Slovenian Novelist &
Playwright
EVALD FLISAR
On the Art of Fiction
Writing
“ ...it was India that gave the most distinct
colouring to my prose, not only to the short stories I wrote for the BBC but
also to novels that were becoming quite a success in Slovenia.”
Born in 1945 in
Slovenia, then still part of Yugoslavia, Evald Flisar is an iconic figure in
contemporary Slovenian literature. Novelist, playwright, essayist, editor,
globe-trotter (travelled in 98 countries), underground train driver in Sydney,
Australia, editor of (among other publications) an encyclopedia of science and invention
in London, author of short stories and radio plays for the BBC, president of
the Slovene Writers’ Association (1995 – 2002), since 1998 editor of the oldest
Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary
Review), he is also the author of 16 novels (eleven of them short-listed for
kresnik, the Slovenian “Booker”), two collections of short stories, three
travelogues, two books for children and 15 stage plays (eight nominated for
Best Play of the Year Award, three times won the award).
Winner of
Prešeren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, and the
prestigious Župančič Award for lifetime achievement. His work has been
translated into 40 languages. His stage plays are regularly performed all over
the world, most recently in Austria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan,
Serbia, Bosnia, Belarus, USA and Mexico. Attended more than 50 literary
readings and festivals on all continents. Lived abroad for 20 years (three
years in Australia, 17 years in London). Since 1990 he lives in Ljubljana,
Slovenia.
His legendary
novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, set
in Ladakh and Zanskar, is the most widely read Slovenian work of fiction since
World War II; still a “must-read” 36 years after its first publication, it will
soon appear in its 12th edition. His novel My
Father’s Dreams, published in 2005, has earned him a place at the European
Literature Night, an annual event at the British Library that features 6 of the
best contemporary European writers. Another of his novels, On the Gold Coast, was nominated for the Dublin International
Literary Award and was listed by The Irish Times as one of 13 best novels about
Africa written by Europeans, alongside Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Isak
Dinesen, JG Ballard, Bruce Chatwin and other great literary names.
In June/July
2015 he completed a three-week literary tour of USA, reading at the Congress
Library in Washington and SUA convention in Chicago, attending the performance
of his play Antigone Now at the Atlas
Performing Arts Center in Washington, speaking at the Slovene Permanent Mission
at the United Nations.
His
international success is truly astonishing: speakers of languages into which
his works have so far been translated represent half of the world’s population.
PRATIK: During your early life you had to move out of
your country to survive and to explore your element. Can you shed some light on
those difficult days of lonely wanderings? How did those experiences shape your
life and writing?
FLISAR: It wasn’t quite
like that. I was born and grew up and lived until the age of 23 in socialist
Yugoslavia, a non-aligned country, which was a buffer state between the West
and the countries of Warsaw Pact, this side of the Iron Curtain. Thanks to
American help, Yugoslavia had the fourth largest army in Europe and was
relatively free; we had passports and could travel. Slovenia, a part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire for over 600 years, was by far the most advanced
republic of multinational federal Yugoslavia and our literature was
Western-oriented. I could have stayed and made a career as a journalist or a
lecturer or even as a writer and editor, but (rather stupidly) I married at the
age of 21, had a child a year later, moved with my wife (and the son) to
Vienna, where my marriage fell apart and I moved to London to study English
literature. There I married a Dutch girl, a fellow student from Amsterdam. We
travelled together to Australia so I could get an Australian passport with
which we could permanently settle in London, where we wanted to live. Our
overland journey back to Europe lasted a year, and it was on this journey that
I first encountered Nepal and India, which later became my favourite country.
I’ve been to India 18 times. I also encountered Buddhism and Hinduism and other
Eastern faiths and philosophies, and became fascinated by them. Although I’d
published a poetry book and two novels before leaving Slovenia, it was in
London that I took up writing seriously. Initially I wrote travelogues (my
Dutch wife and I also spent six months exploring West Africa), but it was India
that gave the most distinct colouring to my prose, not only to the short
stories I wrote for the BBC but also to novels that were becoming quite a
success in Slovenia. Later I had to supplement my income by editorial work,
ending up as an executive editor of the Marshall
Cavendish Encyclopaedia of Science, which made my life in London reasonably
comfortable.
“I lobbied British parliamentarians to recognise the
independence of Slovenia, took part at demonstrations on Trafalgar Square, even
tried to get Harold Pinter to give his blessings to a new country, but he
brushed me off rather rudely: “Come on, not every village can be an independent
state!”
