February 22, 2022, or Tuesday, is said to be once in a century. On such a special day, Movable Type Jun shares with book lovers 22 of the leading contemporary writers and their interviews.
These seemingly endless "literary social problems" are actually related to the many wars of the twentieth century, involving many kinds of crises in the twentieth century, and at the same time, they are also concerned with the individual dilemma of modern society: the atomized state of individual life, the "mobile" generation, the living conditions of "new immigrants", the transmutation of the question of faith in the new century, the way of dealing with the memory of the fathers...
What do these questions have to do with our current China? Maybe not, but if you don't understand, you can't really understand the world.
"Double Time"
An interview with contemporary world literature, this is an in-depth interview with 22 of the leading contemporary writers, who care about how writers see, think and intervene in the world, and ask writers what they think about today's world and how they fit into their creations.
This article is excerpted from Double Time: A Dialogue with Western Literature
Bai Lin by Sichuan People's Publishing House, April 2021
Martin Walser
Martin Walser
Martin Walser (born 1927) is a german novelist and playwright who is on a par with Siegfried Rendez and Günter Glass in contemporary German language. He has won many important literary awards such as the Bichner Prize, the Hesse Prize, and the Schiller Promotion Prize, and his works have caused strong controversy in Germany several times. After the novella "Run Away" was published in the spring of 1978, it caused a sensation in the literary circles of the Federal Republic of Germany. His major works include "The Rushing Fountain", "The Death of a Critic", "The Man in Love", "The Man Looking for Death", "The Escape" and so on.
PAULINE: What do you mean when you say that your writing was very greatly influenced by Nietzsche?
Walser: I started reading Nietzsche when I was fifteen years old, and I never stopped reading him. I don't think Nietzsche was better at philosophical ideas than other German philosophers, he didn't create his own philosophical system like Kant and Hegel, but he was a genius in the precision of philosophical language. For example, there is a word in German that means "uneasiness of conscience", which Nietzsche describes as " uneasiness of conscience " means that your character is not worthy of your actions , so you will be upset. That is to say, your personality is too weak to deserve your own actions. This sentence can be applied to people like Stalin. Nietzsche was not trying to create a system, and his description of philosophy was extremely close to personal life. I hope that as a writer, I can have such characteristics.
Navid Kermani
Naved Kermani
Navid Kermani (1967-) is an Iranian-German journalist, travelogue and orientalist. He has won numerous awards for his novels, essays and documentary reports, including the Kleist Prize, the Josef Breitbach Prize, and the Peace Prize for the German Book Industry. His major works include Zwischen Koran und Kafka (Between the Qur'an and Kafka), Ausnahmezust nde (State of Emergency), Entlang den Gr ben (Walking Along the Trench), etc.
Pauline: From what point of view is it that modern nationalist ideas have led to the impoverishment of culture?
Kellmani: There are some modern nation-states that use violence to form national collectives. In these lands, a hundred years ago there were many languages and cultures coexisting, but now the place may only speak Russian or English, and is becoming more and more closed. The idea of modern nationalism that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and after the 1990s was a completely new political idea, namely, to guarantee the purity of a single race and a single language, which was completely different from the natural state of society. For example, there are so many ethnic groups in the Crimean Peninsula: Greeks, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Jews, Armenians, poles and Ukrainians, who speak a variety of languages and there is no such thing as a monoculture. However, the concept of modern nationalism wants to deny these and eliminate these, and the development of modern nationalism is anticultural, and even allows culture to wither.
Sa a Stop ic
Sasha Stanisic
Sa a Stani ic (born in Bosnia, 1978-), moved to Germany at the age of 14 as a refugee from the Bosnian War and wrote in German. In 2005, he published his debut novel" How Soldiers Repair Phonographs, which won the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Prize "Readers' Favorite Work Award". In 2014, he published "The Night We Talked to Our Ancestors", which was listed on the Der Spiegel bestseller list, won the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Grand Prix, and was shortlisted for the German Book Award.
PAULINE: Do you consider yourself a realist writer? Tell us about the real problems that are of great concern to you?
