Summary: The Interview

Key Points of the Story

• The writer explains the nature and importance of an interview, drawing on his decade-long experience as a reporter who conducted interviews with many celebrities.
• Many celebrities regard interviews as an unwelcome intrusion into their private lives, while the writer defends the interview as a valuable and reliable source of information.
• Some prominent writers and figures-such as V. S. Naipaul, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and Saul Bellow-expressed strong reservations about being interviewed.
• The chapter includes an extract of an interview with Umberto Eco by Mukund Padmanabhan originally published in The Hindu, which illustrates the interview's usefulness and gives insight into Eco's life, work and working methods.

Detailed Summary

The Interview - Part I

• The chapter discusses the pros and cons of interviews and their place in journalism.
• The writer notes that he has interviewed several thousand celebrities over the years and that interviews are widely read by literate people.
• Public opinion about interviews is divided: while many readers treat interviews as a reliable source of truth, many interviewees think of them as an unwarranted intrusion.
• V. S. Naipaul believed that interviews can wound a person and cause them to lose part of themselves.
• Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, refused interviews and had what has been described as a "just horror of the interviewer".
• Rudyard Kipling shared a hostile view of interviewers; his wife, Caroline, recorded in her diary for 14 October 1892 that their day was ruined by two reporters from Boston.
• Some authors went as far as to call interviews a form of crime or assault; others felt that interviews diminished them.
• Saul Bellow, though he sometimes gave interviews, once compared interviews to "thumbprints on his windpipe," showing how stifling he found them.
• Despite such objections, the writer argues that interviews are an extremely serviceable medium of communication.
• Interviews give readers vivid impressions of contemporary figures, often revealing character, habits of mind and opinion in a way few other forms of writing can.

The Interview - Part II 

• This section is an extract from an interview with Umberto Eco, conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan and published in The Hindu.
• Umberto Eco was a professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, and a scholar of semiotics, literary function, academic prose and mass-media texts.
• The interviewer asked Eco about his apparent ability to manage a wide range of intellectual activities simultaneously; Eco explained that he had learnt to use the interstices-the small empty spaces of time-in his life productively.
• Eco said he could use every single moment of his day and that he had developed methods of organising his time to allow for both scholarly work and creative writing.
• He had perfected the art of writing in a narrative style relatively late: he began to write novels in earnest at about the age of fifty.
• Eco became, somewhat accidentally, a novelist after being known mainly as an essayist and academic; he always considered himself essentially an academician and reserved particular days-Sundays-for writing fiction.
• The interviewer questioned Eco about the serious themes in his novel The Name of the Rose, a work that sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and combined a detective plot with deeper examinations of theology, metaphysics and medieval history.
• Eco expressed no amazement at the category of readers who enjoyed his novel and admitted he was not entirely sure why it achieved such remarkable commercial and critical success; he regarded that success as a mystery.

Conclusion

To conclude, the chapter shows that people react differently to interviews: some regard them as intrusive and harmful, while others accept them as a necessary and informative part of public life. Using the example of Umberto Eco, the chapter also demonstrates how interviews can reveal useful biographical and intellectual detail, helping readers understand how a writer organises time, balances scholarship and fiction, and perceives the unexpected success of a work.

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 an event
• Seminal - very important and influential
• Metaphysics - the branch of Philosophy that deals with the nature of existence, truth, and knowledge
• Delves - probes, searches