"Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told"
This combined with the quote by John Berger at the beginning of the novel, " Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one." explains to me the structure and the circular time and Rushdie-like all encompassing narrative.
I think the emotions and the evocative nature of the story comes from the political side of Roy eeping out through the story tellers lense.
She is much more than just a writer which was explained in the pre-speech introduction (from the transcript) . She only has one novel- for her it is less about writing lots of novels, tan saying what needs to be said, which she is doing through screenplays and essays, and once did through a novel. I had a very different idea of the novel actually before I heard this speech, which gives it a much more political slant. The speech puts her up on a level with Naipaul and Rushdie, whereas I might have thought her more passive wrongly equating her, from her writing as a gentle poetic- this though is more interesting- more productive. But now what what can the novel mean?
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