Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon had a discussion about fiction and non-fiction and it was fascinating. One line he used that I really liked was "Everything we remember about our lives is fiction". This was in a context of how "memoir" has more credibility that it should. Chabon recounted how his children have very different memories of events than he has. Zadie mentioned she had a brother who is a stand-up comic who has versions that the rest of the family wonders where they come from.
Ah...just noticed that I used the last name for the man and the first name for the woman. Hmm.
I was blown away by Zadie's "White Teeth"which she began writing when she was 20 and published to great accolades when she was 24. I gave a few of her later novels a try but didn't stick with them. Seeing this discussion has motivated me to pick up the most recent works that I haven't looked at. Funny how she made a comment that, "Well, I could do that (referring to writing from the perspective of people very different from her and who she knew very little about) at 20 but I don't have that kind of confidence anymore at my current age."
I haven't read anything by Chabon but this looks like a good read. It came about because he came across one of these foreign phrase books that was on Yiddish. It had the usual categories like "At the train station". He found it rather fascinating as it was written and published after the creation of Israel which chose Hebrew as a language rather than Yiddish so there isn't really a country where Yiddish is a language.
"At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written."
