Lese-Tipp: Larissa Macfarquhar schreibt im NEW YORKER über HILARY MANTEL

Der NEW YORKER veröffentlicht ein großartiges Porträt über die zweifache Booker-Prize-Trägerin  ("Wolf Hall" und "Bringing up the bodies") Hilary Mantel von Larissa Macfarquhar: 

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"So much of fiction is a matter of trying to force uncertainty and freedom into a process that is in fact entirely determined by choice or events. When she is writing historical fiction, she knows what will happen and can do nothing about it, but she must try to imagine the events as if the outcome were not yet fixed, from the perspective of the characters, who are moving forward in ignorance. This is not just an emotional business of entering the characters’ point of view; it is also a matter of remembering that at every point things could have been different. What she, the author, knows is history, not fate.

When she is writing ordinary fiction, she has complete power over what happens, but she must feel that her characters have free will or else the dead hand of determinism will crush the book. She must feel that her control of them is partial—so light that it is barely sensed. Sometimes one of her characters will say something and it seems to her that she has no idea what is going to be said back until suddenly she does, because there it is, on the page. When this happens, she knows the process is working.

She finds this lightness, this relinquishing of control, difficult to achieve, especially since it cannot be accomplished by simple effort. Her mind does not naturally float about without direction: it is a machine designed for analytic thought. `I like my world, and particularly my inner world, to be organized,” she says. ´I like filing systems. But the whole process of writing novels is the opposite of that—it’s do not label, do not define, do not decide, leave everything loose. You have to say to yourself, I take my hands off, I let my unconscious work for me. It’s desperately uncomfortable! There’s one whole side of my nature that makes me the least likely novelist in the world: the person who insists on getting the historical facts all lined up, and who feels that there’s immense security in a good card index.`”

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(Hervorhebungen: M.B.)

Weiterlesen im NEW YORKER:  Hier .