To one My Dearest Friends Arvind Krish Bala in Fond Memory of Old Things / of Old Mistakes / of Old Friends especially One of My Best Friends J. MAHESH KUMAR / Excerpts / A HEART //// “In trying to escape the fatality of memory,” Richard Flanagan writes towards the end of his Man Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, “he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably leads to greater loss.//// Its “fatality” is not just the inevitability of remembering, but the way in which the past can deal death blows. “A happy man has no past,” Flanagan writes, “while an unhappy man has nothing else”. //// “There was at once an enormous memory of certain things, and a great forgetting of other things. And there was a great and determined forgetting of the experience of being convicts.” //// “I wanted to use what was most beautiful and extraordinary in their culture in writing a book about what was most terrible,” he explains, “because I thought that might liberate me from judgment. And it did help me.” //// They asked Flanagan to pose for a photograph with Mr Seiko, “a tiny cockatiel of a man”, and the small sometime torturer put his arm around Flanagan and wouldn’t let go. “He curled into me, the way little children do when they want forgiveness,” Flanagan reflects, “and I realised there is strangeness in this world beyond any understanding.” //// telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booker-prize/11164728/Booker-Prize-winner-Richard-Flanagan-My-father-trusted-me-not-to-get-his-story-wrong.html
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 21:27:11 +0000
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