It is very difficult to be original don’t you think? Original thought is exceedingly rare. It is not surprising that everything in one way or another is derivative because we are all made up of our own set of life experiences and our encounters with others.
I was discussing this topic with a bookseller recently. I had asked him if he had read ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver and he had said no he hadn’t and he didn’t intend to. Couldn’t she come up with something original, was his comment. (The novel is based on Dickens’s David Copperfield. See my September Bookends.) I countered his views by saying that I had found it a very interesting device to take a basic storyline, transplant it and make it your own. When I was an A level English student I would have loved to have been set that sort of assignment.
A new author I have recently found, Pulitzer Prize winner American novelist Jane Smiley, has employed a similar conceit in her book: ‘A Thousand Acres.’ It takes the outline of Shakespeare’s King Lear and puts it down in rural Ohio, setting the narrative within an extended family on a large farm. Some of the writing is searing in its emotional intensity, shadowing the events in Shakespeare’s play. It makes for a powerful, consuming read.
I am quite happy with that. Maybe any focus on originality is overrated.