Review
Original Minds: Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel
HarperCollins, 433 pp.
"There is another explanation I sometimes give in interviews, because in interviews you have to invent answers."
– Umberto Eco, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel
In our era of the ubiquitous celebrity interview, Eleanor Wachtel’s mellow voice is a weekly respite for CBC listeners. Since 1990, she has interviewed authors on Writers & Company, heard just after the Sunday 5 p.m. news. With the luxury of 55 minutes per interview, Wachtel is thorough with her reading and research, but perhaps more importantly, she listens and counter-questions with a natural curiosity. Wachtel wants to know more.
Original Minds is Wachtel’s third collection of interviews, but the first focusing almost exclusively on the non-fiction writer. This is an anthology of big ideas: Jane Jacobs and Amartya Sen on economics and development; Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem on feminism and intellectualism; Bernardo Bertolucci and Jonathon Miller on film and theatre; Desmond Tutu and Noam Chomsky on apartheid and oppression; and Arthur C. Clarke and Harold Bloom on our human future and past.
The structure of each interview becomes transparent on the page where Wachtel acts as a biographer. She asks her subjects about their childhood, parents and earliest memories. But to appreciate Wachtel’s craft, you also need to listen to her on the radio. Carol Shields says of her voice: "There is no artifice. It’s direct and real." Wachtel actually listens, and she isn’t afraid to pause and think, allowing shifts in thought to occur.
The transcribed interview also allows the reader time to respond. I clearly remember the moment in Wachtel’s on-air conversation with George Steiner, when he said, "The notion that we should have roots fills me with absolute irony and even derision. Trees have roots and that’s why lightning cuts them down; I have legs and that’s why I can move and survive." On the page in Original Minds, I better understand Steiner and how his father prepared their family to outrun and survive Hitler. Wachtel’s expertise is in finding and documenting these moments.
|
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.