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Possible future Rights Readers selection? Death in the Haymarket. NPR has an interview with the author. [Link]
Q: Photographs and documents interrupt your books. What part do they play in your writing process?KCRW's Bookworm has this audio interview including moths inspired by Virginia Wolff, narrative devices inspired by Thomas Bernhard, the conspiracy of silence and more.A: They often precede it. If there's an image you want to use, you often write toward it or away from it. The writer's curse is that he doesn't work with tangible matter of any kind, and this is a little device that helps. It certainly encouraged me to write a novel in the first place.
The cover image [of "Austerlitz"] is one I've had for a long while and always felt I needed to write about. It has a haunting quality that wouldn't leave me alone.
I begin by surveying things I've accumulated: notes, documents, bits of transcribed interviews. When you talk to someone aged 80, invariably the photo album comes out. It's the generation that first had access to cheap cameras.
I've always liked image-text relationships. In the '70s there were very interesting things written about photography by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger. I felt a direct rapport with things said in these essays.
Q: Are the photographs meant to manipulate the reader's visualization?
A: I don't do that deliberately. But what the image always does is arrest the text.
The narrative moves in time and slides toward its own ending. The visual arts have the capacity to lift you out of time, and since all disasters happen in time, they offer some consolation in lifting you out of it.
Sometimes pictures do contain a high density of information. There is an image in [his 1992 novel] "The Emigrants" of a Jewish family in Germany. They're in lederhosen and dirndl skirts. That picture, if you know how to read it, tells you more about Jewish assimilation than any text could.
So does he think he was the victim, in a way, of Turkish self-hatred? This too, apparently, would be too simplistic. "Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others." It is a kind of plea.
My father was so angry about the character of “Ahmed Sinai” that he refused to speak to me for many months; then he decided to “forgive” me, which annoyed me so much that for several more months I refused to speak to him. I had been more worried about my mother’s reaction to the book, but she immediately understood that it was “just a story — Saleem isn’t you, Amina isn’t me, they’re all just characters”, thus demonstrating that her level head was a lot more use to her than my father’s Cambridge University education in English literature was to him.
...it seems to be driven by a purely sectarian agenda, with lists of crimes against Shiites, then against Kurds. There seems to be no focus on the fact that Saddam’s regime terrorized everybody in Iraq in various ways, that the system was totalitarian.
It would have been much wiser to have focused on the ways in which the former regime victimized everyone, irrespective of sect or national origin. Wise leadership in Iraq today cannot be merely about me and what is in my self-interest; it has to be, and to be perceived to be, about “us,” the people of Iraq, and our Iraqi self-interest.