From Jude the Obscure to Wolf Hall - and his own New Confessions – the author reveals the challenges and rewards of writing books that take on an entire existence
‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov memorably opens the first chapter of his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1966). That “brief crack of light” is what concerns us all, and the art form best constructed to examine and elucidate its many complexities is, I would argue, the novel. DH Lawrence defined it as the “one bright book of life” (once again luminosity is the metaphor).
Of course, all art is an attempt to come to terms with and explain the human condition. However, the way the novel has evolved makes it supremely successful in investigating our lives – or, more significantly, revealing other lives to us. You can write a long and complicated novel about a single day in an individual’s existence (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway) or you can write a novel about war and conquest and the decline and fall of empires (War and Peace and the Fortunes of War and I, Claudius novels), but the novel’s unique power lies in its scrutiny of the human factor. No other art form – though theatre runs it close – can deal so effortlessly with the minutiae of our everyday lives. Crucially, no other art form can penetrate the subconscious mind so easily, can expose and elucidate the tiny shifts in nuance of a person’s behaviour and thinking. Other people are opaque, mysterious – even those closest to you. If you want to know what makes human beings tick, in every sense, good and bad, banal and sinister, read a novel.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zI094s
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