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Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photo: Elisa Cabot.
This week at The Paris Review, we’re spending too much time online. Read on for Milan Kundera’s Art of Fiction interview, Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “Mogera Wogura,” and Stephen Dunn’s poem “Historically Speaking.”
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Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81 Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984)
Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically” expanding on the rules of composition. Janáček’s purpose was to destroy this computer … My purpose is like Janáček’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning.
Photo: University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Mogera Wogura By Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Michael Emmerich Issue no. 173 (Spring 2005)
The young humans who have joined the company in recent years don’t even seem to notice how different I look. I don’t think they consciously decide not to wonder about me, why my form is so unlike theirs; they simply can’t be bothered. People sometimes make comments—“You’re pretty hairy, aren’t you?”—but no one openly stares at me anymore, or presses me for information about my background. Until a decade or so ago, people really gossiped a lot. I sit at my computer until lunchtime, mostly dealing with statistics. Sometimes a young woman comes from general affairs and asks me to write out an address on an envelope in calligraphy, using a brush. I’m a good calligrapher. Everyone says I write sharper-looking characters than anyone else in the company.
The young humans who have joined the company in recent years don’t even seem to notice how different I look. I don’t think they consciously decide not to wonder about me, why my form is so unlike theirs; they simply can’t be bothered. People sometimes make comments—“You’re pretty hairy, aren’t you?”—but no one openly stares at me anymore, or presses me for information about my background. Until a decade or so ago, people really gossiped a lot.
I sit at my computer until lunchtime, mostly dealing with statistics. Sometimes a young woman comes from general affairs and asks me to write out an address on an envelope in calligraphy, using a brush. I’m a good calligrapher. Everyone says I write sharper-looking characters than anyone else in the company.
Photo: Ellinor Algin. CC BY 4.0, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Historically Speaking By Stephen Dunn Issue no. 219 (Winter 2016)
It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause. Thus it was a bad year for historians, whose stories couldn’t be correct for longer than a few days. More than ever the imperfections of memory would combine with the slipperiness of documentation to produce versions only people who need not be persuaded could agree with …
It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause.
Thus it was a bad year for historians, whose stories couldn’t be correct for longer than a few days. More than ever the imperfections of memory would combine with the slipperiness of documentation to produce versions only people who need not be persuaded could agree with …
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