Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp 

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

“Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire”

Russian author Vladimir Sorokin disscusses waning freedom of opinion in his country, the lack of opposition against President Vladimir Putin and dangerous Western ambivalence that is enabling the Kremlin’s growing authoritarian tendencies to take root.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, in your new novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” you portray an authoritarian Russia ruled by a group of members of the secret police. The story is set in the future, but this future is similar to the past under Ivan the Terrible. Aren’t you really drawing parallels to today’s Russia?

Sorokin: Of course it’s a book about the present. Unfortunately, the only way one can describe it is by using the tools of satire. We still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible.

SPIEGEL: His reign was in the 16th century. The czardom was followed by the Soviet Union, then democracy under (former President Boris) Yeltsin and (current President Vladimir) Putin. Has Russia not yet completed its break with the past?

Sorokin: Nothing has changed when it comes to the divide between the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people.  

SPIEGEL: Why did you suddenly feel the need to write this book?

Sorokin: The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude — you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.

Plato and chips

By Jonathan Derbyshire

IF MINDS HAD TOES
by Lucy Eyre

Philosophers have always liked to illuminate problems by making up fictions. Plato compared the situation of ordinary human beings with the predicament of prisoners chained and condemned forever to watch the play of shadows on the wall of a cave. Ever since, vivid analogies or “thought experiments” have been an essential part of the philosopher’s stock-in-trade.

In many cases, the purpose of such fictional devices is not merely didactic – a matter simply of illustrating ideas that have been worked out beforehand; often, they’re an integral part of the working-out itself. If Minds Had Toes, Lucy Eyre’s entertaining and ingenious first novel, contains descriptions of a number of famous thought experiments. But it is itself also an extended thought experiment, one that is designed to raise questions about the nature and purpose of philosophy. Lila Frost, a central character in the book, says thought experiments enable philosophers to “test [our] intuitions about a problem by taking it to imaginary extremes”.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington’s recent review — “Uncle Tom’s Shadow“

by Tim Morris 

“Les misérables is the sort of novel where, if you are carrying the lifeless body of the young hero through the sewers of Paris, you will inevitably step into quicksand. If you get out of the quicksand, you will meet your second-worst enemy in the world coming the opposite way. If your second-worst enemy unlocks the grating to let you out of the sewer, your worst enemy will be standing on the other side.”
…

Also, see Chris Tolworthy on “Does Les Miserables matter?“

Beyond the Balkans
Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-40

by
Brett F. Woods
 

While completing Journey into Fear, Ambler correctly presumed that, when faced with the scenario of World War II, he would almost certainly not be able to finish another novel if he began it. And while he did indeed continue writing after the cessation of hostilities, Ambler’s most significant contributions to the evolution of espionage fiction rest in the publication of his prewar novels. Accordingly, we perhaps owe more to Eric Ambler than to any other espionage novelist because he rescued the spy novel from the kind of slough into which the detective novel had fallen. At a time when most spy writers were congenital Tories, he applied his enlightened intelligence to the political background of espionage. And, without Ambler, it seems highly unlikely that either Le Carré or Deighton would have emerged.

As suggested by an interview conducted some three years before his death, Ambler was not only aware of the extent to which world political affairs held sway over the genre, but also the importance of maintaining some measure of neutralism while writing an espionage novel:

Early in my life and books, I was a little to the left. I voted Labour in 1945, but that was the extent of my political involvement. What I believe in is political and social justice. I’m of the same generation as [Graham] Greene. While he was hostile to America, he was never rude about it. I never put the Cold War in any of my books. Never took sides during the Cold War, not that I was a closet Communist. I always found the Cold War distasteful. For my wartime generation, it meant taking the best years of your life and turning them around. After the war, nobody wanted to return to prewar conditions. They had dreams of an improved way of life. Unfortunately, the Cold War did not help those dreams.

