Friday, March 28, 2014

Marcel, my nephew, with Proust's literary attitude :-) Marcel thoughtfully asks ...



Has this moment happened to you?
My Slavic nephew Marcel is much better then the French Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust. Marcel speaks Anglicky, Czech, German, French, Russian fluently / he can even manage Slovak : trully impossible language for outsiders to master ;-) Cold (Atlantic)River, like Marcel, advise: "Happy endings are famously rare in literature. We turn to great books for emotional and ethical complexity, and broad-scale resolution cheats our sense of what real life is like. Because complex problems rarely resolve completely, the best books tend to haunt and unnerve readers even as they edify and entertain." Happy Endings are rare in life as well as in literature

Okay, so if you're born in Slovakia and want to write, but decide to move beyond your native -- and tough-sell-abroad-- language, Slovakian, of all the languages to choose to write in would you pick ... Finnish ? Yes, the Finns are an impressively literate lot, and per capita they read more than almost anyone -- but that total capita is reckoned at short of 5.5 million (and a significant -- well 5 per cent -- minority is primarily Swedish-speaking, on top of it).
       Nevertheless, that is the unlikely literary route Alexandra Salmela has taken, and at Books from Finland she writes about it; see also her literary agent'spage on her, as well as the Books from Finland (brief) review of her prize-winning 27 eli kuolema tekee taiteilijan