ANITA SUSAN GROSSMAN
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all my might - having surrealistic dialogues with those embryonic
characters in the way of telling them to go away, to look for some
other writer.
My
Michael
is an interesting example of that.
It
is told,
as you know, from a woman's point of view, in the first person, an
undertaking which in sound mind I'd never take upon myself. Who
am I? - which is exactly what I told this lady when she kind of in–
vaded me. I said, "Go to a female writer. I can't possibly write your
story in the first person . What do I know?" And by God, she argued
bitterly, saying,
"If
this is the case, you can't write anybody's story.
You can't write about anybody who is older than you are; you can't
write about anybody who is less intelligent or more intelligent than
you are; you can't write about anybody but yourself." And she might
have a point there. Nonetheless, I resisted her for a fairly long time,
and it was only when I felt that either I write her story for her in first
person or else she'd never let me go that I wrote her in order to get
her out of my system. Now a character usually brings with him or
her a cast of other characters. They always come first; then setting,
plot, and so on.
ASG: My Michael,
which was made into an Israeli film in 1975, would
seem the least likely of all your books to be made into a movie, since
so much of it goes on inside the mind of the narrator.
AO:
That's exactly the way I felt about the project when Dan
Wolman first came to see me. I said to him, "Why not
Elsewhere,
Perhaps,
which is much more cinematic than
My Michael?"
He in–
sisted; he said, "So it is a challenge." After he told me what he had in
mind, I said, "You go ahead. I'm not going to be part of it. It's a dif–
ferent musical instrument, like playing a violin concerto on the
piano. Go ahead, and for God's sake don't try to force the piano to
sound like violin because that would be grotesque." He didn't, and I
believe the result is a decent, low-key, interesting film experiment.
ASG:
Would you say that
A Perfect Peace
was a political novel?
AO:
In the broadest sense, anything is political. It's not a novel
which conveys any specific message. It is political only in the sense
that life is political, that love is political. In away,
A Perfect Peace
is
also a novel about how a group of ecstatic revolutionaries and world
reformers gradually fade away, giving room - perhaps the right
English word is compassion.
ASG:
While Azariah is trying to get into the kibbutz, Yonatan is try–
ing to opt out of his society. In a way, the beginning of
A Perfect Peace
reminded me somewhat of Melville's tale of Bartleby the scrivener,