Stanisic: As an author, I am definitely rooted in contemporary and contemporary issues, but in order to make the image of a place complete, I also allow myself to look back at the pain points of the past, because if we leave our history behind, who are we? The narrative itself can slide into fantasy, or at least it may seem unreal, but this does not hinder the observation and contemplation of reality, but rather illuminates reality with a more dazzling light.
At the moment I am mainly interested in the relationship between a group and what is considered by the outside world to be something that does not belong to it: boundaries and exclusion, other governance and isolation, political structures that can lead to the phenomenon of agglomeration, such as support for this or that (including problematic) ideologies. At the same time, I pay particular attention to factions that make extreme interpretations of common life.
Peter Handke
Peter Handke
Peter Handke (born 1942) is an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and director, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most important writers of contemporary German-language literature. He is the author of the plays "Scolding the Audience", "Caspar", "The Moment of Strangeness", the novel "The Anxiety of the Goalkeeper in the Face of Penalty Penalties", "The Sorrow of Desirelessness", "Left-handed Women" and so on. The screenplay "Scolding the Audience" is Handke's famous work, which has caused an unprecedented sensation in the German language scene. His co-written "Under the Berlin Sky", co-written with Wenders, became a classic in film history, and the director's film "Left-handed Women" was nominated for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival.
Pauline: After writing "Scolding the Audience", "Self-Accusation" and "Caspar", everyone felt that your text has a strong postmodernity, and in terms of expressing the absurdity of reality, they all compare you with Beckett, but what you use your work to express is that people need to resist in the face of absurd reality, which is closer to Camus in thought, I am curious, what do you think is the prescription for rebelling against absurdity?
HANDKE: If you give me a thousand bucks, I'll tell you the prescription (laughs), but I must have told you what I meant. I am not an existentialist like Camus, I am an essentialist. My dialectic is that I know that I have to live another kind of person's life, I have to experience other people, but this is almost impossible, and I can't help it. But I can write. When I write, I am full of respect for others. Writing keeps me in a good relationship with others and avoids making me someone hostile to others. As long as I write, I am a dramatic character who is friends with people.
Camus is a little too philosophical, and the writer cannot be just a pure philosopher and come up with a pure doctrine to educate others. If you don't say the prescription, but if you say the teacher, to me, [the teacher] is another kind of writer, such as Tolstoy and Homer, or nature, or the old man and the child, and it is not the theory of the philosopher anyway.
PAULINE: So what fundamental difference do you think is between a writer and a philosopher?
HANDKE: Writers are too stupid for philosophers. On the other hand, philosophers are too stupid to engage in literature, and philosophers may not be competent in the work of writers. I believe in literature, and a good writer is also a philosopher, but one cannot be found to be a philosopher, he must be a philosopher without a trace. Of course, without philosophy, there would be no literature, but no attempt can be made for philosophy to form a system in literature. In literature, there is no Hegel and Marx, only Goethe and Hölderlin.
Marias Belle
Mariasz Bella
Marias Bela (1966-) is a contemporary Hungarian novelist, painter and musician. Born in Serbia, in 1988 he formed the avant-garde band "Scholars", which swept the Balkans. He fled to Hungary in 1991 to escape the Yugoslav civil war, then settled in Budapest and became a Hungarian citizen. All of Maliash's works have a strong "Eastern European flavor", especially the "Balkan elements". Representative works include the novels "Garbage Day" and "Paradise Supermarket".
Berlin: It is said that in Hungary, whether it is literature or painting, because of satire politics, the authorities do not like you, how do you see this situation?
Mariaš: The political struggle in Hungary is now very intense, because the two factions are pinching each other so that the people cannot talk about the same thing from different angles in their daily lives. I remember around 2007, when rival political factions were fighting fiercely, marching in the streets and setting fire to television stations, like a civil war, and different members of a family would have a cold war because of different political views. In this situation, I use absurdity and irony to comically draw or write out these politicians, whether left or right, and to paint these self-righteous gods as childish babies, to make people laugh, in the hope of alleviating the psychopathic trauma of the people, which is what an artist should bear.
Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk (1962-), Polish heavyweight writer and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw, he entered the literary world in 1989 with his poetry collection "The City in the Mirror". She is adept at integrating elements of folklore, mythology and religious stories into Polish history and human life. Representative works include the novels "Taikoo and Other Times", "House by Day, House by Night", "Cloud Tour", novel collection "Wardrobe", "Collection of Grotesque Stories" and so on.
