Blogging might be a bit patchy over the coming days (when isn’t it, some might argue). Apart from noisome tasks associated with contract work, I’m doing some reading in my spare time (well, spare spare time, assuming that non-working hours should be spent being a good and patient father) for an interview I hope to do with one of Ireland’s more interesting new writers, Sean O’Reilly.All going well, the interview should appear on the main site within a fortnightish.In the meantime, I leave you with a great profile by the Spanish writer Javier Mar�as of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the singular (in every sense of the word) author of The Leopard.Crammed with insights, the short piece contains one of the better explanations of the motivation for writing a novel: “According to Lampedusa, what finally made him decide to write was seeing one of his cousins, Lucio Piccolo, another late starter, win both a prize and the applause of Montale for a volume of poems he had written. “Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel,” he said in a letter to a friend. He was convinced that The Leopard deserved to see the light of day, but he also had his doubts. “It is, I fear, rubbish,” he remarked to Francesco Orlando, who claims that he said this in good faith.”(Link via Rake’s Progress)