Dacia Maraini (Courtesy: oubliettemagazine.com)

A finalist for the Man Booker Prize and a Nobel nominee, Italian writer Dacia Maraini gives this most interesting interview with Tehelka TV, in which she discusses the following:

• Travel causes one to recognize that neither oneself, nor the culture one is from, is the centre of the universe.
• Women continue to be disregarded within society; and women writers are insufficiently regarded by critics and, in particular, by literary institutions.
• Market culture is destructive of what one is, as it concentrates on what one should have; and, in doing so, causes even ideas and schools to be commodities. Berlusconi was a commercial advocate of this.
• Despite their need to be alone creatively, artists increasingly participate in the solidarity of all artists.
• In fiction, the character knows better than the author.

An excerpt from Maraini’s The Ship for Kobe, in Genni Gunn’s translation, has been published in The Malahat Review 188. In it she describes “the spiritual mythology [she claims] in order to believe in reality,” and within a family, despite its compactness, the need for space between its individuals.