Meeting the King of Sweden and
his wife at the Royal palace in Stockholm.
PRATIK: What made you return to your country and to
your mother-tongue spoken by only 2 million people? Do you have any regrets? Or
do you think you made the right decision?
FLISAR: There were three
reasons. The first one was that my wife, at the age of 32, wanted a child, but
I, having left one in Vienna, didn’t have enough courage; I didn’t want to
repeat my first mistake. The second reason was that in Slovenia writers and
other intellectuals have launched an independence movement, which resulted in a
ten-day war with the Yugoslav Army but ultimately brought Slovenia freedom and
statehood. I wanted to be part of that. My wife and I parted as friends and I
went back to Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital. I kept my flat in London and still
did occasional editorial jobs there (I needed the money!). For some years, I
drove every other month or so from Ljubljana to London; the journey took me
from seven in the morning till midnight. I lobbied British parliamentarians to
recognise the independence of Slovenia, took part at demonstrations on
Trafalgar Square, even tried to get Harold Pinter to give his blessings to a
new country, but he brushed me off rather rudely: “Come on, not every village
can be an independent state!” However, a highly developed Alpine republic of 2
million people was not a village and after we were recognised by the Vatican
and then Germany and some other countries, the big powers, especially
Americans, had to acknowledge the new reality and accept us as a nation with an
independent state. That was 30 years ago, when we still believed that we could
turn our “tiny Alpine republic”, as we were called by the BBC during the
independence war, into “second Switzerland”. That didn’t happen, I’m afraid.
Although the first Constitution was drafted in the Writer’s Association
building, and although for some time after independence writers played an
important part in transforming the society, the new, democratic social order
was soon hijacked by bankers and neo-liberal businessmen; more and more it was
money that people wanted, not culture. In today’s Slovenia, culture has been
trivialized to a large extent, and the word of writers and intellectuals no
longer means as much as it used to. The third reason for my return to Slovenia
was the language. Although English is an amazing and probably the richest
medium of expression, and although I could use it for writing with ease, even
with a high degree of originality, I realised that with English I couldn’t
reach my deepest feelings and memories, the world of my childhood, my soul. I
remained bilingual, of course, and still find it easier to speak English than
Slovene, but I prefer to write in Slovene, except stage plays, which I write in
both languages simultaneously, however strange that may sound. That helps me
cross-check my writing and correct mistakes. I can’t do that with novels, of
course.
Chatting with Danilo
Turk, former President of Slovenia and before that Kofi Anan's deputy at the
United Nations.
PRATIK: How did you come to story/novel writing? What
were your influences? How did you evolve?
FLISAR: I started early,
as a child. I wrote poems and stories at the age of 12, wrote my first stage
play at 13 and had it produced in the hall of the village fire brigade. But I
started to write serious poetry at the age of 18, and had the first (and only)
poetry collection published as a freshman at the Faculty of Philosophy in
Ljubljana. Then, after translating Stefan Zweig’s collection of biographies Die Baumeister der Welt from German into
Slovene, I came to realise that I really wanted to write prose. My first novel,
A Swarm of Dust, came out two years
later, and my second, Dying in a Mirror,
a year and a half after that. By then I was already in London, where I started
to write radio plays and short stories for the BBC. I did the same for the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation during the three and a half years I spent
in Sydney. While still in London, I also wrote my first stage play, The Chestnut Crown, based on the novel, A Swarm of Dust. It was presented by the
Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor while I was sailing on the notorious
steamship Achile Lauro to Australia, and later at Nimrod Theatre in Sydney,
directed by John Bell, who later founded the famous John Bell Shakespeare
Theatre Company. But after the long overland journey back to London, I started
to write about my travels, both in travelogue form and as travel short stories.
A collection of these stories, Tales of
Wandering, was published in the US and India, and later in many other
languages, including Arabic. (A selection of the stories related to India in
Nepal was published in 2009 by Nirala Publications in New Delhi under the title
The Price of Heaven: Travel Stories from
India and Nepal.) Then, in 1985, I had a big break with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a novel based
on my wanderings with an Indian saddhu in Ladakh and Zanskar. In Slovenia, this
novel worked like an explosion and in no time at all I became a household name.
