"The Very Last Interview" by David Shields (NYRB, 2022) ISBN 978-1-68137-642-4
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
The Richard Diebenkorn painting Coffee (1956) on the cover of David Shields’s The Very Last Interview is the perfect visual for the book. The figure in the painting looks like Shields, as someone across the table confronts him as he sturs his coffee. I imagine numerous interviews with the author took place in cafes and restaurants, and this book focuses on the interviewer's world and its subject matter. The big difference here is that we only get the questions, not the answers. It’s a one-sided conversation that reveals the journalist, but the subject matter is David Shields.
As I read the book, I can imagine the author's answers to these questions, but then how I would answer them creeps into my consciousness. The book is broken into chapter headings such as “Childhood,” “Knowledge,” “Suicide,” and so forth. This book is based on interviews given to Shields over the years, but just the questions are exposed.
Until I read this book, I have heard of David Shields but never read any of his other books. The Very Last Interview is a structurally fascinating way to obtain knowledge of his writings and life. The questions are often banal, but some are thought-provocative regarding how an author comes to write a specific type of work. While reading the book, I come to the press conference with the great French Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle. Funny enough, in the film, he plays a writer who is confronted by banal questions from the press. Or one can go back to the press conference with Bob Dylan in 1965. The questions asked are usually more interesting than the answers because it exposes the mindset of the interviewer, or what is the common interest in that one’s publication, or the mainstream media itself. Banality reveals a culture.
The Very Last Interview is a funny read, but it also deals with serious issues of the placement of literature in the world and how one is perceived in that landscape.
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