THE PRINCE OF PROSE: WILL SELF The author opens up about his Man Booker-longlisted novel, Umbrella Ed Wood: Do you feel that, as in books like Umbrella, exposing the absurdity of life is something that the novelist is uniquely able to do? Will Self: Some of my novels undoubtedly do target absurdities – usually of human social forms, rather than life per se – but Umbrella is not one of them. I think it’s a broadly ‘life-enhancing’ novel inasmuch as it attempts to give form to the felt experience of living, rather than filtering it through the mannerism of so-called naturalism. EW: Which book or books changed what you thought was possible in a novel? WS: Joyce’s Ulysses, L.F. Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Borges’ Labyrinths, Dostoevski’s The Idiot, J.G. Ballard’s Crash and so on … MORE > at We Love This Book