Tell me about drawing up that limit to the novel and what it was like to explore the limits of that.Īustin Clarke: I thought that I would have some reason for her to have withdrawn so voluntarily. Ramona Koval: It's a fantastic sentence, and you have created this bubble, I suppose, this one woman's consciousness and four consecutive days in her life. But reading it now for you in Australia I think that I have come close to success in that respect. Ramona Koval: Oh you have, I'll let you know that now.Īustin Clarke: Thank you very much. And I cannot tell, because of my modesty, whether I have succeeded.

Ramona Koval: How long did it take you to write that sentence, because it's like a global sentence, and it describes everything really that we're going to think about in the book.Īustin Clarke: It was actually longer than it is now published, and I don't know whether I should thank my editor or not, but I felt that I could put in the first sentence everything that was going to happen in the book of 200-odd pages. What a sentence! What a triumph.Īustin Clarke: I deliberately thought I will be naughty and see whether I had written the longest sentence in the history of literature in Canada, if not the western world.Īustin Clarke: I haven't been challenged yet. Ramona Koval: Austin Clarke reading the first sentence, the one sentence from the beginning of his new novel More.

Ramona Koval: Can we begin by getting you to read the opening of your novel More?Īustin Clarke: I shall be delighted to do it. Austin Clarke joins us now from a CBC studio in Toronto.

We learn of her life her disappointing husband who has left her for a new life in New York, her son BJ who moves into the gang scene and takes on a new Muslim name, her friendship with a white woman, Josephine, and her reporting of life amongst the immigrants from the Caribbean and their coming up against the reality of multicultural life in Toronto.Īustin Clarke is a distinguished novelist and short story writer and memoirist, much awarded and recognised in Canada, winner of Canada's Giller Prize in 2002, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in 2003, a member of the Order of Canada. We stay with her in her mind, in her memories, with her reveries for four days and nights. In his new novel called More we meet Idora Morrison, a black immigrant from Barbados now living in a basement apartment in Toronto where she's collapsed. Ramona Koval: First this morning we're off to Toronto Canada to meet Austin Clarke.

More by Austin Clarke