What I'm reading

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 11, 2009

Michelle Wilding

Louis Nowra, novelist, playwright and screenwriterLouis Nowra often rereads books. "Sometimes you want to find out extra layers in the book and other times when you reread the book it's actually not as good as you first thought," he says. "I recently reread Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and on the second reading it was quite dreadful."Nowra is reading Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn."It's one of the best works of fiction from the 1990s," he says. "It's a trilogy of short novels and based around the character of Patrick Melrose. It's about a traumatic childhood, drug-addicted adulthood and finding some sort of sense of finding life again."Recently, Nowra got his hands on an advance copy of Fungi And Environment Change edited by Geoffrey M. Gadd, Juliet C. Frankland and Naresh Magan. "It's my hobby to study ecology," he says. "It's very interesting because fungi can reveal changes in the environment that high forms of plant can't."Nowra's favourite book is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - the first novel he read to the end. "I had a very bad brain injury when I was young and I never completed a novel until I was 17 and that was it." Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time was another novel that moved him. "I guess because both made me realise great writing is based on exquisite prose. You cannot have a great novel that is badly written," he says.Nowra also names Nathanael West, Philip Nicholas Furbank, William Faulkner and Heinrich von Kleist as authors he admires. "They all have a very distinctive prose style and every word they put down counts," he says.Nowra reads in the late afternoon when he finishes his own writing. "I read every day but I can't read before bed. It excites me too much and I can't sleep."Ice by Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin, $32.95) was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award.

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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