It’s presumed that the author starts with an intention and if the book’s published they’ve succeeded in it. But successful books are ones that have escaped the author’s intentions and become something else. Novels when they succeed are incoherent and contradictory and mysterious. Nothing is more secondary to a writer’s achievements than their original ambition.
…and speaking of his own new novel:
The challenge that took me years to work out was how to write about the collapsing of the natural world. This awareness of a moment of immense loss that could take us with it. I wanted to write it with a kindness and a gentleness because it seemed to me that above all things it was human dignity that was being attacked. That’s what I was searching for. Trying to find my way towards a new language of both grief and possibility.
Tasmanian author/activist Richard Flanagan’s new novel is The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.
His quoted remarks come from an interview-based article by Michael Williams, published in today’s Australian edition of The Guardian.
Click here to read all of it.
(photo is copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 5.31 pm on 23 March 2018 in southwest Tasmania. The water’s edge is that of one of the Breaksea Islands in Port Davey. Happily, Port Davey is “wilderness”, not a “working” port)
Richard Flanagan reprised those ideas and more in his interview last night with Jennifer Byrne through the Wheeler Centre with FANE (https://fane.vhx.tv/products/a-live-stream-with-richard-flanagan) … did you see it? Cheers Bob