When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
Interpretation
Writing literary works is a costly venture that is often overlooked in discussions about books.
Olga Tokarczuk highlights the often-ignored economic implications of writing, particularly in the literary realm. She emphasizes that the creation of literary works involves significant investment, whether in time, resources, or personal commitment, which is rarely acknowledged in conversations surrounding literature.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the challenges authors face when writing literary works at a book club.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
... and the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.
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