The essays, reviews and articles here have a coherence I imagine, rather than claim, for them. A coherence of pleasure maybe, of curiosity, of alarm sometimes at our disarray. There's no special picture of my making. I look at the interviews and only see in retrospect that in most cases the subject’s life spanned the best part of the twentieth century: Norman Lewis, witnessing the Asturian miners’ gunfire that precursed the Spanish Civil War; Eric Ambler in Manchester Square, viewing the upward curve of fascism; Lydia Chukovskaya, without whom there would be less of Akhmatova’s poetry, seeing the reality of Stalin’s purges. I notice only now too a fixation with writers, mainly novelists. Even when I have written about non-writers – a neuroscientist, musicians – it was probably because they seemed to possess a literary sensibility, a reaching for the persuasion of sentences. Often the writers in question are forgotten. If there's a connection between them, it may be that they represent a style shunned for at least a couple of decades, a style married to its meaning, a style both for itself and for the reader. If I dissent from style for its own sake, as being a sort of vanity, I also dissent from the view that the world is ending, or changing fundamentally, especially since 9/11 and its sequels. Both are vanities. Civilisations are always threatened. Even more so, our fragility is vital to us, being what makes us human. Yet conversely I believe the world is still more various, more encrusted with future discoveries, than our normative outlook suggests. And whether that conformist tendency eases or not, the world is still best perfected, or made legible, through the metaphor of writing about it. Because the journalistic racket is itinerant, the story strays. I have included a few excursions that illustrate the unplanned process of finding things to write about. None of the subjects, bar one, was anybody else’s idea. I agree that that doesn't excuse their appearance. Essays, reviews Writers Politics Music Travel |
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© Julian Evans 2006-08. Site designed and built by Laurie Harrison
August 2010
José Saramago: a Life of Resistance,
BBC Four film
Making the World Legible,
a new translation anthology free online
see Events and download
"Hooking Reality: Creative non-fiction",
a new course for writers at Glencot House, Somerset, 10–14 January 2011. See Miller's Writers' Retreat for the new season of courses and to book
recent articles
The master of small things, Prospect
Pole positions, Times Literary Supplement
Letter from Odessa, Prospect
Illuminating the human heart, Prospect
Small wonder, Traveller
An eye on the world's absurdity, Guardian
Almost a British Balzac, Prospect
Mysteries afloat, Times Literary Supplement
Damned by his brain, Times Literary Supplement
also download radio features on
Robert Louis Stevenson
F Scott Fitzgerald
Anton Chekhov
Alexander Pushkin
François Rabelais
and listen to the 20-part BBC Radio 3 series on the rise of the European novel The Romantic Road, with interviews with
Henning Mankell
José Saramago
Javier Marías
Michel Houellebecq
Ismail Kadare
Camilo José Cela
Michel Tournier
Dubravka Ugresic
Marcel Möring
Cees Nooteboom
Marie Darrieusecq
Antonio Muñoz Molina
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Claudio Magris
Michel Déon
Harry Mulisch
Ivan Klíma
Dacia Maraini
Antonio Tabucchi
Friederike Mayröcker
Peter Pist'anek
Ludvík Vaculík
Pawel Huelle
Tadeusz Konwicki
Magda Szabó
Péter Esterházy
Andrei Bitov
Julia Latynina
Yuri Andrukhovych
Fatos Kongoli
Ólafur Gunnarsson
Einar Mar Gudmundsson
Per Olov Enquist
Sara Lidman
Slavenka Drakulic
Torgny Lindgren
Jaan Kross
© Julian Evans 1993-2010
