It's a testament to the popularity of American novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, who has written only three books in the past decade, that the ASB Theatre was packed at 10am yesterday for the last day of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.
Eugenides introduced himself by saying he'd seen the sign "Schindler's Lift" at his hotel, quipping he wasn't sure if he'd be safe getting in.
Hosted by Kate De Goldi, Eugenides was a smart, wry guest, much like his books (The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot).
He attended university in the 1980s when the teaching of literature was having a kind of civil war; his creative writing teacher hated narrative but Eugenides liked stories, sneaking them in like a "blackmarket".
Eugenides, of Greek origin, wrestled with spirituality when he was a young man and went to Calcutta to work for Mother Theresa, but "avoiding the hardest tasks". He didn't last long. An advocate of learning Latin ("it taught me English grammar") and Anna Karenina as the greatest book he has ever read, he could have told us much more, but De Goldi tended towards long statements instead of honing those more quickly into questions, while the Q&A was marred by a member of the audience trying to seek publicity for his own book.
