Kushner had friends in jail and several years ago she became intensely interested in Californian prisons and particularly in prisoners who had received life sentences with no chance of release. There were moments where it was really dark to think about the lives of people, friends who I have gotten to know, who are supposed to die in prison."
"Even though I feel by far it's my funniest book, over the years I have been writing, it was the bleakest place I have ever gone to and it was hard. Romy is a prisoner of her circumstances, well before she becomes a prisoner at the fictional Stanville. The novel is deeply interested in the structural organisation of society with race, poverty, gender and the justice system in the US. While The Mars Room is about life inside a women's prison – the community, shared intelligence, brutal indignities and the flickers of hope in futility – it is just as concerned with the life that exists beyond the walls of the institution. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to or not, until you don't exist, and then your plans are meaningless," Hall, now inmate number W314159, says. In the opening pages, we find ourselves on a prison bus with former strip-joint dancer Romy Leslie Hall, a 29-year-old single mother, who has been sentenced to two life sentences, plus six years, for killing an obsessed client who relentlessly stalked her. Rachel Kushner: "I wanted to engage deeply with people serving long sentences just even as a challenge to the fact that they've been disappeared so thoroughly from view." Credit: ANN SUMMA
0 kommentar(er)
