The imagination must not be used to distort reality but to penetrate deeply and uncover what lies beneath the surface.
In other words, the writer can assist reality to catch sight of himself, sums up this year Nobel Laureate in Literature.
But there is hardly any authoritarian tone of voice, quite the contrary. This year’s laureate is known to be both shy and modest person. The Swedish Academy’s citation, he describes now as “a compliment that goes beyond my person.”
With the eyes of the manuscript, he reads in French, before the crowded Exchange Hall, word for word out of his lecture. With some trepidation, he notes that he has never before been spoken to so many people.
– You would think that the task falls easily and naturally to a writing person. But a writer – at least a novelist – is often difficult to deal with the spoken word, says Modiano.
The lecture is primarily about his own writing. The initial work on a novel he compares with driving in the dark in the winter.
– It is slippery and the visibility is nonexistent. You have no choice, you can not back down, you have to run ahead and tell themselves that the fog will facilitate and road eventually becomes feasible.
With just a single well-chosen detail can Modiano evoke a mood or a environment in their minimalist novels. His method is similar to he at a akupunktörs. The secret, or art, is that both the reader with him and give him just enough space for the story to penetrate.
– You have to stick the needle in the right place so that the flow propagate in the nervous system, he says now.
He also gives some autobiographical keys to his writing. The childhood he spent most of the time far away from their parents, away left to their friends and acquaintances. Even today, he knows what it was that he lived with. Only much later did he realize how full of mysteries of his upbringing was and the will to see through them nourished his desire to write:
– As if the writing and imagination could help me to finally find the answers.
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