The corrosion of truth in these strange times is terrifying | Richard Flanagan

Lies have become alternative facts and truth irrelevant in the face of power, while we all give up our privacyIn Book 8 of The Odyssey we read that the gods weave misfortune so that later generations have something to sing about. It wasn’t a god but a conman who now leads me to describe how – some decades ago, while working as a labourer, with one child and twins on the way – I was struggling to write my first novel. It was going badly in every way. I couldn’t make the novel work, and we were living in desperate straits. Related: Richard Flanagan on lies, literature, and Australia’s greatest conman The darkest dream of totalitarianism is now our daily life, carried in our purse and pocketWe all contain multitudes, and that is why anyone who reads a novel as a memoir is in errorWhat if truth is the precarious hinge that holds freedom and progress together?More than ever we need fiction to understand our world afresh Related: Want to wrest back some privacy from Mark Zuckerberg? Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2017-10-30 00:00:00 UTC ]

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