As his new novel The Future Future is published, Adam Thirlwell talks with Hans Ulrich Obrist about how he overcame his hatred of historical fiction, writing from a woman’s perspective, and why the novel is a “form of control”
Right: Hans Ulrich Obrist by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Unfinished Live
As in previous works, the full range of Thirlwell’s intellectual promiscuity abounds, with philosophy, language, science and anthropology coalescing into the book’s utopian climax., another polymath, to discuss his new book, its implications for the historical genre and the future of literature more generally.Finn Blythe: In many of your previous works, time is a fluid, slippery thing.
She talks of the English being “constitutionally mesmerised by the past”. So this leads to a couple of questions: has it been an excruciating period of reading? Secondly, are there any historical novels of the recent past that you find inspiring? And there’s also the question of: what style are you allowed? Are you meant to always pastiche the style of that particular period, or can you write in a different way? The historical novel comes from the 19th-century era of nation-building and nationalist politics. So people like Walter Scott or Alessandro Manzoni, they’re writing these novels to essentially ground a sense of historical identity, often for European nation states. And that version was what I really disliked.by Virginia Woolf.
If a book is an exhibition, how could you vary the time frames you encounter in the same way Phillipe does in an exhibition?Could you speak about that?I was reading a lot of anthropology while writing this book, people like [Eduardo] Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola. I guess it goes back to this idea of how you write the ‘inhuman novel’ or the ‘non-human perspective novel’.
So I knew this would have to be something I took very carefully. In terms of Celine’s physical experience, I was very sure that there wouldn’t need to be any sex scenes. In this novel about someone who’s being pornographically described, I was very sure that I didn’t want to in any way compete with that, and that her sense of privacy had to be maintained.
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