Pauline: As a writer, do you feel like you have some sort of writing responsibility?
Olga: I'm not a fatalist. Today, if we can build a strong, sober and supportive society, Poland can become a modern and creative cultural community, and perhaps that is what is happening. Sometimes, the blows of history seem to cause society to lose self-esteem, and defeat and several uprisings lead to unconscious self-deprecation, or the absence of genius. This lack of self-esteem was an effective tool for the colonialists. One way to solve this problem, to increase self-esteem and improve self-valuation, is to build culture – a system of dialogue that enables deep and concrete exchanges in society. Some politicians don't seem to like this, betting on factories, mines, import and export trade, but it is culture that makes society stronger.
Mikhail Popov
Mikhail Popov
Mikhail Popov (1957– was a Russian writer, poet, essayist, and critic. He worked for the magazine "Soviet Literature" and the magazine "Moscow Bulletin". He won the 1989 Best Book Award of the Association of Writers of the USSR. Representative works include "It's Time to Go to Sarajevo", "Igiea", "Moskva", "Fiery Red Monkey" and so on.
Berlin: It is an indisputable fact that literature is marginalized in contemporary Russia, has the state made any effort to save it?
Popov: The state is really trying, and now Russian classics have entered the textbook. You know, many Russians outside the textbooks can no longer read Tolstoy and Chekhov, and for people like Pasternak, they may know the name, but they know almost nothing about the work. Another example will be to try to adapt the classic masterpiece - the Ministry of Culture is trying to make Dostoevsky's "Idiot" into a detective novel, trying to attract readers back to the classics in a gripping way.
But this is all helpless practice, in Russia, technology is more and more occupying the space for people's survival, literature and this "electronic demon" can not match at all, the situation is getting more and more difficult, but literature should not give up the struggle, because we are a "fighting nation", between boots and Pushkin, Russia will eventually choose Pushkin.
Maria Stepanova
Maria Stepanova
Maria Stepanova (1972-) is a Russian poet, writer, publisher, and one of the most prominent and active figures in contemporary Russian literature. Founded and edited the Russian independent literary and art information website colta.ru, with nearly one million monthly visits. As soon as it was published in 2018, the masterpiece "Memory and Memory" won three awards in the Russian literary circle that year, and was quickly translated into many languages.
Berlin: In Memory, the people in the family are the people who have been hidden in the great history of Russia... What is the value of these people who live in "small histories", and you look at them in the context of the turbulent history of the twentieth century in Russia?
Maria: I can't "choose" or "decide" to write that at all, because it happens to these fictional characters — I just follow the real facts and the literature all the way. You might say that whoever was born in Russia at the beginning of the last century would have been unlucky – and whoever survived and survived for a long time is purely miraculous – this is a distinctive feature of recent Russian history. For some Russian thinkers, the uniqueness of Russian history, of the Russian experience, can be said to be unprecedented.
I'm not going too far off the page – almost every country has experienced its own tragedy in the twentieth century, and every country is still trying to digest their catastrophe. For some, it was World War II, and for others, it was World War I. But for the history/story of Russia, the real sadness is that we have not only suffered one disaster, but have experienced a series of disasters. I call it a kind of "traumatic infiltration": for decades, the country and its people have moved from one horror to another, from one disaster to another. There is not enough time to think about what happened, no time to mourn the dead, to imagine the future, to move on, never to make yourself aware of the suffering around you.
At some point, people begin to feel that disaster is a natural order of existence, and that people must coexist with it and resign themselves to fate. As a result, concepts such as everyday life, private life, etc. are easily belittled, and the perception of the past and the future is distorted. This phenomenon adds to Russian literature a special connotation that, though crazy, but almost morbidly clear.
Alexievich
Alexievich
Alexievich (1948- ) is a Belarusian journalist and essayist. Because of her independent reporting and critical style, her independent journalism activities were restricted by the government. She wrote documentary literature in the form of interviews with the parties, recording major events in human history such as World War II, the War in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl accident. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Representative works include "Second-hand Time", "Chernobyl's Lament", "Zinc-Skinned Baby Soldier", "I Am a Female Soldier, Also a Woman" and so on.
