An interesting interview

with Ahdaf Soueif at Guardian Unlimited Books. A small taste: "It is quite interesting how people can be sympathetic to a character in a novel and indifferent to people in life. I think I have always looked at life as though it were a novel. As to how I would have felt or what I would have been writing if I weren't writing in English, I'm sure my subject matter would have been quite different. The core, the heart would have been the same, but things would be seen from a different angle. I might not, for example, have been so concerned with how the west perceives the Arab world." There's lots more good stuff there about the current situation and other matters. I have loved the novels of hers that I've read: The Map of Love was wonderful, and In the Eye of the Sun one of the best novels I have read in the last four or five years (very nineteenth-century in its conception; Hollinghurst: James :: Soueif: George Eliot).