I can’t rule out that I wouldn’t ever write another non-fiction, I well might. Going forward, would it be more of fiction from you? Review of Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian author Alba de Cespedes, translated by Ann Goldstein I find them both challenging in their own way. With non-fiction, you really can’t invent, you can’t make up you can rearrange, dramatise, but you can’t simply invent. You can make it up, you can go back in time, you can go into people’s heads, you can go into the afterlife and come back but you have to work 10 times harder to keep the readers’ interest. With fiction, you’re completely liberated. Was the transition from non-fiction to fiction easy? For someone to feel that fiction is somehow made up and therefore not important is the opposite of what I believe. Similarly, in England, The Citadel (1937), a book describing medicine in a small mining town, captured public attention and that was the genesis of the National Health Service. I tell them how slavery ended in America it wasn’t the president or a politician but the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Why?īecause I increasingly hear my physician colleagues say ‘I’m a serious guy, I read only non-fiction’, as if fiction has nothing to offer. You are fond of quoting that line of Camus’s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |