Plagued by Moral Qualms

I liked the subjective way in which the story is told. I liked the approach Julia has taken with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as the organising principle of the book. The whole thing starts in the bathhouses and Julia’s writing style is also full of eros, so I just inserted her in Boccaccio’s bedroom and Julia had no problems with that. To create those worlds, for example, of Bombay in the time of the bubonic plague of 1896 or the Chinese ghettos of California in 1899, where in a clear act of racism, Chinese people were cordoned off because it was thought they were bringing the plague; or the race to the treatment for plague, you have to go through a lot of pictures and bring a lot of rigour to your research. You are never 100 per cent on top of your work or 100 per cent the master of your craft—designers or architects are like that.