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There are two types of people in the world: those who realize that this world is constantly reinventing itself and are usually capable of recognizing the new directions in which the world is headed, and those who can’t.
There’s this pathological fear that the world is more and more superficial; kids are dumb, the world is too fast and hungry and wants only to be fed information via an usb cable, people aren’t reading, paperbacks aren’t selling, bookstores are closing, and no one seems to read the newspapers anymore. And this is a global fear, it affects people on all continents, and yet…
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The novel is not dead. Nor are short stories, or even plays. Why? Simply because there’s still a need, there’s still a demand. But the world is changing, I give you that. And the way people read has changed along the decades in such a subtle way that it requires a lot of attention to notice it. The way stories are told has changed as well; they are much more minimalistic, the style of most writers is terse, stripped naked of all embellishments.
But the novel is not dead, and it will never be. No matter what. And I strenuously believe it, simply because it’s one of our most fundamental of desires: to tell stories, to read them, to hear them, to share them. And there’s magic involved too. Imagine reading a book, imagine the solitude that the act requires, imagine the questions and the answers. And then there’s that certain empathy, the link that an author establishes with his reader. It’s a fascinating process, to be able to see into another person’s mind, to find another human being functioning in a different way than you are, to compare, to absorb ideals and beliefs in such an organic way. The best of books are not read like books. As cheesy as it sounds, they transfigure their medium, they become much more than just words.
