Springtime in Paris

It was love at first sight for me and The Paris Review Interviews Volume 1 published by Canongate, one of those books that just told me it was going to be good and I was right.
So how did I know?
Great reviews?
Freebie copy?
Don't be daft, it's that cover for a start.The yellow that announces fin-de-siecle- Paris- Rive- Gauche- Deux- Maggots-Jean- Paul-Simone- de- Beauvoir and for which I am a complete push over.
Having moved past my love of the feel and weight of the book with its rough cut,deckle-edged pages I then actually hadn't got a clue what to expect.
With an introduction by Philip Gourevitch this is a compilation of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews in the Paris Review over the years which "have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life"
What has unexpectedly happened is that reading the interviews has led me back into some writers who may otherwise never have had my full attention.
You can hear them talking, strong voices all, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, T.S.Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut and you can almost see George Plimpton, who landed the Ernest Hemingway slot, suffering death by a thousand cuts under Hemingway's withering and ascerbic replies.There's a point when Hemingway is clearly getting bored and retreats into brief one line answers. Plimpton plods on and must have heaved a sigh when after about a dozen of these he suddenly stumps up a question that jolts Ernest into action and a page later he's still going strong with his reply.
I haven't read a great deal of Hemingway but he makes such interesting claims for his writing that now I want to take a closer look.
I've also ordered some Jorge Luis Borges because he sounds so unassuming and modest.I was in the bookshop the other day and a very elderly gentleman was ordering Borges books and talking very effusively about him, I want some of that.
The one I might not order any more of for now is Saul Bellow.
His interview with Gordon Lloyd Harper was definitely not "off the cuff" and it showed. He insisted on typescripts of remarks after each session which he then corrected and rewrote answers ready for the next taping session when the interview would start all over again, it all took weeks back in 1965 and presumably an old reel to reel tape recorder.
Gordon must have needed a holiday after sorting it all out.
I most certainly needed a long holiday after struggling through Herzog, diligently first word to last and everything in between with copious marginalia for a reading group years ago, only to discover that I was the only one to have got past page 10.
That was a month of my life I'll never get back.