DURHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2000

 

LINDA GRANT

Linda Grant has just been awarded the prestigious Orange Prize for her novel When I Lived In Modern Times.

She was born in Liverpool and read English at the University of York. She is a feature writer on the Guardian; her books include Sexing the Millennium, The Cast Iron Shore, which won the David Higham Award in 1996, and Remind Me Who I Am, Again, her award-winning account of her mother’s dementia. Linda Grant now lives in London.

When I Lived In Modern Times tells the story of Evelyn Sert who, as the novel opens, is standing on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. It’s April 1946 and armies of men and women are on the move across Europe, intent on coming home – if they have homes left to go to. A young hairdresser from Soho, Evelyn is soon to arrive in the glittering white Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv, where Jewish refugees and idealists from all over Europe are gathering to forge not only the new Jew but a modern consciousness on the edge of the Middle East. The old imperial British identity collapses in slow motion around her. The cafes teem with intellectuals, politicians, artists, Zionist gunmen and gangsters, intent on plotting the future and devouring pastries in a city where a babble of cultures and languages are meeting each other again for the first time in 2000 years.

For Evelyn, adept in disguise, it is a time when anything seems possible – the new self, new Jew, new woman all are feasible. But the fate of the modernist architecture of the city, all these dreams will turn out to be not quite what the pioneers and refugees had imagined.