It sold almost 100.000 copies and is still selling 36 years later; the
publishers are preparing the 12th edition. Regarding the population size,
100.000 copies in Slovenia would translate into 70 million copies in India!
Following that I published a novel Crazy
Life, which some literary historians regard as one of the beginnings of
postmodernism in Slovenian literature. I am not entirely happy with it and
will, if I live long enough, rewrite it. I am rather peculiar in this regard
and would like, at least to some extent, rewrite most of my prose works. But
not stage plays. With plays, the “big bang” happened for me in 1992, when two
of my plays, What about Leonardo? and
Tomorrow, achieved a resounding
success and received, next to extraordinary critical acclaim, the Prešeren Foundation
Prize, the highest state award for literature, with What about Leonardo? also
receiving the Grum Award for the best play of the year. I continued to write
plays, most were nominated for the best play of the year award, and two more
received it, the last one, Comedy About
the End of the World, in 2015. After that, my 15th play, I said good-bye to
drama; theatre has changed so much that I can no longer see a place in it, the
rest of my life I want to devote to writing novels. The plays, of course, continue
to be produced by professional theatres round the world (UK, USA, Japan,
Indonesia, Egypt, Taiwan, Belarus, Russia, Czechia, Austria, India …). In
Kolkata, Bengali versions of What about Leonardo? and my first play, The Chestnut Crown, are waiting for a
production which Covid has so far made impossible. My novels also started to
travel round the world and into many languages, and continue to do so. A Journey Too Far, the sequel to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, describing
the search for the Ladakhi guru throughout India with a young Indian woman
Sumitra, was 20 years ago filmed on Indian locations as a 7-part TV series by
the Slovenian National Television. Most successful of my subsequent novels, If I Only Had Time, My Father’s Dreams, On
the Gold Coast, Words Above the Clouds, Look Through the Window, The Girl Who
Would Prefer to be Elsewhere, The Dream Collector and Alice in Crazyland have, next to many other countries, also been
published in various languages in India, in English, Bengali, Hindi, Nepali,
Tamil, Malayalam. The publication of My
Father’s Dreams in Odia is hanging in the balance. What I want to say is
that my considerable literary presence in India, my favourite country, gives me
great pleasure. Nepal, of course, I regard as part of the same great cultural
tradition.
Meeting the
President of India during his state visit to Slovenia.
PRATIK: How do you write? Is it a daily exercise? Can
you shed light on your creative process?
FLISAR: This has changed
through the years, which was to be expected, considering that at my age (76) I
no longer have the same energy I had at twenty. When I was young, I would start
at one o’clock and write until midnight or two in the morning. In my middle
years, I still did my best work between four in the afternoon and midnight. But
it all depended on what I was writing. In London, writing an additional volume
of the Encyclopaedia of Mankind
(subtitled “the history of everyday lives of our ancestors”) was such a huge
undertaking that I worked on it from eight in the morning till midnight, with
the assistance of strong coffee until noon, beer until six in the afternoon,
and finally wine until midnight. How I survived the effort I have no idea, but
it was the best paid work in my life. Fiction and drama, in spite of my
international success, have not made me rich. After the age of sixty the
concentrated time I could devote to writing began to shrink and today I’m happy
if I find enough motivation to start. If I do (and I still do) I can put in
four, maybe five hours of work a day, but not every day and not every week. It
all depends on what you call “the creative process”. Ideas for writing a novel
are not hard to come by, in fact I am surrounded by such ideas as by a swarm of
bees. There is a constant buzzing in my head, even in my dreams which have
helped me solve many problems when I got stuck during the writing of a novel or
a play. But even if everything goes all right, writing a novel or a play is not
easy, far from it. There are many traps one has to avoid, some evident and some
invisible, and it rarely happens that one wouldn’t get caught in at least one
of the invisible ones. Then you have to backtrack, make repairs, throw away
pages that may be good, even excellent, but are more suitable for another,
different novel. In spite of that, in most cases, the story you want to tell somehow
succeeds in taking shape and reaches the stage at which further intervention
would damage it. Then you must let go. And publish it. And be damned, as the
saying goes.
From left to right:
dr. Vasko Simoniti, Slovenian minister of culture, dr. Janez Drnovšek,
President of Slovenia, and Evald Flisar, editor-in-chief of the oldest literary
magazine Sodobnost (founded in 1933), jointly praying for the magazine's future
PRATIK: How do you see the reality of literature and
art in the world today, in the light of everything that is happening,
especially technological development and the rule of social media?
