17 de outubro de 2013

Terry Pratchett: Take a protagonist from the bottom of the heap and they’ve got it all to play for (entrevista)

The Carpet People, o primeiro romance publicado por Terry Pratchett (em 1971 - tinha Pratchett 23 anos; o livro acabou por ser revisto e reeditado em 1982), vai ter uma nova edição hardcover em Novembro próximo. A propósito desse lançamento, e da publicação daquele que será o 40º livro da série Discworld, Raising Steam, Cory Doctorow (autor do best-seller internacional Little Brother) realizou uma curta mas muito interessante entrevista com o autor e satirista britânico para a Amazon UK. Alguns excertos:
Cory Doctorow: The Carpet People was your first novel, and now the fortieth book in your Discworld series is about to be published. Do you think you could have kept us in the Carpet for anything like forty books? 
Terry Pratchett: I was about to say, “No,” but right now I wonder. . . . If the idea had taken, I don’t know. I really don’t. But how would it be? People in the Carpet are more or less tribal. What would happen if I . . . You’ve got me thinking! 
(...) 
CD: One thing I’ve always enjoyed about your books with feudal settings is that it seems you get something like the correct ratio of vassals to lords. So much of fantasy seems very top-heavy. Do you consciously think about political and economic considerations when you’re devising a world?  
TP: I’ve never been at home with lords and ladies, kings, and rubbish like that, because it’s not so much fun. Take a protagonist from the bottom of the heap and they’ve got it all to play for. Whereas people in high places, all they can do is, well . . . I don’t know, actually: I’ve never been that high. If you have the underdog in front of you, that means you’re going to have fun, because what the underdog is going to want to do is be the upper dog or be no dog at all.  
CD: Damon Knight once told me that he thought that no matter how good a writer you are, you probably won’t have anything much to say until you’re about twenty-six (I was twenty at the time). You’ve written about collaborating with your younger self on the revised text of The Carpet People. Do you feel like seventeen-year-old Terry had much to say?  
TP: That’s the best question you’ve asked all day! I think that he had a go at it, and it wasn’t bad, but that when I was younger I didn’t have the anger. It gives an outlook. And a place from which to stand. When you get out of the teens, well out of the teens, you begin to have some kind of understanding: you’ve met so many people, heard so many things, all the bits that growing up means. And out of that lot comes wisdom—it might not be very good wisdom to start with, but it will be a certain kind of wisdom. It leads to better books.
A entrevista completa pode ser lida na Amazon UK.


Sem comentários: