Sometimes I get the feeling that the readers of good literature have died out, yet every now and then one of them appears — a survivor with a heroic face, someone who seems to have come through a kind of war, slapped around by those books written by little hands that skillfully copy other books, by tiny fingers that merely mimic the writing fever, by pencils worn down from erasures, or by laptops in which chat conversations blend with daily annoyances.
And this battered, stubborn reader is, for me, the emblem of the last two decades. The rest are passing nonsense.
This is more or less what I told Hoia in an interview published on Libris.ro. And he went on to ask:
“For readers who haven’t yet discovered you, what would you say to persuade them to read your books? How does Doina Ruști recommend Doina Ruști?”
What could one possibly answer to such a question? What would you say?
Here’s what I eventually wrote:
Writers can only be recommended by their writing. No story is overwhelming in itself — what matters is the way someone has written it. And to understand the true worth of a novel, you have to read it to the end. Only little worms can believe they’ve grasped a writer because they’ve read a single sentence from their work.
When I hear — and I hear it quite often — someone say about a novel that they “tried” to read it but “couldn’t,” I’m absolutely certain that the person never actually opened the book. Not that book — any book. I do not aspire to that kind of reading, and I don’t believe I need to recommend myself. I trust my writing and in the existence of that reader who is looking only for me.
*The full *interview on LIBRIS
