What Writers Must Do: 'Love People'
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
In nine acclaimed but varied novels, Rupert Thomson never tries the same thing twice. He has written historical fiction, surreal political allegories, character-driven novels with classic unreliable narrators (like The Insult, which features a blind man who believes he isn’t blind.) The Book of Revelation, which takes off from a central harrowing incident of torture and humiliation, explores the aftermath of trauma. In Soft!, a sleep experiment turns people into unwitting shills for the soda industry—it’s cutting satire that anticipates the world of “Sponsored Tweets” and big-data marketing.
"People have always tried to put me in a box,” Thomson recently told The Guardian, “but I think in the end, I just don't fit.” In our conversation for this series, Thomson explored the reasons why he’s always pushing himself towards new terrain. Early on, he located his mission statement in a poem that urges us to go beyond the familiar, celebrating the restlessness that has characterized Thomson’s life and art.
His most recent book, a historical novel called , is another departure: Set in 1691, its fictionalizes the life of , a medical wax sculptor famous in his day for his eerily precise anatomical models of plague victims. In the novel, the sculptor meets an enigmatic woman while he wrestles with a secret commission—Sicily’s Grand Duke wants him to build a life-sized, “perfect” woman out of wax—and at the same time guards his own dangerous secret. Rupert Thomson spoke to me at the offices of his publisher, Other Press.