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MEMBER BLOG TAG: marlon james

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...
 
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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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