PAULINE: What would you say about what happened in Russia in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Alexievich: I will be more careful when evaluating the nineties. Anyway, it was a great time! I remember how quickly people's faces changed, even their manners. The air of freedom is mesmerizing. But the question that remains is: What are we going to build in this place?
We thought: Thousands of people have finished reading The Gulag Archipelago and everything is going to change. Today we read not only Solzhenitsyn, but also Razgon, likia Kinzberg... But has it changed a lot? Not long ago I found in the painter Ilya Kabakov the most accurate image of the status quo: before everyone was fighting a huge monster, and this struggle made a small person bigger. When we had defeated the monster, we looked around and suddenly saw that now we needed to live with the rats. In a more frightening, stranger world. All kinds of monsters drill in our lives, drilling in human species. Somehow, it is called freedom.
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
Felit orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk (1952-), considered one of the most outstanding novelists in contemporary Europe, is an internationally acclaimed Turkish writer. Born in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul University of Science and Technology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. Representative works include "My Name is Red", "Istanbul", "Museum of Innocence", "Strange Things in My Head", "Naïve and Sentimental Novelist" and so on.
Pauline: In recent years, you've spent half of your year teaching at Columbia University in the United States and the other half in Turkey. Is there any different experience as a writer in Turkey or in the United States?
PAMUK: In Turkey, being a writer is dangerous, politically risky, and means many invisible enemies who are jealous of you. I have some friends of Turkish writers who have had misfortune. In the early years of writing, I was very jealous of European and American writers because they could make money by writing, had a huge readership, and wrote enough to make them live. But in Turkey, it is simply not possible.
Of course, this is all a complaint of the early years, and now Turkey has changed a lot, with more bookstores, more people starting to read, and writers can make a living by writing. On the contrary, I now hear a lot of complaints from my writer friends in New York and close a bookstore! Fewer and fewer people are reading!
But the improvement in reading in Turkey immediately leads to another problem – intolerance, or a certain sense of intolerance. In Europe and the United States, a writer publishes a book, and no one will bite the bullet and say that this paragraph insults A, that paragraph insults B, and so on. But it's not like that in my hometown, too much intolerance, some people just think that everything you write is a reflection, they persecute writers at every turn, and even throw them into prison. These are all harmful to Turkish writers, but they are also important. Because this shows that the government is afraid of us telling the truth, and the writers dare to take the risk of telling the truth, and they have the support of many readers, which is an influence. intolerance? yes. But we are also brave.
Amos Oz
Amos Oz
Amos Oz (1939–2018), an important Israeli writer, wrote only in Hebrew. He is adept at solving the mysteries of family life, not only the best writer in Israel today, the most influential Hebrew writer in the world, but also a respected political critic, who has written more than ten novels and a variety of short and medium stories, essays, children's literature, etc. His major works include "The Story of Love and Darkness", "Picture of Country Life", "My Michael", "The Same Sea", "Black Panther in the Basement" and so on.
BERLIN: Your father is from Russia and your mother is from Poland, but these Jews in the diaspora have always been confused about the search for a homeland in palestine. In your opinion, has a new generation of Israelis formed since the establishment of the State of Israel?
Oz: If there was a new generation of Israelis taking shape, it was the moment when everyone danced to the same tune. But in fact, I don't want this moment to happen. I hope that in my country, people can play different tunes and dance different dances. Some of the songs I like, some I hate, but there are different tunes to choose from when dancing. Just like in Beijing, there may be five thousand restaurants, do you hope that one day it will become a chain of the same restaurant? The waiter gives you a menu with only one dish to choose from. Gosh, how boring that must be! I wouldn't agree with all the insights, but I love diversity and love different tunes.
David Grossman
David Grossman
David Grossman (1954-), an important contemporary Israeli writer and renowned pacifist, has worked for many years with Amos Oz and others to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated in philosophy and drama from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and worked for many years as an editor and news commentator on Israeli radio. Representative works include "A Horse Walks into the Bar", "To the End of the Earth", "Testimony: Love", "Jagged Child" and so on.
PAULINE: A lot of people like to compare you to Amos Oz, what do you think?
