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Last Issue: #31 The Journey
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...Read more
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Loading ...“…that feeling we all have sometimes that everything we say or do is not our own, that we as people are only quotations from our environment, that we are carried along by the merciless stream of history and reality… the complications arise when one tries to give that feeling an identity. I do not think it can be done within a conventional novel form”. That’s why Per Olov Enquist, great master of Swedish literature, journalist, playwright, critic conscience of the Scandinavian society, chooses a bridge way between documentary and fiction that, in a strong constant innovation of form, explores the ambiguous, subtle relationship linking past and present, fiction and reality. The great writer fabricates this way possible truths, “stories that become more and more like dreams, hallucinations, with parts of my own reality mixed more and more into the dream: a series of dreams about my own situation”. That’s what he has always done and keeps doing. In the theatre, with big success, as for example facing a giant like Strindberg in his sexual uncertainties, or for the cinema, writing for the Hamsun by Jan Troell about the last years of the Norwegian writer accused of Nazi sympathies. And he does in his magnificent novels, where the documentary combines with intense, surprising moments of poetry. The characters Enquist investigates, as Straunsee, Enlightenment doctor at the Danish court, or as Marie Curie, the extraordinary Polish Scientist who won two Nobel prizes and was tore apart not only by radiation but also by a scandalous love affair, become his instrument to develop a relentless critic analysis of our world, in the effort to interpret in time the fascinating ambiguity of human condition.
In your novels you usually tell about important and somehow controversial/conflicting historical characters, using their stories, and History in general, to read human complexity.
I try to see the historical figures first of all as figures marked by imperfections, not as monuments. And I’ve always written fiction novels on this… even about my own past. If you use an historical figure the reader knows, you have the chance to introduce a problem that could seem known, but is in fact confused, complex, new. And you must remember that I have a background as literature historian and as a consequence have a let’s say “familiar” relationship with characters like Strindberg or Hamsun, just to give a couple of examples. Of course in story-telling you can put the “monument” in the middle and observe it form three points of view: that of the literature historian, that of the reader and that of the writer. Furthermore, the confidence and at the same time the lack of confidence the writers put in other writers creates a very interesting dissonance. Writers, thanks to the typology of their job, know very well the writer lies to create truth. And they now how he does it.
Lewi Pethrus and Sven Lindman, the “God Twins” of the Pentecostal Movement, lose themselves in power flatteries. Marie Curie finds herself mutilated of her heart… does getting to an excellence point in a field necessarily imply losing purity and misplacing emotions?
No, you never loose purity. On the contrary you understand where pain creeps in. I’ve always thought the grain of sand that inside the oyster creates the pearl entails for the oyster a lifelong pain… the book I’m publishing in Autumn tells specifically about my hell.
Does an important and successful writer as you are think about renewing, not only in the themes he chooses but also in the way to express them? In a word, have you ever been afraid “to get stuck”?
In fact I’ve always been afraid every book I wrote could be my last. In the Eighties this fear became very close to materialise, as I was going to die. Then, on 5th February 1990, I came back to life. That moment words as “miracle” and “resurrection” became for me a reality.
What, in your opinion, can innovation nowadays be with respect to the Novel, and to writing in general? What, in the tradition of the novel, is necessary, unavoidable?
The one essential thing, in writing a novel, is the story telling. That’s it.
What did you loose, what could you never loose, in your journey as a writer?
What I hope with all my might is never to loose my good ear for prose. I think I’ve got a good ear for what I write. And this good ear has never deserted me. The very day it would abandon me I would never write a single word again.
Interview by Lilia Ambrosi
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