Inspiritations

So how did 'Goin’ To Dostoevsky’s' come about?

I was studying at an institute in Yaroslavl and, with a week’s holiday due, made the decision that I’d attempt the trip to the house I’d heard about in Staraya Russa where Dostoevsky had written all his late, great work. It was a kind of literary pilgrimage for me. My Russian teacher tried to put me off going, but I decided to give it a try anyway. And what a trip it was! Overnight train to St Petersburg and waking up to the first real snowfall of the year, searching out a hotel when technically I wasn’t allowed to stay there; getting on a bus to Novgorod… But, hey, I’m giving away the story. The journey to the house is to some degree allegorical. But, more to the point, concerning the true inspiration behind the book - despite having read all his work and most if not all the worthwhile biographies and critical essays, not until I walked along the cobblestones on the embankment where he would have walked did I actually feel I knew the man. Then I knew I could write about him.

Okay, the blurb on the rear cover compares the experience of reading the book with that of listening to music on MP3. Just how exactly does that work?

It’s a technical comparison. By dropping out certain unnecessary sounds MP3 enables the listener to access and store greater amounts of information. This analogy holds true with the book, only with regards to textual information. There are a lot of different stories in there. I’d go so far as to compare it with a CD burned with all your best tracks. What’s more, like random play, they can be put together in any order. My next book may be based on MP4. No, make that the book after next.

And the front cover picture...?

There aren't any library pictures that are any good. By the way, other photos from the trip are available on the website. They're pretty rare - especially in the west.

And the rear?

Yeah, that’s me, looking gorgeous.

Some people won’t have heard of the Russian writer.

Well, they need to find out. Because Dostoevsky was probably the most remarkable writer who ever lived. Not only did he reflect and refine the arguments raging at his own time, and live by the consequences of them, he honed them to such a degree that they have complete relevance even in our own time.

Goin' to Dostoevsky's Pics

‘On the Run’ was difficult to write because it brought up extremely painful memories concerning my sister, who drowned when she was still very young, just twelve, even though her family, including myself, were present on the beach. My mother was chatting to an aunt. My other sister was with her in the water. I was playing in the sand...

I'd been reading the likes of Koestler, Orwell and, especially, Camus, and wanted to focus on the way the world was traumatised in the twentieth century.

What I want to get across in this novel is how difficult – if not impossible – it is to come to terms with great trauma and grief, intimate and universal.

Can you intellectualise your way out of it – use some kind of philosophical or scientific system to mollify your feelings?

Can you try to just forget it?

Glyn Ridgley conceived and wrote the novel The Street School Of Music in Kensington Central Library while he was living on the street and working as a doorman in various clip joints. Here he explains how it all came about.

How The Street School Of Music came to be written

'After being kicked out of an East End squat by Tower Hamlets council I moved into a Bayswater B&B and from there walked every morning across Hyde Park to Kensington High Street, stopping off at McDonald's for a coffee take-out and sitting on the wall outside the Central library until it was open. Once inside I'd take out my A4 pad and get working, only stopping to answer occasional questions from a Chinese philosophy student who I was helping with his university dissertation. Part way through something completely different I suddenly had a vision for a novel in its entirety and spent the next ten minutes committing it to paper. Several drafts later and it had become The Street School Of Music.

In the background all the time I could hear Bod playing his guitar...'

glynridgley.com

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