter, whose album “The Last Ship” will be released
this week, says his favorite novels are really extended songs: “What is
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ if not an opera?”
Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
Sting
What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
I enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies,” almost as much as I
enjoyed its predecessor, “Wolf Hall.” Her portrait of Thomas Cromwell is
complex and largely sympathetic to a character that is usually cast
darkly and exclusively as Henry VIII’s “muscle.” I enjoyed Nathaniel
Philbrick’s treatment of the American War of Independence in “Bunker
Hill” for similar reasons, a well-researched story proving to be more
nuanced and compelling than a well-established myth.
If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?
Mark Twain, for the perfect combination of plot and character in “Huckleberry Finn.”
What kinds of stories are you drawn to?
I like personal dramas set within the sweep of historical events: Colum
McCann’s “TransAtlantic” and “Let the Great World Spin,” or Ian McEwan’s
“Sweet Tooth.”
We have to ask about Nabokov. How does it feel to have turned on
a generation of junior high schoolgirls to “Lolita”? Are you a Nabokov
fan?
Is that true — that my appalling rhyme led a mass migration to the
linguistic cosmos of Nabokov? I don’t think so, but then, they could
have gone to worse places.
In what ways do the books you read figure into the music you write?
Songwriting is of course a very different art to that of the novelist —
condensing sometimes large ideas into rhyming couplets seems to be the
opposite process.
But it is interesting to me how often a novel will begin with a quote
from a poem or a song, so the territories do overlap to some extent. My
favorite songs are narrative songs, short stories that can be recounted
in three minutes. My favorite novels are extended songs. What is “One
Hundred Years of Solitude” if not an opera? And a grand one at that!
You’ve written a memoir, “Broken Music.” What was that
experience like for you — the writing itself, and the publication and
reception of the book?
I began to realize while writing and remembering that memory is a neural
muscle, and once you begin to stretch it, it grows to accommodate
everything that has ever happened to you, often things you might prefer
to forget. But the abiding emotions that sustained me through the
process were gratitude and forgiveness; to use the newly developed
muscle otherwise is largely a waste of time. I think people were
surprised that I wrote almost exclusively about my early life, before
the distorting lens of fame and success, and the well-worn clichés of
celebrity.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
The complete works of P. G. Wodehouse, for their innocent escapism.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
A self-help book? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
Probably Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita,” a delicious and disruptive
satire of Soviet Russia. I hear a dead man was put on trial in Moscow
only this past summer; Woland would have loved it!
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Meditations,” by Marcus Aurelius — Stoicism and the limitations of
power. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I
deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest,
jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from
evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and
have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not
of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of
the divine.”
Did you grow up with a lot of books?
We only had two in the house, an illustrated Old Testament and Volume 1
of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was well versed in everything from
“aardvark” to “azimuth,” but little else. The public library became a
sort of refuge. I never throw a book away now. I have kept every
dog-eared paperback I have ever read. Books are the only things I’m
acquisitive about. And no, I don’t lend my books . . . join the library!
Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?
I imagined myself as Jim Hawkins in “Treasure Island,” an innocent among
thieves and cutthroats. It must have been the first book I ever read
from start to finish, with unforgettable characters, Long John Silver,
Blind Pew, Ben Gunn. . . . The Black Spot still terrifies me.
What books are on your coffee table?
Albert Camus: “Solitude and Solidarity,” a beautiful and evocative
portrait of the man and the writer, edited by his daughter Catherine,
and Ellen Von Unwerth’s “Fräulein.”. . . Well, what did you expect?
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel
you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you
put down without finishing?
I’m no critic. It’s hard enough writing a book without some opinionated
parvenu dismissing your work because he wasn’t in the mood or is too
daft to catch your drift. Mind you, anything with the word “Code” in the
title, I will avoid like the plague!
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I’d like to ask Shakespeare if he composed while walking, or was he entirely sedentary?
What do you plan to read next?
I’m weighing “My Lunches With Orson” against Daniel C. Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.”
Any plans to write another book?
Oh yes! I definitely want to give it another crack!
sursa: The New York Times Published: September 19, 2013