Jasper Fforde!

I'm sure most of you are wondering who Jasper Fforde is and why I am about to dedicate an entire blog post to him, but you are about to find out. He is a British author who has written a number of books that I absolutely love and I got to hear him talk at a nearby bookstore tonight and I am now as crazily hyper and ecstatic as Lauren and Maggie were upon seeing Henry Cavill. When I read his books, I took the dry wit and the brilliance and speculated that this was what the author was actually like, and thank goodness I was right. He was really funny, witty, and charismatic and therefore even better than I had imagined.

So, first, the books of Jasper Fforde. The first book I read by him was called The Eyre Affair which was about a woman, called Thursday Next, who lived in a kind of parallel Britain where the Crimean War has been going for over 150 years, the country is essentially run by the Goliath Corporation, and literature, especially Shakespeare, is a HUGE part of society. Thursday is a veteran who now works as a literary detective, which essentially involves determining the legitimacy of pieces of writing claimed to be written by someone famous. However, her job gets much more exciting when a very clever and incredibly evil villain goes inside Jane Eyre and kidnaps her and threatens to kill her. So, Thursday must go inside the book in order to solve the mystery. Do you see why I love this? It is an amazing combination of literary and science fiction which seem like two completely different types of people, but markets to me perfectly. I would say that it leans more on the literary in that Jane Eyre and Shakespeare are not the only literary characters who pop up and the further into the series (oh yes, there are currently five books in the Thursday Next series), the characters become more obscure, the sciencey stuff gets more complicated, and we are taken completely into the world of fiction (which has its own police force called Jurisfiction). Also, if you like word puns or funny names, these books are also for you. For example, Thursday's boss is named Braxton Hicks.

Tonight, Mr. Fforde was talking about his new book, Shades of Gray, which is not like anything he has written before. He commented on how all his other books use characters that other people have created so he felt that he's been cheating a bit when he writes these books because 30% of the work is done by the reader who has to identify the character and connect with this book and situation to find out the joke. This time he wanted to write a real novel in a world completely his own with characters completely his own. This book takes place in a post-apocalitic world 600 years in the future where a localized crazy-strict government (think British small town version of Big Brother) has commodified color. Everything is gray except for the colors you are allowed to see based on your class, with red being the lowest class and purple being the highest. Needless to say, he has gone more science fictiony, and I'm not sure yet if I'll read this book. But listening to him talk was so cool.

He took questions after he has talked about his new book and many of them were about the Thursday Next series that I adore. One was about a possible movie, which Mr. Fforde said wouldn't happen. He said, and I completely agree, that the books are about reading and writing and it wouldn't make sense to make it into the movie. He also said there was too much going on to be able to condense into a 90 minute movie...although that usually doesn't stop them. The only way he would sell the rights for a movie, he said, was if he decided he needed a new kitchen and needed money to do so. Another question was about who would play him if a movie were made about his life. He said Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep as she's "quite good." But my favorite question was by a very British woman, and since I am in London, pretty much everyone there was British, who asked if American audiences understood the Thursday Next novels as they take place in Britain and therefore have many British references. I found this a very funny question and probably should have raised my hand to respond, but Mr. Fforde replied that his books are actually just as popular in America as they are here, which surprised him.

I'm sorry if I am being boring you, but this was one of the best nights of my life. It was so cool to hear him and then to briefly talk with him as he signed my book. His first comment to me was if I knew there was a river named after me, which I said I did as well as an airport (they are in Ireland for those of you who don't know what I am talking about.) But the best part was I asked him how he liked his U.S. book tour, from which he was just returning. He said he liked it very much and asked me where I was from because obviously I sound American and he said that he didn't get to Minneapolis this time, but that they have it on the list in the future. So hopefully Iill get to see him again!

So in conclusion, I'm so glad I found out about it, which was completely by accident. For any of you who have not read his books, you should! If you like literature, read The Eyre Affair. He also has a Nursery Crime series featuring Detective Jack Spratt which are also very good. Or try his new book. He has an amazing imagination and some crazy things pop up in his books. He admitted that he doesn't know how most of his ideas end up in the books, but somehow they do. I thought he was very honest about his writing process in that a lot of times, he leaves an open end in an earlier book that he knows that he can somehow connect back to in a later book but has no idea how until three books later when he manages to work it in. Anyway, I promise I'll stop gushing on and on now and leave you with my favorite quote from the last book I read by him, called Something Rotten. Yes, it features Hamlet and this quote is by him about the real world to which Thursday has brought him:

Hamlet: "If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Over-long, detailed to the point of distraction - and ultimately without a major resolution."
Thursday: "Perhaps that's exactly what we like about it."