FLISAR: I’ve mixed
feelings about the way things are going. With clever phones in their hands and
a choice of social media, people have less time to read, especially fiction,
and increasingly less concentration to read more than a few pages. We are
bombarded by news, some important but mostly unimportant from all directions;
more and more people are trying to tell us something, to sell us something, to
force their opinions on us, to express their opinions, mostly half-baked or
downright stupid and hateful, so the desire and the need for alternative
realities offered by books, by stories and poems, by literature as we knew it
are gradually waning. I fear that sooner rather than later, unless a miracle
happens, literature will become a luxury for an increasingly smaller minority.
Sad, but inevitable, I fear.
“Will someone, after reading this, feel entitled to
demand that my books be taken off the shelves of bookshops and libraries? It
wouldn’t surprise me. I ‘ve already been accused of sexism and even sexual
abuse for telling a woman, out of politeness, that she is sexy and beautiful.
The worst thing about these movements is that they can so easily (and so
frequently) enable selfish individuals incapable of reasoned argument to
destroy innocent people and to throw insignificant remarks into the same basket
with the misdeeds of a Harvey Weinstein. Ghastly, the whole thing. Where is
this going to end? Immorality in the
name of morality. Worse than Covid.”
PRATIK: There’s a great
deal of talk of several movements, including #metoo and woke. Do you think these
movements are tailored to seek prominence at the cost of successful people?
FLISAR: These movements,
which started with “political correctness” but then generated into fascism,
make me sick. Especially when I read what is happening in the world, mostly in
the US and the United Kingdom. That an anonymous accusation can destroy a
person’s career, that a university lecturer can be sacked for saying that not
everything in the British Empire was bad, that statues of historical figures
can be toppled as if this could change history, that practically any man can
have his reputation ruined and his work cancelled by being accused of sexual
harassment or even violence without the accuser having to provide proof (the
rule that you are innocent until proved guilty no longer applies), that writers
like JK Rowling can be disgraced and attacked for saying that biological sex
cannot be changed, that one has to be afraid to pronounce an opinion on almost
anything (because you are always in danger of being penalised for it by an
aggressive minority), and that no distinction is made any more between the
accused and his work – this, I am sorry to say, is how far things have gone in
this selfish, stupid and vindictive assault on what we call civilisation. Will
someone, after reading this, feel entitled to demand that my books be taken off
the shelves of bookshops and libraries? It wouldn’t surprise me. I ‘ve already
been accused of sexism and even sexual abuse for telling a woman, out of
politeness, that she is sexy and beautiful. The worst thing about these
movements is that they can so easily (and so frequently) enable selfish
individuals incapable of reasoned argument to destroy innocent people and to
throw insignificant remarks into the same basket with the misdeeds of a Harvey
Weinstein. Ghastly, the whole thing. Where is this going to end? Immorality in the name of morality. Worse
than Covid.
PRATIK: Covid pandemic has paralysed the world. How
did you (and how do you) deal with it? Has it impacted your writing?
FLISAR: It has, but not in
a way that it would creep into the new novel I am working on. It’s too close
for that, suitable for reports, not for works of art. And I’m not a reporter.
However, in terms of the extra time for writing it has given me, its impact has
been beneficial. When you can’t travel abroad, when you can’t walk the streets
or visit theatres, when you are not allowed to leave the house, you write. I
also have philosophical discussions with my 14-year old son, play chess with
him, clean the house, do a bit of gardening. And I write. What else is there to
do? But I am filled with tension that borders on depression, and I hope that
this horrible punishment for our sins won’t last forever...
At Slovenian Book Days with Yuyutsu Sharma, Himalayan Poet
and Editor of Pratik Magazine
PRATIK: Is there a distinct Slovenian
style of fiction writing? Has Slovenian prose writing evolved its own art of
storytelling that can be distinctly called or recognised as Slovene?
FLISAR: We
have old folk tales and fairy tales that could be said to have a distinctly
Slovenian tone, but literature in general is European, since we have been an
integral part of European culture since our arrival in the Alps in the 6th
century AD. We have been influenced by German, Russian, French, Italian and
English literary forms throughout our history, so there is nothing purely
Slovenian in our novels and plays, except the subject matter, of course, and
the local settings of literary works. ,,,
To read the full
version of Interview, go to Pratik’s Spring 2021 Issue
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