Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
English novelist who won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for 'The Finkler Question'.
On the island
Eight records
Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen (from Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug)
Dame Janet Baker, Bath Festival Orchestra conducted by Yehudi Menuhin
It is one of the most exquisite pieces of music sung exquisitely. Crying is very important to me. I used to cry a lot, and I cry a lot now when I hear music and I use music for crying. The minute this begins I am I am gone.
Mario Lanza, who was my hero when I was a boy. I can't remember a time when I did not listen to Mario Lanza. I adored Mario Lanza, and I particularly liked him singing Neapolitan songs. And this again is for me heartbreak.
I mentioned my brother, and this is a record that my brother made. My brother belonged to a group called the Whirlwinds.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
I came across an LP of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong when I was a teenager and it was music to smooch to. And it was at the age when I was desperate to smooch.
Putting my mind to where all what you were sweet enough to call Schmaltz, and I was talking about heartbreak, comes from, it occurs to me that a lot of this actually grows out of Jewish cantorial music. ... And this is Rosenblatt, one of the great Jewish cantors singing about God's compassion.
Graziella Sciutti and Eberhard Wächter, Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini
Don Giovanni, L'Acci darem la mana. Here is this exquisite, exquisite love song in which you feel you're hearing people, you know, singing from their hearts.
Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898 (Second Movement)
Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals
Schubert, I adore Schubert. This is piano trio in B-flat major. It's a very important piece of music to me, A, because it's exquisite, and B, because it was a piece of music I listened to with a very dear Australian friend, Terry Collitz, who died last year.
You're a SweetheartFavourite
Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and his Band
This is to my wife, Jenny, and it was a... We got married five and a half years ago and we had a band playing at our wedding that had to play, I had to make sure before we had the band that they knew this and could play this in the right spirit.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:18How much did it matter to you to win [the Man Booker Prize]?
Well, it's huge because it's good how you feel about yourself. For a writer my age, it of necessity casts a light back on the other work, even though your other work's got nothing to do with it. So your other work comes alive again, and I somehow was able to decide it's a kind of reward for that too.
Presenter asks
6:03What is it about marriage that you need and like?
I need the company, obviously. I need the support. I think I need to be looked at with love to be certain I'm there. Maybe I need to see myself in the beloved's eyes to see a nicer version of myself than is either actually the case or than I fear might be the case.
Presenter asks
18:49Can it be true that as a little boy you were crippled by shyness?
Crippled by shyness, yes, and it went on until I was about 14 or 15. I needed to do this smooching to get me out of it because I'd hated being hated being shy. ... So I was really horrified by being shy, as well as being shy. And then I got rid of it and I thought, this is great. And then I went to Cambridge and it all came back. And I spent three years at Cambridge scarlet.
The keepsakes
The book
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Arthur Quiller-Couch
I have to have some poetry there and since, you know, I can't have a volume of Donne and a volume of Keats and a volume of Wordsworth, so that way I will get a little bit of all the ones.
The luxury
Crisp shirts and pleated trousers
What I actually want is shirts. I love shirts. I am a shirt person. I want to look I want to have pleated trousers and I want to have shirts which are kind of somehow or other miraculously ironed for me so that when the rescue party comes, which I hope will be very, very quickly, I'll be looking smart for you.
Presenter asks
25:11Was [the period when your first marriage broke down and you moved to Australia] a time of turmoil, a time of pain?
Yes, yes, huge turmoil turmoil. ... I was very bitter about it. I see photographs of myself at that period, and I can barely bear to look at them. Very unhappy, no good as a husband, bad as a father. I wasn't fit to be. I truly was not fit to be a husband or a father. I was too unfulfilled. I wasn't nice to my friends. I wasn't nice to my parents. I wasn't nice to my son. I wasn't nice to my then wife. I wasn't nice to anybody.
Presenter asks
29:28Are you a good father now?
Well, I get on very well with with my son and his wife, and he's had a child recently, Ziva. I'm a grandfather. I never thought I'd be able to cope with being a grandfather. ... I feel I was, you know, ripped untimely from the state of being a child. I've gone on being a child longer than I ought to have gone on being a child. And if you're going on being a child, it's very hard for you to be a father, let alone a husband.
“My sense of myself and certainly my sense my sense of myself as a writer has always been being on the outside, on the outside looking in, on the outside as a Jew looking into Gentile England, but also, you know, on the outside of Jewishness too. I've always felt myself to be on the outside of everything.”
“The balance between laughter and tragedy for me is really w you know what I'm about, taking laughter as close as I can to what's sad and then taking what's sorrowful as far as I can. But to keep them in balance is for me the great you know the great challenge of writing.”
“For all my misery, I must love the world a lot because I so dread leaving it.”