Curious incident new york
Fifteen-year old Christopher knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings, and when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered with a garden fork, he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down. See all episodes from World Book Club. Young narrators casting a weary eye over the troubling world around them.
The world's great authors discuss their best-known novel. Main content. Listen now. Show more. Jun 08, AM. Thank you Mark Haddon!!!!!!!!!!!! A friend with an autistic child recommended it. After reading it I have encountered several children with Asperger"s Syndrome. I have always been intrigued with the brain and the way people behave.
I look forward to reading your other books soon. Jun 11, AM. I found this interview most insightful, as soon i shall be studying Mark Haddon's novel "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" for a'level english examinations. Very interesting and most facinating. I loved Mark's comment on creating characters. As a writer myself, I agree that men, women, teens, and kids have a lot more in common than we realize.
Think how you would react to a situation, and you can't go far wrong. Instead, she started screaming again. I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up, with my forehead pressed onto the grass. The grass was wet and cold. It was nice. I suppose you'd call it high-function autism in that he can function on, you know, a day-to-day basis, in a kind of rudimentary way.
But he has a serious difficulty with life in that he really doesn't empathize with other human beings.
Mark haddon interview curious incident book summary
He can't read their faces. He can't put himself in their shoes. HADDON: Because I don't want him to be labeled, and because, as with most people who have a disability, I don't think it's necessarily the most important thing about him. He's obsessed with mathematics. That's one of the little hobbies he has. It's one of the ways he manages to pattern and organize his daily life and keep chaos at bay.
And as a good friend of mine said after reading the book, a friend who is himself a mathematician, it's not a novel about a boy who has Asperger's syndrome; it's a novel about a young mathematician who has some strange behavioral problems. And I think that's right. GROSS: Because he sees the world in a very literal way and hears conversation in a very literal way, he doesn't understand jokes.
He doesn't get irony. He doesn't understand human emotions. He has no real empathy for other people. What are the things that really scare him because they're so incomprehensible? HADDON: Because he can't put himself in other people's shoes, he doesn't really understand what other people are going to do, and other people are therefore extremely unpredictable.
He likes his life to be safe and ordered. He's never gone farther than the end of his own road without someone to keep him company, so his life is very small and circumscribed. And it's things that threaten to wreck that pattern, it's change and difference and chaos which really terrify him. Did you do a lot of research?
I gave him kind of nine or 10 rules that he would live his life by, and then I didn't read any more about Asperger's because I think there is no typical person who has Asperger's syndrome, and they're as large and diverse a group of people as any other group in society.
Curious incident pdf
And the important thing is that I did a lot of imagining, that I did a lot of putting myself into his shoes in trying to make him come alive as a human being rather than getting him right, whatever that might mean. GROSS: You know, that's an interesting exercise for you because what you were doing is putting yourself through the exercise of having empathy for a boy who, because of his problems, can't empathize with other people.
On the surface it's a very, very simple book, partly because his voice is a very, very, very simple voice. And yet you're right. It needs a lot of empathy to write a character who has no empathy. Another paradox is that he says he can't tell lies; he needs to tell the truth all the time.
Curious incident play: Author Mark Haddon on the origins behind his smash hit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I’ve always regretted that the phrase ‘Asperger Syndrome’ appeared on the cover of Curious Incident when it was first published.
And he always tries to do this, and yet somehow he always gets things wrong. You've got that wrong. He's a very unreliable narrator. And perhaps for me the biggest paradox of all is that you'd think someone like Christopher, who can't empathize, who can't understand anything more than literal meaning, who can't see the bigger picture, would be a really bad narrator for a novel, and yet it's a wonderful, wonderful voice to write a novel in because it helps you avoid the pitfalls that so many novels fall into.
He never explains anything. He never tries to make up the reader's mind one way or the other about anything because he has no real idea of there being a reader out there. Now your main character, who is autistic, doesn't read novels.
Although he's the narrator in your novel, he has a great deal of difficulty comprehending fiction. And there's a short excerpt I'd like you to read about that. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, "I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.
What does this mean?
Mark haddon interview curious incident book pdf full
I do not know. Is this something that you made up to sound as obtuse as he finds metaphors as being? That's really terrible. That's totally incomprehensible and terrible, but that's your idea of how all fiction reads to him. GROSS: One of the things you had to imagine is what it would be like for Christopher to, for the first time, get on a subway by himself and go to London, where he's never been, to find his mother.
