"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was"
"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it"
"She lay in the dark and knew everything".
From Atonement, by I McEwan
Especially if you want to write fiction, not just read
it or absorb it, if creating characters and developing their tale is something
that you feel passionate about, if you have ever felt dissolved (rather than
immersed) in the depths of a story, chances are that you are intrigued by that
mystery of literary creation. Astonished by all the intangible and
"magic" surrounding the art of fiction, you may have given it a few
thoughts, on that mystery that dissolves you, precisely.
McEwan's Atonement is then a must read for you. Because of the narration itself and its moral implications, yes. Obviously, also by its beauty and the impeccable talent behind its manufacture. But first of all by that fascinating reminder: the overwhelming power of fiction, which is well beyond the purely aesthetic, and well into the rebuilding or reinvention of reality itself. Or what our mind understands as such.
Atonement (Amazon)
