Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
Interpretation
Great literature often incorporates unexpected or strange elements to enhance the narrative.
Michel Faber suggests that for a book to resonate profoundly and engage readers, it should include elements of chaos or the inexplicable. This unpredictability can elevate a story, making it feel more authentic and capturing the complexities of life, which do not always follow a clear or logical path.
In practice
During a book club meeting discussing a novel, one could say, 'As Michel Faber suggests, really good books need a chaos element to engage readers.'
Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.
Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys.
Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.
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