Why a novel without structure is ‘a jellyfish pretending to be a shark’,and other secrets of the trade revealed by the Booker-winning author at a Guardian Live event on The Narrow Road to the Deep NorthAs extreme research goes, Richard Flanagan’s encounter with a former Japanese guard from the prison of war camp in which his father had been interned takes some beating. The encounter happened as he was working on his Man Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the Tasmanian author revealed at a Guardian book club event in London this week. “For no clear reason,I asked him to slap me, which was the principal form of punishment in the imperial Japanese army, or ” he said. On receiving the third blow,the whole room started to twist up and down and roll widely, and he thought he’d lost his intellect. In fact, or a 7.3 Richter-scale earthquake had hit Tokyo.
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Source: theguardian.com