Author: J. Maarten Troost
Quotes of Author: J. Maarten Troost
Seriously. There were three of them, all roughly in their thirties, and they spent their time traveling the world, putting together documentaries about the earth's wonders. The on-screen talent, I learned, did indeed write his own scripts, and came off as the Boss Man for the trio. He was the one with all the responsibilities-deciding on shots, dealing with the Home Office, periodically having to shave, etc. The camera guy did all the heavy lifting and was always one hernia or one dropped camera away from ruin. And the sound guy? He just stands there holding a lightweight microphone and a headset. Then ka-ching, paycheck, and he trots off to the Andes. It sounded ideal to me, a lazy traveler's ideal profession. No thinking. No lifting of heavy objects. Just keep the mike out of the camera's view and know what a woofer is. Easy-peasy. Then they asked me what I did. book-quoteI too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost . . . I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book. To get in the right state of mind, I read big books-Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Ulysses by James Joyce {okay, I skimmed parts of that one}. I read King Lear. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating. And book-quote
