15+ questions for Willem Anker

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15+ questions for Willem Anker

Everything you want to know about the author of Siegfried, Skepsel and Buys the latter's English translation by Michiel Heyns, Red Dog, made the Booker longlist.

1. Describe yourself in a hashtag?

#voordittelaatis

2. What's on your bedside table?

Anne Carson's Decreation for which I don't find time to read, glasses that I never wear, a half-drunk cup of coffee, a flat headlamp, a blunt Leatherman and my ID from 1996.

3. What do you listen to in your car?

Radiohead works well on the long road, Rammstein in traffic.

4. Are you an esthete?

I like beautiful things, even things that are so ugly that they're beautiful.


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5. What kind of a child were you?

Shy and sometimes naughty.

6. What did you do as a child that made the hours feel like minutes?

I played by the little river near our house on the edge of Wellington.

7. What would you ask for if you knew the answer would be yes?

World peace? I'm just kidding.

8. Have you ever asked for someone's autograph?

Nope, but during initiation at boarding school, my dad had a book signed for me by Terry Pratchett in Tyger Valley Mall.

9. What do you think will happen to you when you die?

My molecules will become something more interesting.

10. Your favourite smell?

Smells that reawaken moments from the past.

11. Your earliest experience?

I wish I could remember how oom Petrus, the gardener at Citrusdal, apparently made a pipe from the cork tree for me as a two-year-old, with which I sat and “smoked" with him. The first image I do remember is my baby sister's diapers blowing in the wind on the clothesline.

12. Favourite period in history? And why?

When the earth was still formless and empty. When everything was still possible.

13. What series do you watch?

I'm not sure, I fall asleep very quickly in front of the TV.

14. Your favourite action movie?

Die Hard 1.

15. Your favourite dictator?

Caligula, if it were true, which unfortunately it is not, that he made his horse consul of Rome. So unfortunately not him. Second choice, Kim Jong-un of North Korea. According to CNN, he apparently sends bags full of garbage with large balloons across the border which then land in South Korea's neighbourhoods. His foreign policy at least is funny.

16. Your favourite god? 

Dionysos, the god of winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, ritual frenzy and theatre. A good list of things to watch out for.

17. Your favourite table at a church bazaar?

Definitely the pudding table.

18. If you could choose a fictional character in any novel, who would you want to be?

Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

19. Who will win a fight between Samuel Beckett and Nietzsche and why?

Beckett will take the blows (“… Fail better”) and Nietzsche will continue to attack exuberantly until both are lying on the floor, exhausted and laughing.

20. What book do you wish you had written?

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje.

21. Are you superstitious?

No.

22. What do you find sexy?

Irony.

23. Describe your style?

I'm not very stylish.

24. What else do you still want to do?

Travel through Iceland.

25. Anything you regret that you didn't do? 

That I never learned to swim properly.

26. If you could invite three people to dinner, living or deceased, who would they be?

Tom Waits, David Lynch and the first Homo sapiens.

27. One book you would recommend to everyone to read?

Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee.

28. Your favourite Christmas song?

None of them. Especially not when they play in Checkers.

29. What are you looking forward to?

Time.

♦ VWB ♦


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