Nathan Filer by Phil Bambridge
Extract from BookBrunch – 26th March 2012
“Like a sizeable number of publishers, my last week or so has been coloured by the arrival of an extremely impressive novel by a young British writer called Nathan Filer. Canongate was one of many publishers to be swept away by the voice and the tenderness of Nathan’s book. Whoever ends up publishing Where the Moon Isn’t (11 publishers bid on it and I still desperately hope we might land it), is going to be launching the career of a wonderful talent. Hats off to Sophie Lambert at Tibor Jones for her brilliant agenting.
During our meeting, and triggered by a part of the conversation, where we got talking about how storytelling is partly what both creates and blurs our sense of memory and time, Nathan opened up a little black note book and took out this piece of scrap paper that had been folded into a small square and passed it over to me and said read this:
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
This short passage from William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, really knocked me out and was so attuned to what we had been talking about, and to Nathan’s novel. Perhaps the latter is not a surprise as he said that this passage had a huge influence on the book and was part of what he wanted to explore in Where the Moon Isn’t. I love the fact that he shared this in the way that he did.”
Read the entire article here