

There are sort of echoes, parodies of phrases from The Sun Also Rises that come up in St. Urbain’s Horseman, about another fellow named Jake. Pugsley: I was speaking to a professor the other day and he was talking about St. The man was a bit of a brute and a poseur, but he was a good writer. Richler: Oh sure, I think Hemingway’s stories are absolutely wonderful, a fresh way of using language. Pugsley: Would you still read those people now? Would you pick up The Sun Also Rises and look through it now? So those were the people I read as a kid. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.

Richler: Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. Pugsley: What I wanted to talk about were the writers you were attracted to when you were first thinking about becoming a writer. Pugsley: Congratulations on this super book. The interview appears here in full for the first time. Our talk occurred in the main dining room of the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto in the fall of 1989. What follows is a transcript of the interview between the very much alive Mordecai Richler and the very much unprepared, inexperienced, and bumbling me. After seeing my review of Solomon Gursky Was Here, Penguin Books called to ask if I wanted to interview Mordecai Richler when he came to Toronto on his press junket. When I was a student at University of Toronto, I wrote book reviews for the Varsity, one of the university newspapers.
