Читать книгу Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter von Tom Franklin. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial. - Tom Franklin, Patrick Neill Charles - Страница 8
Оглавление| 3. | ANALYSES AND INTERPRETATIONS |
| 3.1 | Origins and sources |
SUMMARY
Tom Franklin is widely considered to be a regional, and specifically Southern writer. All of his published work has been set in Mississippi or Alabama, and the region and his experiences there have shaped his work as a writer.
“To write a story, you have to get the details right. You have to convince a reader you know what you’re talking about.”[3]
(Tom Franklin)
Franklin’s personal background in the region and his familiarity with the life, landscape, history, people and feel of the South means that there are traces of his life and experience in his work. This is also true of Crooked Letter: for example, like Larry, he grew up with a father who ran a car repair workshop in a tiny rural community.
He mentions in interviews how much autobiographical detail has slipped into Crooked Letter: “the character of Silas "32" Jones is very loosely based on the sole police officer of the hamlet of Dickinson, Alabama, where I grew up”[4] and “I used a lot of autobiographical stuff for Larry, the mechanic”[5]. These autobiographical details include Larry’s reading habits – when asked in an interview who his favourite writers were and are, Franklin says, “I loved Stephen King and Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid”[6].
His roots in the South have shaped him as a writer:
“So, yes, the souths made me the writer I am. It taught me to listen to the cadences and rhythms of speech, and to notice the landscape. It also has this defeated feel, a lingering of old sin, that makes it sweet in a rotting kind of way. Much of it is poor, much is rural, and thats an interesting combination, a deep well for stories.”[7]
In the same interview, Franklin talks briefly about the origins of the novel: “Id been wanting to write about a small town police officer, and Id long had the image of a loner mechanic in my mind. When I put the two together, the story began to form.”
This comment reinforces the impression many readers of Crooked Letter have that this is primarily a character-driven novel, and, despite the plot, only secondarily a crime thriller.