Grossman: I tend not to compare me to Oz or any writer. Every true writer has his own melody and way of speaking. Mr. Oz is not only a mentor to me, but also a close friend. When I started writing, I was constantly inspired and encouraged by him, along with another friend of mine, Abraham Ba Yeshoshua, who had a rare and sincere camaraderie between the three of us. We share our manuscripts, we share each other's views on writing, we support each other and benefit a lot. Isaac Newton once said that it is only when we stand on the shoulders of giants that our horizons become vast.
Etgar Frame
Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret (1967-) is an Israeli writer and screenwriter who specializes in short stories, picture books and screenplays. Kerret's writing style is concise, he likes to use everyday language, dialect colloquialisms, and his works have influenced a large number of Israeli contemporaries. Representative works include "Suddenly, think of a knock at the door", "Beautiful Seven Years", "A Little Disorder on the Edge of the Galaxy", "Want to Be a Bus Driver of God" and so on.
PAULINE: It's not easy to explain israel's complexities to a child, but what kind of difficulties do you encounter when telling your youngest son about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the predicament of Israel's own survival?
Kerret: The biggest challenge is how to teach your children during war not to hurt the "enemies of the state." It is important for me and my wife that even during the missile attacks, we cannot forget to remind our children that palestinian children of his age were also hit by shells at the same time. Fear quickly turns into hatred, and as parents, the last thing we want to happen to our children is that.
Boualem Sansal
Boualem Sansar
Boualem Sansal (1949-), an Algerian writer who studied at the Polytechnic University in Algiers, had a doctorate in economics, later taught, went through business, worked in politics, and switched to literary creation in the 1990s, mainly writing novels. In June 2015, Boualem Sansar received the Peace Prize from the German Book Trade Association for his works such as The Oath of the Barbarians, The Mad Boy in the Empty Tree, The Village of the Germans, or the Diary of the Schiller Brothers, The Privacy and Politics Journal: 40 Years After Algeria, and 2084.
Pauline: Why aren't there women in 2084?
Sansar: 2084 is a hypothetical totalitarian society of the future, and a totalitarian society is a society of men, and the totalitarian system has no place for women. In moscow in the past, we saw propaganda photos of the country, which were strong male figures, because they needed to embody this rule of rule — there could be no feminine, feminine existence. Once there is an image of a woman, it is an allusion to totalitarianism. Women represent beauty and goodness, and in totalitarian societies, women's status must be obliterated to a secondary position or alienated into a male figure. Similar books are handled this way, such as Orwell's 1984.
But there are still a few moments of love in "1984", and there are not many women's pages, but we must understand that "1984" writes about totalitarianism in the British cultural environment to imagine a distant totalitarian system, but the background of my writing of "2084" is a naked reality. For example, in some Muslim countries in the Middle East, there are no complete female faces on the street, and at most a shadow dressed in black can be seen floating by. Who is it? It could be a woman, or it could be a ghost.
Vincent Message
Vincent Mesari
Vincent Message (1983-), French writer. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure de France with a degree in Literature and Social Sciences, after living in Berlin and New York for a while, he began teaching comparative literature at the University of Paris VIII in 2008. He is the author of "The Night's Watchman" and "The Multi-Fictionalist", and the allegorical novel "The Rout of the Master" won the most popular Orange Literary Award in France.
BERLINNE: Descartes in seventeenth-century France lit up the Enlightenment, and when talking about the twenty-first century, you said, "We need a new Enlightenment.", what does that mean?
Mesari: The new Enlightenment should follow the line of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: the Enlightenment ushered in an era of revolution that allowed institutions that focused more on individual freedom to sprout in many countries. But the Enlightenment also had many areas that were not taken into account: it did not immediately question slavery (it would take another hundred years before it was abolished, and we know that slavery still exists in some countries today), it did not question the repression of women by men (including the recent scandals of sexual harassment and sexual violence that have been exposed, and it is not difficult to see that thousands of women are still victims of male domination).
David Szalay
David Shorey
David Szalay (1974-) is a British writer. Born in Canada, raised in the UK, graduated from Oxford University. Representative works include "Innocent", "Spring", "Turbulence", "People Are Just Like This" and so on. His debut novel London and the South East won the Jeffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Betty Trask Prize for Literature, while "Man Is Just So" was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize for Best Novel and the Plimpton Prize for Best Novel by the Paris Review.
