I think I've found what I want to do when I grow up." It's being able to learn as much as you want about whatever you want and be paid to do it. Keeping your own schedule, not someone else's. "It's being able to go to sleep when you're tired and waking up when you want. And Auel (pronounced "owl"), a plump, self-assured grandmother from Oregon who married young, raised five kids and never wrote a thing until she was 40, was staring out at the fog and musing on what it all means. A major screen production of "Cave Bear," starring Daryl Hannah of "Splash" fame, was on its way (it opens today in Washington). Auel's other two books were booming again in paperback. "Mammoth" had lumbered confidently to the top of the best-seller lists, where it's been ever since. 6 publication date a staggering 1.5 million copies of the appropriately elephantine (656 pages) novel were in print. Fueled by a firestorm of advance sales, Auel's third novel, "The Mammoth Hunters," swept to an unprecedented first hard-cover printing of 1.1 million copies - dwarfing the previous bests of such proven big-book titans as James Michener (750,000 copies for "Texas").īy the Dec. It may be the least probable setting for a best-selling novel since "Watership Down": a mind-teasing blend of archeology, paleontological botany, Outward Bound survivalism, geophysics and "Flame-and-the-Flower" romance.Īuel, however, has not only made it work twice ("Clan of the Cave Bear" and "Valley of the Horses"), but has rewritten publishing history her third time around.
Out there in the ghostly fog hover the questions that send her imagination leaping back 35,000 years to a world half-fantasy, half-real - a world of flint-knappers and cave lions, of aurochs and mammoths, of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals.
From the 31st floor of the Carlyle Hotel, Jean Marie Auel can look out this winter day into a chill, drippy mist rolling in on Manhattan like the breath of the Ice Age glaciers that haunt her mind.
0 kommentar(er)