So he's coming from, like, a suburb of London to London, and it's like "The Odyssey" for him. So maybe you could just describe how you imagined, for instance, the subway, you know, the train looking from his point of view. HADDON: As we all know when we visit a strange city, particularly in a foreign country, you're bombarded with information and noise and sights and sounds in these places.
And for someone like Christopher, who sees everything around him and attempts to understand it all, it's completely overwhelming. Although I have to say that strange as Christopher is, this experience isn't so alien. I think one of the reasons when we read about it that we understand it is because it's an extreme version of something we've all experienced at some time or other in our lives.
I don't know whether we've said yet, but the book is peppered with little maths questions and maths puzzles and diagrams because he is very good at maths and obsessed with maths, and he uses it as a way of blocking out the world sometimes in the way that many of us use crosswords or other kinds of puzzles. And that's pretty much like myself.
I very nearly did mathematics at university. And even now, after I've had a month or two of novel writing, I get a yearning for numbers again and go back to working on maths for a week or so. So all the maths in the book came straight out of my head, and that is the part of Christopher that is unadulteratedly me. GROSS: That's funny 'cause I thought you were going to say that you often felt so confused by the world and by people's emotions and their response to you in the same way, or in a different way, than he does.
But that's not it, huh? I really love interacting with other people, and in that sense I'm very, very different from Christopher. But this is one of the ironies about Christopher.
Mark haddon interview curious incident book
If we talk about Christopher as a whole--everyone talks about Asperger's syndrome and autism and talks about him as a kid with a disability, and yet every single little oddity of his behavior I have taken from someone that I know who doesn't have that label, who is not called a disabled person, who's not labeled with Asperger's or autism.
You know, he has a little habit for determining whether a day is going to be an unlucky day or a lucky day. You know, I know someone who does that. He has a habit of disliking foods that are yellow or brown. I know someone else who's like that. And someone else who can't eat foods if different food types are actually touching on their plate.
And all of these people are, you know, quote, "normal," unquotes, people. But it's only when we put these things together that I find I've got a portrait of a person that we call disabled. HADDON: I know a few of those people, and I certainly know a few people--and to be honest, most of these people tend to be either scientific or academic people, people who can't really do conversation with others, people who find it very hard to listen to what the other person is saying to them, because they're so worried about what they're going to say next that they're concentrating on that.
We'll talk more after a break. After university, I spent a few years working with both children and adults with a variety of physical and mental handicaps. HADDON: The irony is that even at the time, autism was a fairly kind of loose and conjectural diagnosis, and it's only now looking back that I realize that some of those people were autistic.
Although I have to say all of them were much more severely disabled than Christopher is. My first job when I left university was to work as a live-in volunteer with a young man who was crippled with multiple sclerosis, and he needed constant, constant attention. And two of us lived in his house and did 24 hours on, 24 hours off looking after him.
And from there, I moved down to London and did a series of part-time jobs helping with kids and adults, both in training centers and at home in their families. HADDON: What got me into that work was spending three years at Oxford University and feeling that I'd kind of eaten too much birthday cake and I needed some kind of compensation to set myself right again.
I'd had three years of, you know, hard work, but in a fairly luxurious setting in which, you know, if you're a student at a prestigious university, you're kind of the center of attention there and you think you're pretty important. It was really nice to go out there and do what I thought of at the time as a proper job in which I was helping other people for a change.
And I really felt it restored some kind of inner balance to my life. GROSS: I'm thinking that you might have learned a lot of things about yourself by working with people with disabilities, because since some of those disabilities were cognitive, you might have had to change things about yourself in order to communicate to them in a non-threatening way.
I mean, the nice thing about working with people with disabilities is that you don't think about yourself. It contains huge gaps that readers fill without noticing. Christopher, for example, never says what he looks like, the clothes he wears, the way his hair is cut, whether he is skinny or fat, tall or short. In spite of this most readers have a vivid image of him.
And this, I suspect, is one of the many reasons why so many of them feel a peculiar sense of ownership about the book, for when they close the final page they have had an experience which is, to a large extent, of their own making. If I was being contentious I might say that Curious is not really about Christopher at all. Christopher is an outsider, and novelists are drawn to outsiders of all kinds — Robinson Crusoe, Raskolnikov, Holden Caulfield, Jane Eyre and Benjy Compson — because they grant us a privileged position from which we are able to look back at ourselves.
Curious is about us.