Being conscientious about spreading my online presence far and wide, I naturally have a Goodreads author page. Not a lot happens there but the other day I received my first question. I wondered who was so kind as to want to know my opinion on anything, but when I looked, I was informed the question came from… Goodreads. Perhaps they have an algorithm that spots lonely authors and tosses them a question every now and then. I thought it was very decent of them, anyway, so actually took the trouble to reply.
The question was, ‘Who is your favourite couple in fiction and why?’ It took me quite a long time to come up with an answer because all the couples I could think of came from my childhood and weren’t really couples in the conventional sense.
The closest I got to an actual ‘couple’ couple was:
Hmm… Not very literary, I thought. So after racking my brains a bit, I came up with Oscar and Lucinda, from Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. That’s extremely literary. And they are actually a lovable, eccentric, tender, tragic, unforgettable couple. Oops – did I say unforgettable? The thing is, when it came to explaining my choice, I could hardly remember a thing about them. And I thought of Carl’s apothegm of wince n° 85: “I never remember what I read. So why read? Waste of time.”
Of course, it isn’t a waste of time because (a) the book was fabulous when I read it and (b) now I can read and enjoy it all over again. But it does say something about memory and getting old. Still, I won’t go into that here.
What about you? Any favourite couple in fiction?
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