PAULINE: Can you explain the charm of your novel?
Shao Luoyi: Maybe because my book describes the passage of time and the sense of wandering anytime and anywhere, so young people will like it? When a person is in his twenties, there can only be a perceptual experience of this fluidity, and it does not form some kind of theoretical interpretation of "wandering", and my book provides a feeling of infinite proximity to the real experience, which is how people live in contemporary Europe.
Geoff Dyer
Jeff Dyer
Geoff Dyer (1958-) is a British writer. The writing style is rich and varied, involving music, photography, film and other fields, and integrates novels, travelogues, biographies, reviews, memoirs and other genres, forming a unique "Jeff Dale style". His representative works include "However, Beautiful: The Book of Jazz", "Under A Rage: Fighting with D.H. Lawrence", "Lazy Yoga", "This Moment" and so on.
PAULINE: How do you see yourself today, a fringe writer? Hippie writer?
Jeff Dale: I'm just a writer, writing columns, novels, and essays. Some people prefer to be called novelists rather than writers because they think it sounds more advanced, but I prefer to be a writer so that I can navigate the world in the name of experiencing life. I enjoy all the conveniences of being a writer.
Colin Barrett
Colin Barrett
Colin Barrett (1982-) is an Irish novelist. The first book published in 2013, the collection of short stories "The Young Man of Granbe", has been widely praised by the literary world, and has won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Looney Award for Irish Literature, and the Guardian First Work Award.
Pauline: Let's talk about the more social issues. At first glance, "The Young Man of Granbe" is about the bleak and cruel youth of small-town young people, but in fact, these stories have serious social backgrounds. For example, in the last story, "Please Forget My Existence", a bartender from Eastern Europe fought in the Bosnian Civil War in the 1990s. It can be seen that the perspective of your novel is not limited to your hometown, but also extends to the social problems of other parts of Europe, so what kind of realistic problems are the most concerned about you in your writing?
Barrett: I'm ashamed that for my generation of young people in poor small towns in Western Europe, they know almost nothing about Eastern Europe, and all that knowledge probably comes from books and movies. But after the Irish economic crisis, more and more Poles came to my country, and I also came into contact with a lot of Poles, and I felt that Eastern Europeans had a history that I did not know, very deep. The last story in this novel, "Please Forget My Existence", is an accidental product - only the center of the character of this story is not the young man of Granbe, but a bartender from Eastern Europe who participated in the Balkan wars, and his body is full of silent stories, deep and bottomless, like a fog, which is also how Eastern Europe feels to me.
In the ensuing works, the social context of Ireland's debt economic crisis will continue to be the story of my novels, but I also aspire to and try to extend my tentacles beyond Ireland, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and even Asia.
Azar Nafisi
Hazard Nafisi
Azar Nafisi (1948-) is an Iranian-American writer, scholar, and critic. He taught Western literature at universities such as the University of Tehran in Iran, was expelled from the University of Tehran in 1981 for refusing to wear a veil, and came to the United States from Iran in 1997. Nafisi has attracted worldwide attention for "Reading in Tehran", and has also written "The Things I Am Silent", "Anti-Region: A Critical Study of Nabokov's Novels", "Bibi and the Green Voice", "Imagining the Republic" and so on.
BERLIN: After both of your parents died, are you still in contact with your relatives in Iran? As far as you know, how has the living conditions of women in Iran changed? Is it still difficult to accept Western culture in Iran now?
Nafisi: My uncle, cousins, and good friends are all in Iran. Since I left, a lot of things have changed because of the continued resistance of people, especially the situation of women: women have begun to fight for more freedom in public places, the color of the headscarf has increased, the length of the black robe has become shorter, they still wear makeup, and they walk with men who are not fathers and brothers. But the law remains the same, with arrests and public executions continuing unabated. An official government document had recently been issued declaring the legitimacy of marriages of underage women to older men. The Girls in Iran have no say in this, and their fathers have the final say. So I think there's still a long way to go.
