Booker prize, stars in everybody's eyes

So come on, admit it...how many of you watched Salman Rushdie on 'Shrinkwrapped'? I know Pamela Connolly can make the viewer cringe. I know it is lit lite and psyche lite and quite probably an insult to all of us but...I still watched it. I know, I know. Only a 'literature is just the work, not the personality' saint could resist and there has never been anything remotely saintly about me.

If Rushdie did the interview to improve his general image/profile/readership then I'm sure it did the trick. He came over as quite a sensible human being and all the stuff about how long it took him to get success as a writer (from 1968 to 1981) will all help him in the public eye (how we love a trier!). It may well reduce the air of 'smug, know-it-all' that seems to have attached itself to him over the years (not that smug, know-it-alls are necessarily all bad, but you know what I mean). He talked of being dumped by his last wife and of learning to live alone (how we love a loser in love) and of his stern, alcoholic father (how we love a victim) but despite the fact that I know how much he was probably using the interview to his own ends I still found him more interesting as a result (and anyway why shouldn't he use it - it was using him). It was quite interesting too on how little control writers have over their image and that's a subject we've touched on before here. I used to write book reviews and interview writers (as well as lots of other people) and I was often amazed how badly interviewees felt they had been treated in print and how other journalists, they said, had written barefaced lies about their houses and their looks and what they had said during the interview (why was I amazed? Well, I was a lot younger for a start). And I know I wasn't immune - on at least one occasion I disliked the person I interviewed so much that I couldn't keep the hatred out of my finished piece (the latter was so...negative the magazine wouldn't print it and that was a wise decision in retrospect!). I don't think I said anything inaccurate or dishonest...or I didn't think that at the time. At least on a TV interview like Connolly's show it is quite straightforward and grown-up and no one can dismiss you in a snidey aside about your living room wallpaper or your bookshelves or how you speak to your husband/wife/partner/cat. And no matter how cringemaking she can be, Connolly does at least seem to be fair to her interviewees (some might say too fair). I will be honest I am now probably much more likely to give Rushdie's books another go some time (to date I've never made it through any of them...not sure why...I never even tried 'The Satanic Verses'). If I do I will get them from the library though (or my Mum's bookcase - she is most definitely one of those readers who 'reads something once it has won the Booker'...or at least she used to be until some of the recent ruder ones - that Pierre bloke, for example, put her off well and truly).

For this week I am working my way through another Booker prize winner - Ben Okri's 'The Famished Road'. I'm about 100 pages in and not finding my feet in it yet...someone tell me it's worth the effort. I picked it up in the public library the other week...I do love to wander through a library and look at bookshelves (not just p.c.s!) and pick up books at random and think....'I've never read anything by him' and wander off with it into the sunset. I never much liked university libraries but no matter how many smelly people are sitting looking at the papers, no matter how loud some people are talking, no matter how limited the stock I still think that the public library is as close as I may get to heaven...in my lifetime.