Penny Busetto
Penny Busetto is a South African writer known for her 2014 novel The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself. The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself was awarded the 2013 European Union Literary Award as well as the 2014 University of Johannesburg Debut Prize, and in 2016 was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Quotes
[edit]- I don’t believe that the internal cohesion of The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself came about because of the time it took me to write it but rather because of the way I wrote it. What I was trying to follow and express was a feeling rather than an idea, and I would know quickly when it felt wrong. When it was going well I would feel my breath grow deep and regular, and Anna’s voice would emerge slow and painful. It was never very important what she was saying; what was important was the underlying feelings of loss and grief and their slow transformation into a kind of tenuous hope.
- J.M. Coetzee states that all writing is autobiographical, and I agree with him to some extent. I can’t get outside of my own experiential world and so whatever I write will have the colours and flavours and smells of my inner world. But that doesn’t mean that my book is autobiographical in a straightforward or simplistic way. I have never visited the island where Anna P lives and most of the events of her life are fictional, but they interplay freely with small details from my life. For example, her walks on the island are descriptions of my own walks on Table Mountain. Her meeting with Ispettore Lupo is drawn from a frightening encounter I had many years ago with a policeman in Milan called Guardia Lupo. But unlike Anna P, I did not kill the real-life Guardia Lupo.
- Memory is a very unreliable record of the past. It shifts and moves and will not stay still. Particularly when there have been traumatic events in our lives, we push the memories of the events and anything associated with them out of consciousness and are left with holes in the meanings of our actions.