I'm glad my family is living much freer in the U.S. than in Iran. I'm glad to be able to write here what I want to write and say what I want to say. But I still miss Iran, and I remember everything that happened there. The Iranian people are very wise, they are very familiar with Western literature long before the Islamic Revolution, and even after the Revolution, they can continue to read Western literature in a secret way. The Internet helped Iran better connect with the world, but even before the birth of the Internet, the secret content of some people's lives was to delve into how to understand the outside world.
Marilynne Robinson
Marilyn Robinson
Marilynne Robinson (1943-) is a contemporary American writer. When his debut novel The Butler was published in 1980, it immediately caused a sensation. Twenty-four years later, his second novel, The Book of Gileaders, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the sequel to the Gillette trilogy, Homestead and Lyra, was also enthusiastically received. In addition, Robinson has always paid attention to the relationship between American social thought, positivism and Protestant tradition, and has written several essay collections such as "The Fatherland", "The Death of Adam", and "The Lack of Thinking".
Pauline: Feminist critics see The Butler as a book that fights against patriarchal oppression and fights for the consciousness of female subjectivity, but it might be a bit of a pity if we only define this novel that can be interpreted in multiple ways. How do you see this?
Robinson: There's a tendency in today's world to always think too aggressively about a certain concept. There are billions of women in the world, and everyone is very different. I strongly disagree with feminists classifying them all as a general category. As a woman, I can express my most sincere opinions by writing my true thoughts.
I am very fortunate to live in a time when the feminist movement has made many contributions to the emancipation of women. I have lived so long, long enough to understand how hard it is for these struggles to reap the fruits. But the specific ideas of any current of thought, including the feminist movement, should not be imposed on fiction.
Michael Chabon
Michael Chaban
Michael Chabon (1963-) is an American writer and screenwriter. His interest in genre fiction and popular culture makes his work rich and diverse and difficult to define. Representative works include "The Secret of Pittsburgh", "Rhapsody in the Moonlight", "Jewish Police Union", "The Magical Adventure of Cavalli and Clay", "Gentleman Khazar" and so on.
PAULINE: Do you think literature shouldn't have serious and popular boundaries? What is the model of "crossover" in your mind?
Chaban: I'm not going to give literature a serious and popular line. What we call mainstream fiction is a genre. It makes me uncomfortable that people, who know that they get a lot of pleasure from some good popular novels, are ashamed to admit it because they are swayed by a strange idea that "I shouldn't like science fiction or fantasy."
In the twentieth century, genre novels were notorious for a long time, they were published in popular magazines that sold well, with pitifully low fees, and writers had to write non-stop to make ends meet, perhaps some of them were of unsatisfactory quality. But that's not the whole story, in fact, many of the great writers have written genre novels, going back far, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the sequence of short stories, from Maupassant, Joseph Conrad to Henry James, so many masters are eager to try gothic, horror, crime and science fiction. Many great works of literature have long been ignored or belittled because of the nature of their genre literature. The real crisis of literature lies in the limitation of self-genre.
Martin Caparros
Martin Carpalos
Martin Caparros (1957-) is an Argentine writer. From 1976 to 1983 he was active in various underground publications, during which time he received a master's degree in history in Paris, before living in Madrid and working for haupeform in Spain. Representative works include "The Living Man" and "Hunger".
Berlin: The philosopher Adorno famously asserted, "After Auschwitz, it was barbaric to write poetry." In the face of suffering such as the Holocaust or famine, the expression of literature and art seems to be pale and powerless, and can only be silenced. Writing Hunger actually faces this dilemma: no matter how you write about hunger, you can't solve the problem of hunger. And, in the face of suffering, the words of sorrow may be in danger of "selling suffering", how do you digest this problem?
Capalos: That's why I said Hunger was a failure. Because I wrote Hunger, I can't keep more people from going hungry. But I don't quite agree with Adorno' statement, it seems to me that the distinction must be made between action and the result of action, as camus did in the Sisyphus Myth, we act not because it necessarily leads to good results, but because we have to do it. Whether it's Auschwitz or nine hundred million hungry people, these sufferings would make a real writer angry. After great suffering, literature is not meaningless, and suffering becomes the driving force of literature. It is the responsibility of literature to ask questions, not to solve them—let us wonder why such things as hunger and concentration camps arise. If literature has any role, it is to make people suspicious.
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