How to help children, teenagers and adults to read books in the age of smarphone-dependent society where attention spans on are coming down? “By writing good books,” says Marie Darrieussecq. “I have three children, and yes they read less than I read when I was of their age because of mobile phone, and tv series – they are so many good (ones) … I also read the Wire or watch sopranos or all those fantastic tv series but when I take subway in Paris I see people reading and reading books in paper. It still exists. People … there are still readers … I think there will always be readers, I don’t know why … people need to wait. Reading is close to meditating, you need to be calm inside your mind and it is not at all like watching images. And I think people need that calm, inside calm, very close to meditation.”
Marie Darrieuessecq is French novelist and commentator. She has written 15 novels in 22 writers. In an interview with www.TeluguRajyam.com she says life and love inspires her but her literary output is less than the famous writer, poet and dramatist of the Romantic literary movement. “Victor Hugo wrote more than I did.”
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The subjects of her novels reflect the society in particular about women. She says, “It is the movement of life and of my life and also I know in my heart they are not different … there is always something different about the body, about women, ghosts dead people … all my books deal with that even if they look different I know they are not different.”
Marie Darrieussecq’s most recent book is ‘Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker’. It is a biography of German painter and the first woman in Europe to paint paintings of self-expression: nudes of herself. Marie says she was impressed with the life of the German painter and want to try to help in taking her work to a wider audience.