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.
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
That the best piece of art a person is capable of making is the one that only they could create.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
How did writing come to me? Like birdβs down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.
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