In an interview on A Poet Soldier’s View of Bosnia

Gerard Reve?

This is a book that travelled with me to Bosnia during the war in the 1990s and it had a great effect on my debut novel. Reve was born into a communist family and in later life he became a Roman Catholic, which was rather strange because many people left the church in the 1960s but he, an openly gay guy, proclaimed his Roman Catholic belief and he also found a new style of writing while he was travelling. I don’t know why but I admire writers who stay close to themselves, to their heart, who go against the tide, which was exactly what I wanted to do at that time, which is why the book had such influence. 

Are his letters actually about finding his faith?

Some of them are, but there is one, the first one, that is about writing. He visits a conference in Edinburgh, in Scotland, and it’s very funny and deeply moving. That’s what I like about it. When he arrives, the woman who welcomes him says immediately that she frequently felt a strong desire to be dead. During the conference many concepts like the future of the novel were being discussed and it becomes more and more farcical. He says: ‘Writers are very ugly. The pictures that appear in papers in which they rest their chin on their hands in soft lighting have often been taken 28 years ago.’ It goes on and on like that, but it was something that I read when I was in the army and I thought you can go against the tide when you are a writer. I was an army officer in Bosnia, commanding a company.