MEMBER BLOG TAG: jan kjaerstad
| Sunday, May 10, 2009 2:27PM | | | | Make Believe or Must Believe? | Tags: Benjamin Anastas, Jan Kjaerstad, Brian Everson, Nadeen Aslam, Mormon, Brigham Young
| | | | The panel on Faith and Fiction was the one I most wanted to attend. I disagree with the premise that fiction is make-believe and faith is must believe. Fiction is far more than make-believe. Some fiction presents a truer picture of the world than television, movies or newspapers. When Marlon James asked a German historian the source for his description of life in 19th Century Germany, the historian said it was from novels.
Some fiction requires suspension of belief, as does a fable or parable, but fiction goes to the dark side to test, identify, clarify with the ultimate purpose of redemption. Hamlet is must-believe at the end. So is Crime and Punishment, the parables of Jesus, the fables of Aesop, the stories of Franz Kafka.... | | | | | | | Friday, May 8, 2009 3:42PM | | | | Lies like Truth | Tags: Jan Kjaerstad, Horacio Catellanos Moya, Roxana Robinson, Marlon James, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Jesus
| | | | The program was billed as a discussion of where truth lies in fiction but quickly turned into darkness. Jan Kjaerstad, master of Theological Studies at the University of Oslo, said that fiction can get to a deeper level, a complexity that is impossible in nonfiction. The best part of a novel is what you can’t express in words. Psychology, sociology can go only so far; beyond that is darkness. Fiction writers try to shine a faint light into the darkness. He pointed out that Heart of Darkness was told on a ship in London, the center of civilization at that time, and the story returned there at the end. “Maybe the heart of darkness is the center of the world,” he said.
Horatio Catellanos Moya... | | | | | | | Saturday, May 2, 2009 9:15PM | | | | Writing Into The Darkness | Tags: Novels, Marlon James, Jan Kjaerstad, Horacio Castellano Moya, Roxana Robinson, Noreen Tomassi, truth in fiction,
| | | Using words to talk about words is trickier than you might think when the topic is writing stirring, meaningful novels. There’s a mystery to the process, which perhaps is as it should be.
“The best part of a novel is what you can never express in words,” said Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad, part of a panel of four award-winning, renowned, and very thoughtful novelists discussing Where The Truth Lies: A Conversation on the Art of Fiction. The best gift fiction can give its readers is the possibility of understanding human motivation beyond what he referred to as “darkness.”
Kentucky-born American author Roxana Robinson picked up that theme and pushed it further, noting that writers often write into their own personal darkness. “You’re part... | | | | | |
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