The Fuss Over Super-Fine Fiction

James Bradley

Once, when the novel possessed the clout television and film possess, this transgression could change the world. Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby played no small part in driving the reform of the Yorkshire schools in Britain, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook changed lives around the world, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was a touchstone for the US civil rights movement.

It would be tempting to suggest the nostalgia many commentators, particularly those on the Left, feel for this conception of the novel as a force for social action is really a nostalgia for a different time, a time when novels were widely read and closely entwined in the lives of those caught up in the process of social change. And, indeed, in many ways it is. Certainly, David Marr’s plea several years ago “that (Australian) writers start focusing on what is happening in this country”, that they “address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live”, was representative of a long-standing view that writers can and should be social activists as well as artists.

But simultaneously it is hard to ignore the sense of excitement that books such as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe or even A.L. McCann’s splendidly ill-tempered Subtopia spark in contemporary readers, the sense there is something transcendent in the passion of their rage against the machine, in their self-annihilating assault upon the foundations of the societies they depict.

The art of pleasantries vs. the art of concern and provocation

By Stuart Nudelman  

 

“Nachtwey works in the tradition of Upton Sinclair whose novel “The Jungle” exposed and instigated reforms in the meat processing industry, and the many visual artists, George Grosz, Kate Kollwitz, Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith, whose images have in varying degrees borne witness to man’s inhumanity to man….

“Nachtwey is a gently, sensitive, laconic man with an aesthetic sensibility and an artist’s desire to portray the truth and retain the vision of a better world. He has subjected his body and spirit to injury, pain, discomfort, and the potential of death as he roams the world documenting the many stories of conflict, war, and critical social issues.”

“Nazia Peer is a medical doctor and author. House of Peace, a book she hopes will be educational as well as entertaining, is her debut novel. She recently won the Nelson Mandela Scholarship and will soon begin a master’s in law at the University of Cardiff, Wales. Her short story, One Love, One Heart, is one of the winners in the 2006 BTA/Anglo Platinum competition.”

From Counterpunch:

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life….

To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery of language yet does not call attention to itself. I shall try to suggest in what follows that he has a decidedly catholic and, in a way, overbearing view of his country, and, like an emperor surveying his realm, he feels capable of summing up, judging, and shaping its long history and complex position as one of the world’s oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, as well as its own natives.

In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual and literary means to convey them in a manner entirely his own–powerful, direct, subtle. Like his characters (who are always described right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz comes straight at you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it, all the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves of his characters’ lives, Egypt’s history under prime ministers like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa El-Nahhas, and dozens of other details of political parties, family histories, and the like, with extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not unlike Dante’s in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal, but without the Christianity.

Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz published three, as yet untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments). He also translated James Baikie’s book Ancient Egypt before undertaking his chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan Al-Khalili, which appeared in 1945. This period culminated in 1956 and 1957 with the appearance of his superb Cairo Trilogy. These novels were in effect a summary of modern Egyptian life during the first half of the twentieth century….

To have taken history not only seriously but also literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz’s work and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the measure of his literary personality by the sheer audacity and even the overreaching arrogance of his scope. To articulate large swathes of Egypt’s history on behalf of that history, and to feel himself capable of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its representatives: this sort of ambition is rarely seen in contemporary writers….

Welcome to the Impossible World 
Rebecca Solnit 

Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.

The stories we live by are themselves like characters in books: Some we will outlive us; some will betray us; some will bring us joy; some will lead us to places we could never have imagined. George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t a story to shelter in, but a story meant to throw open the door and thrust us into the strong winds of history; it was a warning in the form of a story. Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang was an invitation in the form of a story, but even its author didn’t imagine how we might take up that invitation or that Glen Canyon Dam might have taken on a doomed look by 2006. “The universe,” said the radical American poet Muriel Rukeyser, “is made of stories, not atoms.” I believe that being able to recognize stories, to read them, and to tell them is what it takes to have a life, rather than just make a living. This is the equipment you should have received.