The Interview Class 12 English Flamingo

Key Points of the Story 

• The writer reveals the basic facts and importance of an interview as he himself was a reporter for a private eye for ten years and during his career, he interviewed a lot of celebrities and found both negative and positive opinions about an interview. 
• He experienced that most of the celebrities found interview an unnecessary intrusion in their lives. 
• But the writer opines that interviewing is a very important and reliable source of information.

Detailed Summary

The Interview Summary Part – I

• In this chapter, the writer discusses the pros and cons of the interview.
• It is an important part of journalism.
• Several thousand celebrities have been interviewed over the years.
• Today, every literate person will have read an interview at some point in their lives.
• Some people consider 'interview' a reliable source of truth whereas most of the celebrities see it as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives.
• V.S. Naipul feels that some people are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves.
• Lewis Carroll, the creator of 'Alice in Wonderland' never consented to be interviewed and had 'a just horror of the interviewer'.
• Rudyard Kipling had a condemnatory attitude towards the interviewer.
• His wife 'Caroline' writes in her diary for 14 October 1892 that their day was wrecked by two reporters from Boston.
• Even they considered interview as a crime and assault.
• Some of them feel that it diminishes them.
• Saul Bellow, though consented to be interviewed on several occasions, once described interviews as being like thumbprints on his windpipe.
• Despite all these drawbacks, the interview is a supremely serviceable medium of communication.
• We get the most vivid impressions of our contemporaries through interviews.

The Interview Summary Part – II

• It is an extract of an interview of Umberto Eco, taken by ‘Mukund Padmanabhan’ from ‘The Hindu’.
• Umberto Eco was a professor at the University of Bologna in Italy.
• He had expertise in Semiotics (the study of signs), literary functions, academic texts, newspaper articles, and many others.
• Mukund interviewed about Umberto’s versatility of managing too many things.
• Umberto revealed the mystery and answered that he had discovered the way to use the empty spaces in his life.
• He could use every single moment of his time.
• He had perfected the art of writing in a narrative style but applied it at about the age of fifty.
• Accidentally he became a novelist after moving from an essayist.
• He was more interested in academics rather than the novels, so always considered himself as an academician and denoted only Sundays for writing novels.
• Mukund also questioned the serious theme of his novel ‘The Name of the Rose’ that was widely appreciated and more than 10 million copies of this novel were sold all over the world.
• It contained a detective surface but delved into theology, metaphysics, and medieval history.
• He had no point of amazement about the category of the readers.
• He was never sure about its remarkable success.
• He assumed its huge success as a mystery that couldn’t be unfolded.

Conclusion 

Difficult Words

• Despise - hate
• Intrusion - entry without invitation
• Unwarranted - not authorized
• Repel - to drive back
• Condemnatory - expressing very strong disapproval
• Vile - mean, wicked
• Assault - a hostile attack
• Unprecedented - that has never happened or been known before.
• Semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and of their meaning and use.
• Ethical - relating to morals
• Interstices - a small crack or space
• Dissertation - a long piece of writing on a particular subject.
• Narrative - a description of event
• Seminal - very important and influential
• Metaphysics - the branch of Philosophy that deals with the nature of existence, truth, and knowledge
• Delves - probes, searches