He never oversimplifies people or situations. Ambivalence is the key to his work – running through his stories is the delicate (and inconvenient) question: What can we ever really know about ourselves, our motivations, our choices, the accumulation of incidents and influences that define us over a lifetime? And if we can't know ourselves, what hope then of understanding anyone else, even the people we are closest to? This also means that elements of his writing can be frustrating, especially when some threads are deliberately left untied (as they would be in real life) – an important character disappearing, for instance, and the reader never learning anything about him again, outside of conjecture.
(From Jai Arjun Singh's article on MG Vassanji.)
Someday, these would be the words that would describe my writing. Because, these are the words that describe my thought process.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
The words for my writing.
at 6:47 AM
Labels: On Writing
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