An Interview and a portrait of Michael Frayn in Bomb Magazine

I always wonder what the author looks like - this is an interesting little interview. It is linked from the title - "An Interview and a portrait...."
Kathleen


There's not much about Headlong - here's what M. Frayn had to say:

mk Your latest novel, Headlong–I know how it began: You're a frequent visitor to the Kunsthistorisches Museum–that wonderful museum in Vienna. You'd been in the Brueghel room many times, and one day you noticed a little sign saying that the paintings depicting the seasons were part of a series, and that one painting was missing.
mf That's right.

mk How many years had you been carrying the idea before you actually started working on the novel?
mf Not a question of years, but days. Claire and I were in Vienna, we saw this sign, I immediately began to think about the novel and as soon as I came back to London I started to do the research and got completely obsessed.

mk Did the process of your research mirror the central character Martin Clay's research?
mf Yes. Well, we were both doing rather the same thing. I was trying to find out whether there had been such a picture and what the subject would have been like had it existed. And Martin Clay was trying to prove a similar thing, that a picture he'd found was that missing picture.